Learning to Bow

by Bruce Feiler

  After talking with students about these exchanges, however, and hearing Mrs. Negishi’s story about speaking English with an American soldier when she was a child, I learned never to underestimate the power of a simple gesture. As a native speaker I was often called upon to judge English-speaking contests in Tochigi. Student after student would rise to the platform in these affairs and relate how a brief hello from a foreigner in Nikko, or a chance meeting with a business associate of their father’s, had turned them on to the importance of studying English.

  “Sensei, sensei,” two girls screamed to Denver later that afternoon in Frontierland, “we met two people from France. We thought they were American, but they weren’t. Their English was not much better than ours. They said Japan was beautiful!”

  “Sensei, sensei,” a group of four boys called as we waited in a one-hour line for a ride on the Space Mountain roller coaster, “a woman from England asked us where we were from. We said Tochigi, but she did not know where that was. Then we told her we lived near Nikko, and she said she had visited there last week.”

  Denver relished the way his students reacted to this task. “When I was a student in Sano,” he told me, “we didn’t have such things as American movies and American teachers in Tochigi. When I first went to university in Tokyo, I used to eat at Wendy’s every day with my girlfriend because neither one of us had ever been to this kind of place before in our lives. I remember when I met my American professor of English. It took me several months to speak to him, but now he is my friend.”

  Denver hoped his students would not be as reluctant to assert themselves around foreigners as he had been.

  “When you first came to our school my students were very afraid of you. They would come talk to me after class and say they could not understand what you said. They laughed at your long arms and way of speaking. But now they are used to you. They were very happy that you rode on our bus this morning. It made them feel very special.”

  “Mr. Bruce, Mr. Bruce,” said a group of girls who came across Denver and me while we were standing in line to buy ice cream. “We can’t find any foreigners anywhere. Do you mind if we ask you a few questions about Japan?”

  “Sure,” I said, “I’ll be glad to answer.”

  They giggled, and I suspected a trap.

  “By the way, will you give us your autograph?”

  On the day after the trip to Tokyo Disneyland, Denver convened a special homeroom meeting.

  “Good morning, boys and girls,” he said at the outset. “I want to thank you all for following the rules yesterday and making our trip a success. I would like all of you to spend the next forty-five minutes thinking about your behavior yesterday and writing a short reflection describing how you felt about the trip. Please begin now.”

  Like most teachers, Denver regularly conducted such “reflection sessions,” or hansei, to encourage students to examine their personal conduct and express their feelings toward the class. Like the open discussions after lunch, these exercises were part of the overall effort to encourage a sense of responsibility and allegiance to the kumi.

  “My group decided to go on one ride in every section of Tokyo Disneyland,” wrote one girl, “so we were very busy.”

  “I met a girl from America,” said another, “and I was very surprised that she could speak Japanese. I want to be her pen pal.”

  The students took this assignment very seriously, and many apologized on their reflection sheets for defying some of the school rules. They offered confessionals of sorts for sneaking candy on board the bus, losing their nametags on a ride, or buying one ice cream cone too many. Although they admitted their violations, the students wanted their teacher to know that they had still learned from him a sense of duty and a desire to care for others.

  Dear Sensei,

  I had a very nice time in Tokyo Disneyland yesterday. I enjoyed seeing Cinderella’s castle and having my picture taken with Mickey Mouse. I was glad it did not rain. But I am afraid that I disobeyed one of your rules. You told us that we could not take more than 1,500 yen per person [about $12]. My group, however, did not have enough money in our collection to buy each person a souvenir. Before I left home, my mother gave me 3,000 yen. I used some of this money so that all of our group members could buy the same T-shirt. Our shirts are very beautiful, and we are very happy today. I hope you are not angry. Now at least we have a pleasant memory.

  Sincerely,

  Kumiko Tanaka

  24

  THE AMERICAN CLASS: LESSONS FROM INSIDE THE JAPANESE SCHOOLS

  How can the bird that is born for joy,

  Sit in a cage and sing.

  How can a child when fears annoy,

  But droop his tender wing,

  And forget his youthful spring.

  —William Blake, “The School Boy,” 1789

  “DEAR MR. BLUSE”, a seventh-grade boy wrote to me in flawless cursive script at the end of my first week in school:

  I saw for the first time, first at the time, then be surprised at tall.

  Unlike Japanese teacher, English lesson enjoyed.

  For short, but thank you very much for everything.

  Love,

  Ryuichi Tominaga

  Since my opening day in a Japanese classroom, when I first walked from behind the teacher’s podium, offered my hand to an unsuspecting boy, and was met by the blank stares and frightened faces of forty-five fearful students, I was consumed by a singular question: How could I accommodate Japanese classroom manners and still expose my students to an “international” way of schooling?

