Politeness

 

COURTESY AND URBANITY of manners have been noticed by every foreign tourist as a marked Japanese trait. Politeness is a poor virtue, if it is actuated only by a fear of offending good taste, whereas it should be the outward manifestation of a sympathetic regard for the feelings of others. It also implies a due regard for the fitness of things, therefore due respect to social positions; for these latter express no plutocratic distinctions, but were originally distinctions for actual merit.

In its highest form, politeness almost approaches love. We may reverently say, politeness “suffereth long, and is kind; envieth not, vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up; doth not behave itself unseemly, seeketh not her own, is not easily provoked, taketh not account of evil.” Is it any wonder that Professor Dean, in speaking of the six elements of humanity, accords to politeness an exalted position, inasmuch as it is the ripest fruit of social intercourse?

While thus extolling politeness, far be it from me to put it in the front rank of virtues. If we analyze it, we shall find it correlated with other virtues of a higher order; for what virtue stands alone? While—or rather because—it was exalted as peculiar to the profession of arms, and as such esteemed in a degree higher than its deserts, there came into existence its counterfeits. Confucius himself has repeatedly taught that external appurtenances are as little a part of propriety as sounds are of music.

When propriety was elevated to the sine qua non of social intercourse, it was only to be expected that an elaborate system of etiquette should come into vogue to train youth in correct social behavior. How one must bow in accosting others, how he must walk and sit, were taught and learned with utmost care. Table manners grew to be a science. Tea serving and drinking were raised to ceremony. A man of education is, of course, expected to be master of all these. Very fitly does Mr. Veblen, in his interesting book,1 call decorum “a product and an exponent of the leisure-class life.”

I have heard slighting remarks made by Europeans upon our elaborate discipline of politeness. It has been criticized as absorbing too much of our thought and in so far a folly to observe strict obedience to it. I admit that there may be unnecessary niceties in ceremonious etiquette, but whether it partakes as much of folly as the adherence to ever-changing fashions of the West, is a question not very clear to my mind. Even fashions I do not consider solely as freaks of vanity; on the contrary, I look upon these as a ceaseless search of the human mind for the beautiful. Much less do I consider elaborate ceremony as altogether trivial; for it denotes the result of long observation as to the most appropriate method of achieving a certain result. If there is anything to do, there is certainly a best way to do it, and the best way is both the most economical and the most graceful. Mr. Spencer defines grace as the most economical manner of motion. The tea ceremony presents certain definite ways of manipulating a bowl, a spoon, a napkin, etc. To a novice it looks tedious. But one soon discovers that the way prescribed is, after all, the most saving of time and labor; in other words, the most economical use of force—hence, according to Spencer’s dictum, the most graceful.

The spiritual significance of social decorum—or, I might say, to borrow from the vocabulary of the “Philosophy of Clothes,” the spiritual discipline of which etiquette and ceremony are mere outward garments—is out of all proportion to what their appearance warrants us in believing. I might follow the example of Mr. Spencer and trace in our ceremonial institutions their origins and the moral motives that gave rise to them; but that is not what I shall endeavor to do in this book. It is the moral training involved in strict observance of propriety, that I wish to emphasize.

I have said that etiquette was elaborated into the finest niceties, so much so that different schools, advocating different systems, came into existence. But they all united in the ultimate essential, and this was put by a great exponent of the best known school of etiquette, the Ogasawara, in the following terms: “The end of all etiquette is to so cultivate your mind that even when you are quietly seated, not the roughest ruffian can dare make onset on your person.” It means, in other words, that by constant exercise in correct manners, one brings all the parts and faculties of his body into perfect order and into such harmony with itself and its environment as to express the mastery of spirit over the flesh. What a new and deep significance the French word biensèance2 comes to contain.

