If you are drowning, please shout for help

 In a famous haiku, Basho wrote, «Silence / Into the rocks seep the voices of cicada.» Today, there would be no place for Basho to be alone with his thoughts, for seeping into the rocks would be an announcement from a chartered police-department Cessna overhead: «Let's remember to fasten our seat belts. When crossing the road, let's look left and right. This is Such-and-Such Police Department.» The writer Fukuda Kiichiro points out that public agencies spend tax money to broadcast this sort of message because they have misunderstood the concept of «public service.» Staffed with amakudari officials who have no idea how to benefit the public in any real way, agencies dream up these announcements so that «in the end it's a burlesque comedy put on by agencies such as the Transportation Safety Association as an alibi so they can say, 'Look! We're doing something!' » Another unstoppable tank of officialdom goes rumbling over the landscape. The same spirit of total dedication that has buried Japan's rivers takes over.

This, however, explains only the announcers, not the audience. The key question is why the Japanese public accepts and even craves all these commands and warnings. Fukuda writes:

One could say that social control in Japan has come to invade the private realm to an extreme degree. Of course «control» does not take place if we have only people who want to control. It's a necessary condition to also have a majority of people who wish to be controlled. It's the same mechanism that sociologists call «voluntary subjugation.» That is, people who wish to be controlled struggle to bring about control over themselves. It's related to the fact that chddren in high schools and students in universities never tire of having their teachers advise them what to do. Japanese college students are not adults who bear rights and responsibilities – they should all be called «children.»

The operative word in the above paragraph is «children.» Apart from the addiction to sound effects, the most remarkable aspect of Japan's public announcements is their sheer childishness. The level of nonsense in what Fukuda calls the Kindergarten State can strain credibility. Buses at Itami City urge riders to use soap. At Hayama, a beach south of Tokyo, a recorded voice tells bus passengers, «If you have come from a long way, please rest before entering the sea. If you are drowning, please shout for help.»

The long and the short of it is that Japan s postwar educational system is turning the Japanese into children. That the air everywhere rings with warnings of «Danger!» «Hazardous!» cries out for psychological study-it certainly gives insight into people's timidity in stepping out of line. Commentators in Japan have discussed the problem of this infantilization at length; the social critic Fukuda Kazuya wrote a book entitled Why Have the Japanese Become Such Infants? The effects of infantilization on Japan's modern culture are far-reaching. As we have seen, manga comics now account for nearly half of Japan's publishing business. The old words that defined Japanese culture – such as wabi (rough natural materials) or shibui (subdued elegance) – have been replaced by a new concept: kawaii (cute). Japan is awash in a sea of cute comic froggies, kitties, doggies, and bunnies with big, round, babyish eyes.

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From hair and dress, the rules extend in the hundreds to issues that go beyond the schoolyard. Many schools require children to wear uniforms on weekends; others decree that students may not buy drinks from vending machines on their way home from school. And often violence enforces these rules.

Corporal punishment is illegal, but this is often a case of tatemae rather than honne. For one thing, teacher violence carries no legal penalty. So widespread is teacher violence that at the trial of Miyamoto Akira, a teacher in Fukuoka who killed a girl by striking her on the head and shoulders, the line of defense was that the court should not single Miyamoto out because teachers everywhere commonly strike pupils. Pupils in the regular educational system fare better than those who are sent to special schools and seminars (boot camps, basically) whose purpose is to toughen them up. These schools are known for their shoutings, beatings, and physical privations; indeed, parents send their children to them expressly so that they will undergo such privations. The severe discipline at these schools often leads to injury, and sometimes to death.

