Learning to Bow

by Bruce Feiler

  Mitsutoshi Iwasaki, the son of a taxi driver, explained. “Everyone else was going to juku,” he said, “so I thought I should go too. It’s a little expensive, but my father said he would pay. I want to study computers in university. I don’t want to drive a taxi.”

  Yoshiro Kobayashi’s father harvested bamboo for a living. “I helped him out a few times,” said Yoshiro, a frail boy with glasses, “but I am not strong enough to do that kind of work. Plus I don’t like it all that much. I want to become a train engineer. My mother suggested that I come here, and I agreed.”

  While these students had no hope of entering a high government agency or major international bank, they did hope to improve their future with white-collar jobs that paid well. For them, as for the brightest students, the key to these dreams lay in the juku system.

  “If you work hard,” Ishikawa reminded his pupils at the end of class, after they had reviewed their vocabulary and interrogative pronouns, “you can make your dreams come true. I want you to spend more time with your exam books this week. Next Monday we will take this test again. Remember, where there’s a will there’s a way.”

  At nine P.M. Ishikawa-sensei welcomed seven ninth-grade girls and boys into his three-table classroom. Most of the students were still dressed in their formal black uniforms. They carried their school books in their government-issue bags. In an effort to coordinate his lesson with the school’s, Ishikawa-sensei taught from the same textbook that the students used in English class. Like many old-fashioned teachers, he began with recitation practice. Standing behind his desk, he read through Lesson Ten, “Two Visitors,” and recorded his time on the blackboard: three minutes and forty-seven seconds. The students then took turns reading the chapter out loud, and anyone who completed the four pages within the target time period was given a lemon drop. Pavlov would have been proud. The rest of the hour was spent reviewing, question by question, the midterm test administered that day at Sano Junior High.

  “How did you find the test?” Ishikawa asked as one of the students handed him a mimeographed sheet.

  “Too difficult,” the students mumbled.

  “How about the vocabulary?”

  “Too many words.”

  “And the written part?”

  “We couldn’t understand.”

  “Let’s have a look.” He turned to the last page of the test and began reading a sample question:

  Do you know the original meaning of “rival”? It was a man living by a river or a man using the same river with another. Rivers were very important, and people living by a river came to compete with each other about rivers—when they caught fish and when they used the water of a river. In this way, the meaning of “rival” became a man who competes with another.

  The students groaned as he made his way through a set of questions designed to test their comprehension of the passage. What is the original meaning of the word “rival”? How did the current meaning of “rival” develop from the original meaning? When do we use “rival” today? As he read, the students grew more agitated.

  “Who made this silly test?” one of the girls blared out.

  “Fuji-sensei made it,” said a boy with half of his shirt buttons undone. “I hate him. I bet I scored only fifty percent.”

  “Sensei, why do teachers make such hard tests?” the first girl asked.

  “Maybe because they want you to work harder,” Ishikawa suggested.

  “But I never get good marks in school,” she continued. “I can’t understand what my teacher says. He always wants us to memorize the words and repeat after him, but I can’t understand what he says.” Her voice trailed off to a whine. “I hate school. I don’t learn anything in English class. That’s why I have to come here.”

  One of the greatest ironies of Japanese education is that because schools devote so much time and energy to teaching “warm” things like moral education, national pride, and group cooperation, teachers often have little time to give proper instruction in their own subjects. And since the sensei are busy mothering their students, the juku master must teach them the basic material for the tests. Part of the problem facing classroom teachers is the vast range in students’ abilities. Since schools do not group students by aptitude, teachers have difficulty adjusting the level of their lectures. According to one popular quip, the Japanese schools are like Shichi-Go-San—a holiday when children aged seven, five, and three are blessed at Shinto shrines—because the number of students who understand their teachers is seventy percent in elementary school, fifty percent in junior high school, and thirty percent in high school. The Japanese education system, for all its achievements, regularly fails to serve the educational needs and bring out the potential of a significant portion of its student population. One of the greatest strengths of the system—its ability to foster a communal environment among a wide cross section of students—breeds one of its biggest drawbacks—the failure of schools to prepare students for future examinations.

  This impasse raises some troubling questions. Why are schools not adequately training students for the exams that the government has decided should measure students’ abilities and determine their futures? Does the problem lie with the classroom curriculum, or with the tests? Should the system be changed?

  Efforts to find answers reveal one of the founding tenets of modern Japan: schools are designed primarily to serve the needs of the state and the companies on which the nation relies. Just as the government tightened school dress codes in the 1970s because universities and companies complained of a loss of discipline, so it continues to put children through “examination hell” because the same powerful institutions claim that the tests are effective screening devices. Because most students “play” when they are in college, corporations cannot rely on college transcripts as a gauge of ability. Therefore, they choose employees based almost exclusively on the universities they attended, thereby increasing the importance of the exams that the students had to pass in order to be admitted.