If the promise is true that gracefulness means economy of force, then it follows as a logical sequence that a constant practice of graceful deportment must bring with it a reserve and storage of force. Fine manners, therefore, mean power in repose. When the barbarian Gauls, during the sack of Rome, burst into the assembled Senate and dared pull the beards of the venerable Fathers, we think the old gentlemen were to blame, inasmuch as they lacked dignity and strength of manners. Is lofty spiritual attainment really possible through etiquette? Why not?—all roads lead to Rome!

As an example of how the simplest thing can be made into an art and then become spiritual culture, I may take Cha-no-yu, the tea ceremony. Tea-sipping as a fine art! Why should it not be? In the children drawing pictures on the sand, or in the savage carving on a rock, was the promise of a Raphael or a Michaelangelo. How much more is the drinking of a beverage, which began with the transcendental contemplation of a Hindoo anchorite, entitled to develop into a handmaid of Religion and Morality? That calmness of mind, that serenity of temper, that composure and quietness of demeanour which are the first essentials of Cha-no-yu, are without doubt the first conditions of right thinking and right feeling. The scrupulous cleanliness of the little room, shut off from sight and sound of the madding crowd, is in itself conducive to direct one’s thoughts from the world. The bare interior does not engross one’s attention like the innumerable pictures and bric-a-brac of a Western parlor; the presence of kaké-mono3 calls our attention more to grace of design than to beauty of color. The utmost refinement of taste is the object aimed at; whereas anything like display is banished with religious horror. The very fact that it was invented by a contemplative recluse, in a time when wars and the rumors of wars were incessant, is well calculated to show that this institution was more than a pastime. Before entering the quiet precincts of the tearoom, the company assembling to partake of the ceremony laid aside, together with their swords, the ferocity of battlefield or the cares of government, there to find peace and friendship.

Cha-no-yu is more than a ceremony—it is a fine art; it is poetry, with articulate gestures for rhythms: it is a modus operandi of soul discipline. Its greatest value lies in this last phase. Not infrequently the other phases preponderated in the mind of its votaries, but that does not prove that its essence was not of a spiritual nature.

Politeness will be a great acquisition, if it does no more than impart grace to manners; but its function does not stop here. For propriety, springing as it does from motives of benevolence and modesty, and actuated by tender feelings toward the sensibilities of others, is ever a graceful expression of sympathy. Its requirement is that we should weep with those that weep and rejoice with those that rejoice. Such didactic requirement, when reduced into small everyday details of life, expresses itself in little acts scarcely noticeable, or, if noticed, is, as one missionary lady of twenty years’ residence once said to me, “awfully funny.” You are out in the hot, glaring sun with no shade over you; a Japanese acquaintance passes by; you accost him, and instantly his hat is off—well, that is perfectly natural, but the “awfully funny” performance is, that all the while he talks with you his parasol is down and he stands in the glaring sun also. How foolish!—yes, exactly so, provided the motive were less than this: “You are in the sun; I sympathize with you; I would willingly take you under my parasol if it were large enough, or if we were familiarly acquainted; as I cannot shade you, I will share your discomforts.” Little acts of this kind, equally or more amusing, are not mere gestures or conventionalities. They are the “bodying forth” of thoughtful feelings for the comfort of others.

Another “awfully funny” custom is dictated by our canons of Politeness; but many superficial writers on Japan have dismissed it by simply attributing it to the general topsy-turvyness of the nation. Every foreigner who has observed it will confess the awkwardness he felt in making proper reply upon the occasion. In America, when you make a gift, you sing its praises to the recipient; in Japan we depreciate or slander it. The underlying idea with you is, “This is a nice gift: if it were not nice I would not dare give it to you; for it will be an insult to give you anything but what is nice.” In contrast to this, our logic runs: “You are a nice person, and no gift is nice enough for you. You will not accept anything I can lay at your feet except as a token of my goodwill; so accept this, not for its intrinsic value, but as a token. It will be an insult to your worth to call the best gift good enough for you.” Place the two ideas side by side, and we see that the ultimate idea is one and the same. Neither is “awfully funny.” The American speaks of the material which makes the gift; the Japanese speaks of the spirit which prompts the gift.