While teachers sometimes resort to physical punishment, most of the violence in the schools is among the students themselves. The acceptance of violence against those who are weaker than you is a part of Japan's educational process, as it enforces group unity. Given the intense pressure to conform from kindergarten onward, Japanese students frequently turn to bullying, known as ijime. Ijime is a national problem, and it results in several much publicized suicides of schoolchildren every year. With a girl, it starts with being called kusai (smelly) or baikin (bacteria), and eventually takes the psychologically crushing form of not being talked to, or being shunned when she approaches. One girl interviewed by a reporter said that she thought what she had done wrong was to be outspoken – or perhaps she was too tall.

As the writer Sakamaki Sachiko has said, «An odd nuance of speech or appearance is enough to invite ostracism, and in a society where conformity is everything, no stigma weighs heavier than the curse of being different. Too fat or too short, too smart or too slow – all make inviting targets. Many Japanese children who have lived abroad deliberately perform poorly in, say, English classes so as not to stand out.» With boys, ijime can result in severe hazing. In the case of Ito Hisashi, a thirteen-year-old in Joetsu, a city north of Tokyo, ijime began when his friends ignored him; later they stripped him naked in the school bathroom, doused him with water, and extorted money from him. His father found him swinging by the neck from a basketball hoop.

There is very little recourse against this kind of bullying, since in Japanese schools it is the one who is bullied who is considered to be at fault. While teachers take an official stand against ijime, they tend to encourage it indirectly, through their own emphasis on obedience to the group. In a nationwide conference of the Japan Teachers' Union in 1996, most teachers agreed: «It can't be helped that in severe cases of bullying the bullied student skips school for a while.» But only 11 percent thought it was appropriate to suspend the bullies. KoderaYasuko, the author of the best-selling book How to Fight Against Bullying, found that when she complained about her daughter's having been bullied, school authorities and the other parents dismissed the problem as hers, not theirs. Dr. Miyamoto says, «Bullying the weak is considered psychologically abnormal and a sign of immaturity in the West. But in Japan it's accepted.»

Students who have studied abroad are obvious targets; so alien is their upbringing to that of their classmates that educationalists have created a new word for them: kikokushijo, «returnees.» Kikokushijo attend special schools to reindoctrinate them into Japanese society. Foreigners are another matter. For decades, the Ministry of Education refused to accredit the special schools attended by many of the children of Japan's 680,000 resident Koreans; these schools teach the same subjects that are taught in other high schools, in the Japanese language, yet until 1999 the ministry pressured high schools and universities not to admit students who had graduated from them.

Far more effective than violence or overt Ministry of Education pressure in enforcing obedience and group identity are behavioral patterns of walking, talking, sitting, and standing in unity, which are instilled through drills and ceremonies, typically to the sound of broadcast music and announcements. These begin in kindergarten and continue in ever more elaborate form right through to graduation from high school. Many of the drills involve the repetition of stock phrases known as aisatsu, usually translated in English as «greetings,» a ritualistic round of hellos, thank-yous, and apologies. These make up an important part of Japanese etiquette, and are one of Japan's attractive features in truth, smoothing the flow of social life and contrasting sharply with curt New York and rude Shanghai. At the same time, aisatsu are the ultimate tool in teaching conformity, for their reflexive use makes it unnecessary for students to think up original responses by themselves.

The effect of the violence administered by their peers and of the broadcast round of drills and rituals is to make Japanese students very good boys and girls indeed. Dr. Miyamoto compares Japanese schools with the chateau in the famous sadomasochistic novel Story of O. In the chateau, where О is locked up, she learns to become a good sex slave by following every little rule to avoid being whipped – and she learns to cherish the reward for good behavior, which is also a whipping. «O became a prisoner of the pleasure of masochism... Now let's replace the chateau with Japan's conformist society, O, with a salaryman, and masochistic sex with work.»

So far, I have dwelled on the ways in which schools teach children to behave and conform, not on the curriculum, and that is because obedience is largely what Japanese education is about. «In some sense it appears that Japanese schools are training students instead of teaching them,» Ray and Cindelyn Eberts wrote. (Dr. Miyamoto goes so far as to call the Ministry of Education the «Ministry of Training.») Nevertheless, what of the curriculum that teaches so much mathematics and science- the envy of foreign educational experts?