  Ryuichi’s reactions were typical. Most students were shocked at first by the sight of this lanky foreign teacher. They were startled when I jumped around the room, bounded from desk to desk, and asked rapid questions in English. “Do you like Georgia Coffee?” “Does he like going skiing?” “Do they like the Beatles?” Most of the students eventually warmed to this style. Now they giggled when I sat on the teacher’s desk or drew funny maps on the board. Sometimes they even answered my questions before I called their names. “Mr. Bruce, I like Georgia Coffee very much.”

  The teachers were a different story.

  Mr. Fuji, for example, had been teaching for thirty-five years, and he did not want a young American coming into his life and encouraging him to be livelier and speak more English in class. He was perfectly content to follow along in the teacher’s manual, give vocabulary quizzes once a week, and check memorization every chapter. About the only role he could think of for a native English speaker was to read every sentence in the chapter twice a day and have students repeat it en masse. This was called pronunciation practice: mine improved considerably.

  Denver, meanwhile, was the exact opposite. He was so excited to have a native speaker in his class that he would regularly stop by my apartment unannounced the night before we were to teach together to ask if I could think of any more songs or games that we could include in our lesson plan. We would sit for hours on the tatami floor of my apartment devising easy-English versions of such American game show classics as “Wheel of Fortune” and “Jeopardy!”

  Answer: “A career woman.”

  Question: “What does Emi [the quixotic star of the English textbook] want to be in the future?”

  Mrs. Negishi, like most teachers, fell in between these two poles. At times she would plan special activities to encourage students to talk with foreigners. Once she hooked up a portable microphone in class, told her students they were reporters, and hosted a mock news conference in which I played the president of the United States: “Mr. President, can you use chopsticks?” She knew that if her students enjoyed these exercises, they would study harder at home. But she also knew that conversation games and sing-alongs were not enough to prepare her students for high school entrance exams, so she plodded along with her thrice-weekly training program of vocabulary drills, diagram workouts, and grammar calisthenics.

  In early July, as the time neared for me to leave, Mrs. Negishi
approached me with her grandest idea to date.

  “Mr. Bruce,” she said one afternoon when all the students had gone home, “the students have had a very difficult term. I want to try something different for our final class of the year.”

  “Okay,” I said, “what do you have in mind?”

  “I want you to design an American class. You can do whatever you want and say whatever you please, just like in America. I want this to be a treat for my homeroom class.”

  Of course I readily agreed, and over the next several weeks I prepared what I thought would be a model Team Teaching plan. During the year I had learned that many of my students could memorize a Shakespeare soliloquy or diagram the U.S. Constitution, but very few could talk their way out of a 7-Eleven using simple conversational English. The objective of my “American class,” therefore, was to have students spend a majority of their time speaking and listening to English. There would be no recitation of textbook passages; no reading aloud after the teacher; no writing out pronunciation guides using stodgy linguistic symbols. Instead, students would put their knowledge to work and take a chance at “living” English.

  One of the first things I insisted for the American class was that students be allowed to wear something other than their school uniforms. “If this were really America,” I told Mrs. Negishi, “they could make their own choices. Class will be more colorful this way, and students will have more fun.” But as soon as I stepped into the ninth-grade classroom on that hazy, humid July afternoon, I feared that my dream had gone awry. Instead of vivid greens and neon oranges, all the boys stood in a line in front of the blackboard dressed in virtually identical outfits of blue jeans and white T-shirts. The girls, on the other side of the room, showed a little more fashion courage, but most wore denim skirts and baggy tops with polka dots or stars. The students looked like nervous high school freshmen at their first sock hop, and the room, which had been decorated with stenciled drawings of Donald Duck and Betty Boop, looked like the local headquarters for the Mickey Mouse Club of Tochigi. “Welcome to America!” a student had chalked on the blackboard. “A friend in need is a friend indeed.”

  My second proposal for the American class was to move the students’ desks from their normal rigid structure and set them in a circle. It seemed ironic that I was preaching the virtues of circular seating in Japan, but Mrs. Negishi said she had never seen it done before. My purpose was to open the fixed desk alignment so that all students had an equal chance—and an equal risk—of speaking in class. But once I moved in front of the blackboard, I realized why no one had tried this technique before. With forty-five students in one class, the desks would not fit into a single loop, so the students had to cram them into two rings that looked less like a fine-tuned platoon and more like a pileup of bumper cars. Undaunted, Mrs. Negishi and I stepped into the center of the room and asked the students to stand up. Instead of asking them to bow, however, we sprung a trap: no student would be allowed to sit down until he or she had correctly answered a question in English.

  On your mark, get set, go.

  We darted around the room, turning first to one student (“What did you eat for breakfast this morning?”) and then to another (“What did you watch on TV last night?”). If the answer perchance was correct (“I watched Best Hits USA”), the student would cheer and slide into a chair, but if the verb was missing or the object misplaced, the student had to remain standing until we came around again. With persistence and some coaching, all the students eventually talked their way into their seats.