It is perverse reasoning to conclude, because our sense of propriety shows itself in all the smallest ramifications of our deportment, to take the least important of them and uphold it as the type, and pass judgment upon the principle itself. Which is more important, to eat or to observe rules of propriety about eating? A Chinese sage answers, “If you take a case where the eating is all-important, and the observing the rules of propriety is of little importance, and compare them together, why not merely say that the eating is of the more importance?” “Metal is heavier than feathers,” but does that saying have reference to a single clasp of metal and a wagonload of feathers? Take a piece of wood a foot thick and raise it above the pinnacle of a temple, none would call it taller than the temple. To the question, “Which is the more important, to tell the truth or to be polite?” the Japanese are said to give an answer diametrically opposite to what the American will say—but I forbear any comment until I come to speak of veracity and sincerity.

1. Theory of the Leisure Class, N.Y., 1899, p. 46. 

2. Etymologically, well-seatedness.

3. Hanging scrolls, which may be either paintings or ideograms, used for decorative purposes.

From: BUSHIDO

The Spiritof the Samurai

Inazo Nitobe

On hikikomori

 6This pervasive distress is reflected in Japan's plummeting birthrate—which now ranks among the lowest in the world—and in the nation's diminishing population, which began to shrink, in absolute terms, in 2005, when the number of deaths surpassed annual births by some ten thousand. 7 This sharp decline can be attributed to women who marry later, if at all, because they don't want to give up their independence to raise children in an unhappy environment; or who, if married, decide that having children is a poor investment of their time and energies, and so refuse to bear them. Radical dissent is also reflected in the proliferation of suicide—Japan has the world's highest rate among wealthy industrial nations—as well as in the growing number of group suicides committed by complete strangers who meet on the Internet in order to die together. Alcoholism and depression are rampant, if seldom discussed, manifestations of adjustment disorder, while exhaustion and overwork claim thousands of casualties each year.

Frustrated and disaffected, many young Japanese just abandon their homeland. Hundreds of thousands of others wander like nomads outside the rigid traditional system, refusing to work, go to school, or accept job training. Even more disturbing—perhaps most disturbing—is the cadre of more than one million young adults, the majority of them men, who literally shut themselves away from the sun, closing their blinds, taping shut their windows, and refusing to leave the bedroom in their homes for months or years at a time. Thus, the anguish the Imperial Family discreetly confronts behind stone palace walls reflects a crisis now being visited on the wider family of Japan.

(...)

Also like Americans, Japanese face the paradoxical challenge that wealth creates. For only in societies blessed with unrivaled prosperity do people have the luxury to consider what it is that truly makes them happy. When the pursuit of material extravagance delivers emptiness rather than inner contentment, a people are forced to confront deeper, more existential questions about meaning, value, self-affirmation, and moral purpose that classroom training alone cannot teach. Exploring this inner dimension demands a different vocabulary, one that wealthy nations often deemphasize and deny amid their constant chase for expansion and greater prosperity. To pose such courageous and fundamental questions is, after all, to subvert the underlying mission by challenging its objective.

While wealthy nations share many common challenges, Japan's particular history, social institutions, and economic architecture also set it apart from others. Indeed, no other nation has more stubbornly defied the comprehension of outsiders. Experts in macroeconomics, for example, are frequently stunned that the models they devise for “normal” market economies simply don't work in Japan. Political scientists find it remarkable that in a nation that has endured fifteen years of bad economics, the political structure has not faltered nor have street protests broken out among its increasingly disaffected citizens. Likewise, Western social psychiatrists find it puzzling that inhabitants of a nation as wealthy as Japan score so low on global measurements of subjective well-being, or that the term “self-esteem” does not exist in Japanese.