It is true that Japanese children score consistently higher on mathematics tests than students in most other countries. However, they have only a middling rank in science, and even in math their scores drop as soon as tests diverge from application of cookie-cutter techniques and focus on questions that involve analysis or creative thought.

Literacy itself is a famed accomplishment of the Japanese educational system, and Japan's high percent of literacy is often compared with low numbers in Europe and the United States. But, according to recent studies, absolute illiteracy-the inability to read and write-accounts for 0.1 to 1.9 percent of the American population, and it is very nearly the same percentage in Japan. Experts have never properly defined «functional illiteracy,» and researchers take it to mean all sorts of things, from the ability to read and write well enough to do a job to the ability to fill out an application form or understand a bus schedule. (If the test is how well a person understands forms and bus schedules, then I, for one, would definitely rank as a functional illiterate.) Based on such criteria, people have come up with figures for functional illiteracy in the United States that range from 23,000,000 to 60,000,000, or 40 percent of the population.

In Japan, on the other hand, functional illiteracy is not a concept. There is no way to know what the results would be if it were measured in ways similar to those used in the United States. One can only hazard a guess. For example, what is one to make of the fact that the favorite reading material of wage earners coming home on evening trains is not books or newspapers but manga comics? Manga now account for a huge share of Japanese publishing-as much as half of the magazine market. The point is not that Japanese schools fail to make their students literate – clearly, they do – but that they are not necessarily doing it better than schools in other countries.

To pass examinations in Japan, students must learn facts, facts that are not necessarily relevant to each other or useful in life. The emphasis is on rote memorization. The Ministry of Education reviews all textbooks and standardizes their contents so that pupils across the country, both in public and private schools, read the same books. Unfortunately, the «facts» are not necessarily the facts as the world sees them-especially the history of World War II. The 1970s and 1980s saw frequent protests from China and Korea, for example, when the ministry tried to insist that all textbooks describe Japan's «invasion of the continent» as an «advance into the continent.» Officially approved texts teach that the facts of the Nanking Massacre are «under dispute»; recently, they finally mentioned «comfort women» (women who were forced to serve the Japanese army as prostitutes) but did not say what they did. There is no information about the infamous kenpeitai (secret police), who administered a reign of terror before the war, no description of Japan's colonial rule in Korea, and so forth. The authorities have effectively removed from students' education the period 1895-1945, a crucial half century in world history. Courts have ruled that the purpose of the ministry's textbook review is strictly to check facts, but it has become another unstoppable process that officials hold dear. In recent years, textbook review has gone beyond war issues to other matters: the ministry scratched a sixth-grade textbook because the onomatopoeic sounds that a poet used to describe a rushing river differed from the officially recognized sounds. Textbooks may not mention divorce, single-parent families, or late marriage. Or pizza. The ministry commented, «Pizza is not a set menu for a family.»

It is bad enough when bureaucrats in Tokyo start telling families what they may think about eating for dinner, but there is another, more serious problem: the facts taught in school are not the ones that university entrance exams test for! Students must therefore attend cram schools (juku) after school – two-thirds of all students aged twelve to fifteen attend juku, which accounts for between two and four hours each day. In addition, extracurricular activities like sports or music clubs function along the lines of paramilitary organizations, with a host of extra duties that exhaust both students and teachers.