  The intimate relationship between big business and education came sharply into focus during my tenure as a teacher when a major political scandal erupted in Tokyo. The scandal, which resulted in the resignation of one prime minister and the arrest of several corporate executives, revolved around the question of who would be placed on select government committees that set guidelines for entrance exams and corporate recruiting. The main culprit in the affair, the Recruit Company, attempted to bribe politicians with shares of unlisted stock to ensure that its president had a place at the table where the rules were written. It is telling that Japan’s biggest scandal of the last twenty years revolved not around violence, drugs, or even sex, but around education—specifically, the exact date on which university seniors would be allowed to have their first interviews with prospective employers.

  While business leaders endorse the exams, parents and children alike despair at the amount of time required to prepare for them. The consensus is overwhelming: eighty percent of parents say the trend in juku attendance has gone too far; ninety percent of high school students planning to attend university say that they are tired of studying for exams; and in one poll, half of the high school graduates who were studying exclusively for entrance exams said that what they wanted most was “to go to a faraway place and drop out of sight from others.”

  Teachers also feel that juku are unnecessary. “Juku is a waste of time and money,” Mrs. Negishi told me. “So many students study the book in juku that when we reach that chapter in class, they get bored and fall asleep.”

  Denver, who like many younger teachers attended juku himself, pointed out that some students enjoyed going to these classes with their friends, but that they probably were not necessary. “Students don’t need juku,” he said, “their parents do.”

  Still, this machine continues to run on the faith that the system, for all its flaws, offers the most tested route to success. If education has done anything for Japan in the last half century, it has opened the doors of
social mobility. The key to the Japanese postwar economic “miracle” has been the millions of students who walked through the painful corridors of “examination hell” hoping for a chance to pass through the open door at the other end onto a successful career path.

  “The juku is the key to college,” Ishikawa said to me after the last students had left SPEL for the night just after ten-fifteen, “and college is the key to success. In Japan, if we graduate from a university we are treated with respect. We can get a good job, lots of yen, and enjoy a stable lifestyle.” He picked up the junior high school tests strewn across his desk. “But studying in public schools is not enough.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because the schools pretend that all students are created equal. This may be good for their hearts, but it is bad for their minds. Some students need special attention. How do you say it? Tender Loving Care.”

  “But there’s one thing I don’t understand,” I said. “At school, the teachers all tell me they know which high schools the students will attend even before they take the tests. Why can’t they eliminate at least the high school tests altogether?”

  “They probably could,” he admitted, “but juku would still not go away. Think of the students who come here every night. They know that the only way to get ahead in life is to work hard toward a specific goal. I like to tell my students what happened to me. I was a sashimi bch; I could use a knife to prepare fish in the traditional way. Not many modern Japanese people can cut fish properly with a knife. But in the company where I was working, I met the ‘big wall.’ I knew I couldn’t move any higher. So I left, and started my own school. I had always wanted to be a teacher, and this way I can earn money, too.”

  He glanced around the empty room. Stacks of practice exams covered the shelves. Lemon-drop wrappers littered the floor. Discarded slippers lay huddled by the door.

  “I want to help my students make their dreams come true,” he said. “Little nine-year-old Hiroyuki told me the other day that he wants to visit foreign countries when he grows up. Yoshiro wants to drive trains. They all have dreams, and I can help them. But I can’t take the tests for them, so I teach them what I have learned.”

  He turned in his chair and pointed to a sign taped above his desk. In simple, handwritten English letters, Ishikawa-sensei had summarized his formula for surviving “examination hell” and his advice to the dreamers of the juku generation: “NO PAIN, NO GAIN.”

  16

  CLIMBING THE LADDER: DRINKING ALONE IN RURAL JAPAN

  He had a dream, and behold a ladder was set upon the earth, and the top of it reached to the sky; and behold the angels of the Lord were ascending and descending on it.

  —Genesis 28:12

  THE CHESTNUT TREES were bare against the granite sky and the puddles were frozen like mirrors on the ground when I left my home on a Saturday night in late February and ventured into town. I met my American friend and fellow schoolteacher Jane at the Sano train station at seven o’clock for what we had agreed would be a study session on the Japanese male pastime of nanpa, picking up girls. In this modern dating ritual, Japanese boys cruise the bars around town, proposition girls with discreet queries (for example, “Would you like to drink some tea?”), and then spirit them into the night. After “drinking tea” and “eating rice cakes” the boy drives the girl home and bids her good night, and everyone lives happily ever after. Since my fairy tale go-con had ended unhappily, I thought I might fare better in the woods of nanpa.

  In the United States, the preferred method of moving from one drinking establishment to the next is hopping. In Great Britain, one crawls. In Japan, perhaps as a result of its hierarchical nature, this activity is achieved by climbing. The nocturnal sport that Americans call bar-hopping and Britons call pub-crawling, the Japanese refer to as hashigozake o yaru, climbing the liquor ladder.

  We began our quest in a traditional Japanese-style bar and grill called The Brothers, where customers gather alongside the counter before a large glass case of skewered chicken parts and vegetables, to drink, chat with the master, and eat yakitori, Japanese shish kebab. After perching ourselves at the bar, we ordered two Asahi Super Dry beers, several sticks of the house specialty—grilled chicken chunks and spring onion slices dunked in a tangy dressing of soy sauce and sugar—plus “Italian” tofu steaks with stewed tomatoes and bell peppers.

