by Bruce Feiler
“Stand up,” a student barked as Mr. Fuji and I entered the eighth-grade classroom.
“Ready…set,” the boy cried again, drawing his classmates to attention.
“Bow.”
“Onegaishimasu,” the class uttered together. “Please teach us today.”
The students stood facing the front of the class in eight rows across, six persons deep, like pilings in a pier. Boys and girls were in alternate rows, with the boys in black jackets and straight black pants and the girls in blue blazers and pleated blue skirts. Each student wore a pair of white slip-on tennis shoes and stood behind a simple wooden desk on the parquet floor. The walls of the room were bare except for pedagogic signs taped around the room: “LET’S PUT FORTH GREAT EFFORT,” “LET’S EAT ALL OUR LUNCH,” and “WHEN THE TEACHER CALLS YOUR NAME, IMMEDIATELY ANSWER, ‘HAI.’ ” Alongside the clock at the front of the room, the carefully scripted school motto reminded the class of the type of students they should try to become:
Students who are healthy.
Students who study by themselves.
Students who are thoughtful.
Students who work hard and succeed.
Just beneath this sign, in front of the blackboard, a gray metal desk stood facing the room with the intimidating authority of a judge’s bench.
“Good morning, boys and girls,” Mr. Fuji said in English when the class had finished its greeting in Japanese.
“Good morning, teacher,” they droned, with all the enthusiasm of a deflating balloon.
“How are you today?”
“I’m fine, thank you, how are you?”
He motioned for the students to be seated and turned toward me, obviously pleased that his students had demonstrated such proficiency. “Please give your self-introduction,” he whispered in my ear. This was an English class, but Mr. Fuji seemed afraid to use English in front of his students. I took a breath and began.
“Good morning, everybody,” I called out, bounding toward the blackboard and grabbing a piece of chalk.
“Good morning, teacher,” came the tepid response.
“No, no, no.” I waved my hands. “This is not a test. Please do not repeat everything I say.”
“Sit up,” Mr. Fuji barked in Japanese. “And be quiet.”
I cringed at his harsh words but paused in deference before beginning again.
“Good morning, everybody,” I said, this time slower. “My name is Bruce. Not Bu-ru-su, but Bruce.”
Several of the students giggled at my mock Japanese accent. Mr. Fuji moved to the back of the class and rested his arm on top of the lockers.
“I come from Georgia, in the United States of America.” I drew a quick sketch of the United States and put a star in the southeast corner. “In Japan, you have Georgia Coffee.”
Georgia Coffee, a product of Coca-Cola, is a popular brand of canned coffee sold both warm and cold from vending machines all across Japan. The design on the label shows a woman wearing a hoop skirt standing before a large antebellum mansion. As I had learned from the principal on my first visit to the school, Southern gentility still sells in Japan.
I drew a picture of a tin can on the board, and slowly the students caught on. “Co-he, co-he,” they screamed. Mr. Fuji stepped forward to silence the swell, but I waved him off and approached the class instead. The students started grumbling as I eased up to a beaming boy in the front with a closely shaved head.
“Gambate,” the class shouted, encouraging him to do his best.
“Please stand up,” I said to the boy. But before my words had time to bounce off his face, Mr. Fuji had converted my request into Japanese.
The boy rose to his feet.
“What is your name?” I asked.
“Eh?” he said, squinching his face.
“What is your name?” I repeated. “My name is Bruce. What is your name?”
The boy blanched and recoiled in fear. Silence flooded the room, and he sank back into his seat. Time to try a new student.
“What is your name?” I asked a boy sitting in the second row.
“My name is Takuhiro Kobayashi,” he said.
“Good. My name is Bruce. Nice to meet you.” I stuck out my arm to shake his hand. The boy looked at it for a moment, then grabbed it and bowed his head. The class erupted into laughter. I asked another question. “Do you like Georgia Coffee?”
The boy turned around as soon as I finished the question and consulted with several friends. Together they began decoding my question. “Coffee, coffee, co-he,” they mumbled excitedly. “Georgia co-he. Suki desu ka? Do you like? Ocha. No, not tea, coffee.” Thwap! One student bopped another on the head. “Hayaku. Hurry upu! Curazy boy.”
After about thirty seconds Mr. Fuji marched over to the desk and translated the question into Japanese.
“Do you like Georgia Coffee?” I repeated in English.
Satisfied that he had understood, young Kobayashi turned back toward me and with all the composure of a seasoned public speaker announced in a loud, clear voice, “Yes.”
The class applauded.
“Good. Now everybody repeat, ‘I like Georgia Coffee.’”