This brings us to another vital and distinctive rule of Japanese education, which sets Japan apart from every other nation in the world (with the possible exception of North Korea). It is the principle of keeping a student busy every second. This successfully eliminates any time for independent interests and results in constant fatigue. «Children often tell me, 'I'm tired,' » says Kanno Jun of Waseda University. «They are busy with school, cram-school, and other activities-way beyond their natural limits.» Sleep deprivation is a classic tool of military training, its use well documented in the prewar Japanese army. Being constantly exhausted and yet exerting oneself to gambare is one of the best lessons in masochism. One private poll of sixth-graders in Tokyo found that one in three students went to bed at midnight, at the earliest, because they were studying for juku.One paradox of Japan's educational system is that juku is considered necessary: if the school system is as advanced and efficient as its proponents claim, this would not be the case. What are the real purposes of these institutions? One is obvious: to fill students' heads with more facts. A similar scenario in the United States would have the majority of American high-school students studying for SAT tests and nothing besides this: they would go to cram school in the afternoon, memorize every word and fact ever asked on an SAT, and strictly avoid everything else. They would stay up until 1:00 a.m. every night memorizing these words and facts.

In the juku, students are learning another important lesson: the hard work, the sacrifice, the exhaustion, the resigning of one's interests and personality to the demands of impersonal rules – this is what juku really teach. The American Ray Eberts relates the following exchange with his friend Mr. Uchimura:

«If Japan's schools are so very good, why do you have to spend so much money for extra education?»

«The children do not learn what they need to know to pass the exams for university in public schools.»

«Well, what are they doing in school, then?»

«They are learning to be Japanese.»

The effect of rules, discomfort, violence both by teachers and by bullies, boring standardized textbooks, juku, paramilitary sports and music clubs, and sleep deprivation is just what one would expect: Japanese children hate school. They hate it so much that tens of thousands of students stay away from school for at least a month each year in a phenomenon known as toko kyohi, «refusal to attend school.» A poll of fifth-graders showed that, out of six countries, children in Japan were the most dissatisfied with their homeroom teachers and the least likely to find school fun – and by a wide margin. Another poll found that only 21 percent of Japanese students said they were interested in their classes, versus 78.2 percent worldwide.

These numbers point to the fact that, under the surface, profound trouble is brewing in Japan's educational system. School in Japan is monochromatic: there's no room, or time, for a student to pour him- or herself into a personal hobby (as opposed to paramilitary club activities), or to read literature, do volunteer work, go to the zoo, get in touch with nature, or learn about other countries. The whole regimen makes sense only if one is determined to battle through «exam hell,» go to college, and become an obedient blue-suited salaryman or even more obedient salaryman's wife. If not, there is no place for you. For the good boys and girls, all goes well. But what of the «bad» ones? In an era of relative wealth and leisure, when children do not feel threatened by poverty as their parents did, students who opt out of the salaryman route tend to opt out of education altogether. They reach a point where they simply snap under the pressure – the Japanese word is kireru – and from then on, the only thing that matters to them is the color of their hair or the speed of their motorbikes. The result is schoolrooms filled with rebellious, rude, even dangerous kids-the exact opposite of what the repressive educational program set out to create!

Karl Taro Greenfield, author of Speed Tribes: Days and Nights with Japan's Next Generation, describes his experience as an English teacher in a high school south of Tokyo, a low-level school whose students were not going to college or aiming at white-collar jobs. «These kids were friendly, jovial, and totally uninterested in learning English,» Greenfield writes. «Most of them slept during class, others kept up a steady stream of jabber, and when I tried to quiet them, they simply walked out. This was the vaunted Japanese educational system? The condition I had stumbled upon, a sort of kireru – the nihilism that animates many left-behind Japanese kids – was broader than I realized.»

If tattoos and pierced tongues meant a liberation of the spirit, then all this might bode well for Japan. But what we are seeing is not necessarily a flowering of individualism. The tattoos, the dyed hair, and the pierced tongues all follow more or less the same pattern; even the rebels remain very true to their group dynamics. These youth are unlikely to be the ones who rise above the Construction State and give thought to the environment, or decide to have an impact on local politics, become entrepreneurs and set up Internet companies, or break free of inhibitions and befriend foreigners. Rather, we are seeing an unpredictable nihilism, the birth of a new and truly dispossessed class. What effects this will have in the future on society can only be guessed.

Dogs and Demons

Alex Kerr