  Flush with success from our surprising opening, I moved to the blackboard for a quick review of the material in the lesson. Instead of reading the six pages on Singapore in the textbook and having the class repeat after me, I gave the students a short tour d’horizon with my chalk, stopping off at the United States, China, Hong Kong, Thailand, and Malaysia before arriving at Singapore. Even with the textbooks closed, we covered all the material in the chapter (“Singapore is a clean and green country”), introduced the vocabulary words (“You must pay a fine if you litter in the streets”), and even reviewed the “target sentence” (“Have you ever…been to Singapore?”).

  Picking up on this target theme, I asked the students to open their notebooks and gave them one minute to write a sample question using the sentence “Have you ever…?”

  “Mr. Bruce,” asked the first girl I chose, “have you ever been to American Disneyland?”

  “Yes,” I said, “I have been there three times.”

  “Have you ever eaten sushi?” queried the next.

  “Yes, I have eaten it many times.”

  “Have you ever eaten breakfast before five o’clock?”

  “No,” I replied, “I don’t believe I have.”

  Following this game, Mrs. Negishi and I distributed a model dialogue to help students practice what they had learned. With twenty minutes left to go in the class, we divided the students into groups of two and asked them to fill in the blanks of our dialogue. As they worked, we rearranged the chairs and focused Mrs. Negishi’s video camera on the makeshift stage in the center of the room.

  “Are you ready?” I called, plucking two volunteers from the circle and thrusting them into the middle. “Take one,” I said, mimicking the director’s routine I had learned at the juku. “Begin!”

  “H’lo,” the first boy mumbled, with his eyes glued to the handout and his mouth hidden behind the paper.

  “Hunh?” came the reply.

  “No, no, no,” I interrupted, waving my hands in exaggerated enthusiasm and snatching the paper from their hands. “Bigger, faster, louder. Be happy!”

  “Hello,” the two boys screamed at once.

  “My name is Masatoshi.”

  “My name is Yuji.”

  “Nice to meet you.”

  The two boys shook hands hurriedly, then rubbed their palms on their jeans.

  “Have you ever been to Utsunomiya?”

  “Yes, I have. I have been there many times. Have you ever been to Alaska?”

  “No, I have not.”

  “That’s too bad. I hope you go there someday.”

  “Thank you very much.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  “Good-bye.”

  After months of hearing nothing but nonsensical exchanges, this dialogue was poetry to my ears. During a year of teaching English in Sano, I had learned to measure progress not by lists of words or flights of rhetoric, but by the simple magic of call-and-response. “Speaking English is like tennis,” I often said. “When you receive the ball from your counterpart, you have to hit it back. If not, the game cannot continue.” From my earliest days as a teacher, I preached the gospel of speaking up and talking out. “Speak up when a question is asked,” I encouraged. “Talk out when you are in class. Whatever you do, just let your voice be heard.”

  After several more students took their turn in the central ring of Room 9-2, Mrs. Negishi stepped in to say that class was almost over and we would have time for only one more dialogue. Six hands shot into the air. She walked slowly around the perimeter, eyeing each of the candidates, and then finally selected a slim boy with glasses who was the star pupil of the class.

  “Susumu,” she said, “you will have a conversation with Mr. Bruce.”

  The class applauded. The boy rose cautiously, ran his hand across his crew cut, and took his place inside the circle.

  “Good afternoon,” I said. “My name is Bruce.”

  “Good afternoon,” he replied. “My name is Susumu. Nice to meet you.”

  “Nice to meet you.”

  We shook hands.

  “Have you ever been to America?” the boy asked.

  Several of the girls started giggling.

  “Yes,” I said, “I have been there many times. Have you ever been to America?”

  “No, I have not.”

  “That’s too bad. I hope you go there someday.”

  “I hope so, too,” he said. “I want to visit Georgia.”


  I glanced at my mimeographed sheet but suddenly felt at a loss for words. “I see.”

  “When I drink Georgia Coffee,” the boy continued, “I always think of you. So I want to visit Georgia. Then I want to listen to your loud voice. I love it.”

  “Thank you very much,” I said, offering my hand as I had taught them to do.

  Susumu took my hand and started to shake it, but changed his mind and bowed instead. “Thank you, Mr. Bruce,” he said. “I am happy today.”

  “Me too,” I said, bowing back. “Good-bye.”

  “Good-bye.”

  I began my year as a teacher in Tochigi seeking clues to Japan from inside its schools. Many of the country’s strengths, I discovered, are passed on early to students: discipline is taught through the strict dress code, cooperation through the kumi, and responsibility through the give-and-take of the teacher-student bond. But Japan’s shortcomings are born here as well: stress is nurtured through “examination hell,” pressure through the threat of gang bullying, and intolerance through the lingering myth that the Japanese are a breed apart. As an American in the Japanese schools, I found myself torn between respect and aversion for this system. On one hand, I admired students’ good study habits and strong communal values, but on the other, I was concerned about the harsh rules and do-or-die exams that schools use to achieve these results.