No sooner had I completed this exchange than Mr. Fuji tapped me on the shoulder. “Mr. Bruce,” he whispered again. “This is the end of your self-introduction. We have no more time for this.” He promptly returned to the teacher’s podium in front of the blackboard and resumed his lesson plan. As I hovered in the back of the room, he reviewed the homework from the previous lesson, in which students had to diagram a series of complex sentences, and then asked several members of the class to recite the week’s chapter from the textbook by heart. Mr. Fuji remained at the podium for the duration of the fifty-minute class, following the lesson plan he seemed to have established years ago. He taught the grammar lesson, in Japanese. He had the students write notes, in Japanese. And through this he tried to teach the model sentence, “In the future, I want to become a…” No student asked a question of the teacher; the teacher asked no questions of the students. When I interrupted and tried to break down this pattern, the response was always the same: students consulted one another in groups, translated my question into Japanese, then crafted as short an answer as possible.
“What sports do you like?” I asked.
“Baseball.”
“What is the weather today?”
“Fine.”
“What do you want to become in the future?”
“Salaryman.”
These students had learned the rules of English, but they had not learned how to apply them. They could recite an entire chapter by heart but could not tell me the time of day. By the end of the first fifty minutes I was sagging under the weight of my assignment. I was relieved when the bell sounded and the students rose to say good-bye.
“Kiritsu,” the young male voice called again.
“Rei,” he said.
The students bowed in unison. “Thank you for caring for us today.”
“My lesson was very disappointing for you, wasn’t it,” Mr. Fuji said to me as we walked back to the teachers’ room.
“I was surprised that we spoke so little English.”
“I’m afraid my English is not very good,” he said. “I was not originally an English teacher. I was trained to teach Japanese history, but the principal asked me to switch.”
“Was it difficult?”
“Not really. My father was a teacher before the Second World War. He taught me that good teachers teach more than their subjects: they train their students in how to behave. I conduct my English class just like a history class. Students can learn English on their own, I think, but they need me to teach them the Japanese heart.”
For most of its history Japan has struggled to preserve its native heart while its mind looked abroad for new ideas. The country’s first public school opened its doors in the latter half of the seventh century, and its goal was to teach students—mostly sons of samurai—to appreciate the arts of China. Ove
r the next several hundred years Japanese emperors founded a series of institutions designed to train officials who would have the skills to manage the imperial court and the taste to appreciate Chinese culture. Over time, as the emperor slowly lost power to the rising warrior class, the imperial schools declined as well and gave way to a new type of institution in Buddhist temples. In 1439 a group of Zen monks established the first of these schools in the mountain village of Ashikaga, in a small, one-room wooden hut that still stands today, about a twenty-minute ride from Sano Junior High.
The temple schools, like the secular ones before them, taught students knowledge from China, in this case the principles of Confucian thought, which Japan had recently embraced. Even after the ruling Tokugawa shogun ushered Japan into a 260-year period of isolation beginning in 1600, Buddhist priests continued to teach the two primary objectives of Confucian thought: administrative skills and cultural appreciation. In these schools, formal ceremonies were stressed, discipline was staunch, and students were asked to memorize texts for comprehensive examinations. As the population flooded to the growing cities, schools in the eighteenth century began to serve not only warriors but merchants and other laymen as well. By 1868, when the shogunate finally lost power to a group of warriors who restored the emperor Meiji as sovereign, Japan was poised to create a new nationwide school network.
With this revolution came a shift in focus from China to the West. In 1872 the new national government announced a plan to form a modern school system and sent emissaries to Europe to bring home ideas. The Japanese modeled their system after the French prototype, with six years of primary school, ten years of secondary school, and four years of university. To encourage studying, the emperor publicly hailed education as the key to developing the “national consciousness” that would help Japan become a rich and powerful nation. Those institutions that had previously aimed at developing government officials began to funnel talented students into industrial fields. Although the government could not at first build enough schools to meet its goals, by 1900 the country had enough facilities to require children to attend school for four years; by 1904 this was increased to six.
As Japan gained industrial strength, its love affair with the West from the 1870s and early 1880s was overwhelmed by a conservative countermovement, which culminated in the Imperial Rescript on Education of 1890. This time the nativist side of the Japanese heart took over from the internationally minded side. By the start of the twentieth century, teachers were promoting a national pride in Japan’s military past and a faith in the emperor as a god. Students learned military skills in school along with their reading, writing, and arithmetic. By the late 1930s, Japan, which had so recently admired the cultures of China and the West, was racing toward war against both.
At the close of the Second World War, occupying American officials decided that the extensive network of schools had been exploited by warmongering leaders to indoctrinate children with imperialist ideas. The Allies’ solution was to reorganize the schools along the model of the American system, with six years of elementary school, three years of junior high school, three years of high school, and four years of university. Under this plan, children were guaranteed schooling for nine years instead of six, and teachers were told to replace their nationalistic sermons with lessons in “democracy” and “individual freedom.” Over forty years later the American superstructure remains in place, but it has proven to be far less American than the Americans had hoped. As it had done repeatedly in the past, Japan adopted a foreign prototype and transformed its alien character by implanting a Japanese heart.
“Good morning, boys and girls,” Denver said in English to the class of seventh-grade students after they had bowed and greeted us in Japanese.
“Good morning, teacher,” they shouted back in unison like a glee club. Shocked by their enthusiasm, I covered my ears in mock surprise, and the whole class burst into laughter.