  The room whirred with the sounds of an early evening crowd. Several groups of businessmen were crooning in the corners, and a small group of women sat quietly at an upright table in the center sipping Irish coffee. A middle-aged man seated alone next to me solemnly cradled two beer mugs and discussed the wonders of sumo wrestling with the master behind the bar, who was so busy basting chicken that he had little time to listen. After several minutes a much younger man came skipping over to the bar from the other side of the room, slapped the old man on the shoulders, and said, “Hey, buddy, what are you doing here? Are you doing nanpa again?”

  The question startled us from our tofu steaks. Had we hit the jackpot so soon? I turned toward the two men. “Excuse me,” I asked in the reserved tone of Japanese I saved for my most abrupt questions, “are you really doing nanpa?”

  “Nanpa?” the man rejoined. “Do you know nanpa?”

  “No,” I said, “but I’m trying to learn. Will you teach me?”

  The younger man, somewhat embarrassed, assured me that he didn’t do nanpa. Only young boys partook in such folly, he said. Then, before even telling us his name, he returned my blunt question with one of his own: Would I teach his four-year-old son to speak English?

  “I’ll do anything for you,” he promised. “I’ll invite you to my house. I’ll take you to Tokyo. I’ll even give you a portrait of your dog.”

  “A portrait of my dog?” I repeated.

  “Or your cat.”

  Hisashi, a twenty-eight-year-old man with thinning hair, droopy eyelids, and puffy, Charlie Brown cheeks, introduced himself as the leading seller of professional dog portraits in all of Japan. He was, it turned out, the only seller of professional dog portraits in all of Japan. A thriving art magnate of sorts, he lived with his wife and two sons in Sano, where he was slowly amassing a fortune and cornering the market in pet portraiture.

  “I want to be very rich,” he said with conviction. “I want to own a lot of land, a big house, and a Benz.”

  His business worked very simply, he explained. Every month he placed an advertisement in the leading—and only—dog owners’ magazine in Japan. Zealous canine owners across the country sent him photographs of their pets, which he forwarded to an artist in Hong Kong. A month later he received a beautiful likeness of the pup, which he then sold to the customer at a five hundred percent markup. He worked by himself. He had never met the artist; he had never met a single customer. He didn’t even own a dog.

  “Won’t the market eventually run dry?” I asked.

  “No problem,” he answered with all the aplomb of a seasoned entrepreneur. “Dogs die every day.”

  The doorman at the Magic Fish welcomed Jane, Hisashi, whom we had invited along, and me with a bow and led our party to the second-floor dining room, which had tender tatami floors underfoot and exposed cedar beams overhead. A rope hung from the ceiling and supported a two-foot wooden carp with a caldron dangling from its mouth over an open fire. The room glowed in the warm flush of green and white paper lanterns. We folded our legs under a table and ordered a round of Lemon Highs—a potent mixture of rice wine and lemonade served in a beer mug over ice—and several snacks, including boiled squid, raw shrimp, and salted lima beans. The conversation took another unexpected turn as Hisashi mentioned in passing that he had lived in France for four years.

  “Why did you go to France?” Jane asked.

  “Because my parents have money and they said, ‘Go to France.’ But I hated every day. I was lonely and sad and didn’t speak any French.”

  While forlorn in Paris, Hisashi learned a lot about Japan. He discovered that Japanese g
oods, like cars, radios, and VCRs, were sold all over Europe. “I didn’t think the Japanese were rich like this,” he said. “I thought we were very poor because we couldn’t speak English or use a knife and fork. I thought we were like potatoes.” In Japanese slang an imo, or potato, is a country bumpkin. “But in France they thought we were rich.”

  After moving back to Japan and taking a job with a large construction company in Tokyo, Hisashi found himself with a small apartment, a girlfriend, and a bleak future, so he opted for life as a potato. He quit his job, moved back to the country, borrowed money from his parents, and began his art business. “To be happy,” he declared, “you need money.”

  His quest for money and his wealthy roots propelled Hisashi toward his nontraditional career. “But,” he insisted, “there are many people like me. I have a wife, a child, a small house, and a car. In a sense, every Japanese is like me…”

  He took a sip of his drink and plopped some beans into his mouth.

  “Originally,” he admitted, “it was difficult. My friends said, ‘Why don’t you just join a nice company?’ My mother said, ‘You should do what other people do.’ But I wanted to be on my own.”

  Although he enjoyed the rewards of working at home, close to his family, Hisashi still missed the camaraderie of a company. He had no drinking parties with colleagues after work, went on no company excursions, and attended no “forget the year” parties at New Year’s time. His only friends, he said, were his junior high school classmates.

  As he talked Hisashi grew gradually more disconsolate. Then suddenly he glanced at his watch and mumbled something about a party of old friends. He apologized, threw down some money on the table, and said he was late for a game of mahjong. “If I don’t go now, I never can,” he said as he left. “If I don’t conform some, they’ll think I’m strange.”