“This class is very perky,” Denver had said to me on the way to the classroom. “They like English very much. Today I want them to meet an American teacher, so we will have no plan.”
I introduced myself as I had in the earlier class, waiting until the part about Georgia Coffee to approach the class. As I walked through the rows of desks, the students squirmed in delight and let out a long, unearthly oooooh, like a horror movie come to life.
“Hello,” I said to a student in the front of the class.
“Hai!” he shouted, popping up from his chair like a piece of toast.
“What is your name?”
The boy did not even have time to turn around before several friends came darting up to the front to whisper in his ear. Within seconds, half the class was shouting his name out loud.
“Matsumoto, Matsumoto,” they cried, following the familiar Japanese custom of referring to people by their surnames. “He is Matsumoto.”
“Hello, Matsumoto. My name is Bruce. Nice to meet you.” I held out my hand to greet him, but the boy looked frightened and dropped his eyes to the floor. Matsumoto, I realized, had never shaken hands with anyone before. I walked back to the head of the class, where Denver was waiting quietly.
“Excuse me, what is your name?” I asked Denver.
“My name is Hamano,” he said.
“My name is Bruce. Nice to meet you.” I stuck out my hand, and he grabbed it, shaking vigorously.
“In America, we like to shake hands,” I said to the class. “In Japan, we bow. Bow, bow, bow.” I darted around the room, bending assiduously at the waist. “Hello, bow. Good-bye, bow. Nice to meet you, bow. But in America, we talk with our hands. Hello, shake, shake. Good-bye, shake, shake. Nice to meet you, shake, shake.”
I moved around the room, practicing with various students, but something felt incomplete. The students were grabbing my hand now, but still they bowed their heads.
“Everybody, please stand up,” I called. “When I was a junior high school student, my father taught me how to shake hands. He said two things were important. Number one: firm grip.” I squeezed hard on Denver’s hand and made a wide grimace on my face. “Number two: eye to eye.” I pointed first at my eyes, then at Denver’s. Everybody seemed to understand. But when I moved toward the class, the silence quickly returned. Not only had these students never shaken hands, I realized, but they had also been taught never to look a stranger in the eye. They had learned instead to lower their eyes when greeting a person in order to show respect. As their elder, I could not expect students to look me in the eye on our first meeting. But as their teacher, I had to convince them that showing me respect meant standing face to face and looking me in the eye.
“In America,” I continued, trying to resuscitate the situation, “we have several different types of greetings. Sometimes we use a special kind of handshake.” I went back toward Matsumoto, lifted one of his arms above his head, and slapped his hand with mine. “We call this a ‘High Five.’ ”
Slowly the students regained their energy and practiced greeting one another with slapped palms and knocked elbows. By now we had used up most of the class with just the basics of greetings.
“If you don’t like either of these,” I said, moving toward a girl with short-cropped hair who stood gaping at me in the front row, “there is one more way you can try.” I stepped up to the girl’s desk, lifted her hand in mine, and gave it a quick kiss on the top.
The class let out a dreamy oooooh again, and someone called from the back of the class, “Curazy boy. He is a curazy boy.”
John Dewey, the American philosopher and educator whose writings held great sway in Japan during the Allied Occupation, once wrote that the most important part of a school is its atmosphere: “The only way in which adults consciously control children is by controlling the environment in which they act, and hence think and feel. We never educate directly, but indirectly by means of the environment.” The modern Japanese school is a model of Dewey’s vision of control and simplicity. Inside Sano Junior High, students could fi
nd few distractions to divert them from study. Rooms were spartan; halls were kept vacant; walls were painted a nondescript beige.
The only decoration throughout the school was the multitude of signs. The walls of the ninth graders, on the third floor, were decked with black and white brochures listing admission requirements for all the high schools in the area, including the time and place of the February entrance exams. The rooms of the eighth graders, on the second floor, were decorated with multiple copies of the class motto, “DIGNITY, HEALTH, AND INTEGRITY.” And the walls of the seventh graders, on the ground floor, were draped with calligraphy from a recent writing lesson. In each piece the same two Chinese characters appeared. They read, simply, Seijin, “Becoming an adult.”
“We must teach our students discipline,” Denver explained to me after class, over a lunch of beef stew, cold spinach, and steamed rice. “This is the role of the schools. We are responsible for shitsuke.”
“What’s shitsuke?” I asked.
“It means discipline. We have to teach students how to behave properly both in school and out—how to follow rules and develop an honest mind.”
“But what about the role of the parents?”
“The principal says they can’t be trusted. Some of them may be working, or not care about their children. In Japan, we teachers must be specialists in bringing up children. Shitsuke is the heart of our schools.”
“But all these signs,” I said. “Can they really teach the students?”
“I think they are important,” he said. “I can remember walking into my classroom when I was in a bad mood and being reminded that a bright greeting and a healthy attitude are important. I would be lifted from my bad feeling. If my students do not give a bright greeting in the morning, I don’t believe they are showing their true feelings. Everyone should be able to give a cheerful ‘hello’ all the time.”
“But what if they aren’t in a good mood?”