I, too, often found myself puzzled and distressed, unable to explain Japan's palpable if inarticulate crisis coherently to outsiders, until I began to hear the stories of men like Kenji, thirty-four, who dares not leave his room, or angry Jun, twenty-eight, who bicycles through the darkened streets of Tokyo some nights to work through his frustration and fear. These are two of the more than one million young adults, fearful, isolated, intelligent, and alone, who barricade themselves in their rooms for protection rather than attempt to engage with a society they feel denies them any expression of self. As I entered their mysterious world and got to know some of these extraordinary men, I sensed that understanding Japan through their eyes could offer a whole new perspective on the nation's festering malaise.

In this book, rather than focus primarily on politics or economics, my aim is to unravel the unusual social, cultural, and psychological constraints that have stifled the people of this proud, primordial nation and prevented change from bubbling up from within. First, I examine the plight of the hikikomori, the young men who lock themselves in their rooms and find little solace in the larger society. After looking into their lives and those of their parents and caregivers, I explore the history and culture in which their tragic stories are embedded to approach some explanation for Japan's contemporary social deadlock. Then I examine a cluster of behaviors that seem more familiar to Western readers: the fixation on consumerism and brand names in the search for identity; women's painful lives and their reluctance to wed and have babies; and, finally, the high incidence of suicide, depression, and alcoholism. Then, I broaden the view to see how Japan stacks up against its closest neighbor and rival, South Korea. Though these two nations share so much history and culture, I explain the underlying forces which allowed South Korea to rebound smartly from economic crisis while Japan still lags. I also assess how the United States, Japan's protector for the past sixty years, contributes to Japan's profound adjustment disorder, even as Japan permits the United States to prolong its own unsustainable course. Finally, I speculate on how Japan's own survival strategy may come to resemble those of the hikikomori who negate themselves and their adulthood, and shut out the sun of vigorous self-affirmation and moral purpose.

In dissecting this very different culture, my goal is to describe and analyze, rather than argue a narrowly focused point of view. I do this deliberately, for when it comes to the nature and pathologies of many of the syndromes I will try to disentangle, there is still a great deal we don't know—a testimony to the relatively shabby state of social science and psychological research within modern Japan as well as to the low status afforded to such inquiry. I also believe that as a Westerner, cast inevitably as an outsider looking inside a very closed world, it is imperative that I use as many Japanese voices as often as possible to elucidate behaviors and describe their own society.

Tragically these are not subjects the Japanese themselves normally choose to discuss. Indeed, they often likened their society to a duck pond, whose tranquil mirror-smooth surface hides the legs churning furiously below the waterline to keep their places in the flock. One day, over a beer at a fireworks-viewing party in a Tokyo suburb, I spoke of my concern about Japan's social dislocation with a journalist recently retired from a powerful Japanese newspaper. He confided that he, too, was deeply anxious about the nation's passive acceptance of failure; its bankrupt banks and corporate malfeasance, rampant political corruption, and the rising pessimism of its people.

“Half the people don't know how bad things are,” he told me. “The rest are in denial.”

Not just the Japanese live in denial, however. By exploring the deeper inner recesses a people keep hidden, I hope to show that shattering the smooth, glassy surface of a society's appearance represents the first crucial step toward its renewal.

(...)

Is this isolation, I wondered, simply these young adults' peculiar form of rebellion against their prevailing culture? Or are they too sensitive or inquisitive to accept such collective constraints, and flee to their rooms both for protection and self-preservation? Or are they—as Taka, one twenty-four-year-old, suggested—simply and unsettlingly “different” from the society that surrounds them? “I was raised to have a good career and be a good boy,” he told me. “My problem is that I can't go to work like other people. I'm different.”

I heard another point of view from the sixty-year-old white-haired mother of a hikikomori, a gentle and sympathetic woman who accepts and understands her son's plight, much as it grieves her: “Hikikomori are kids who value the intangibles,” Hiromi told me. I had met her for coffee to talk about the desolate isolation of her son who, now in his thirties, has for five years been living at home, confining himself to his room because he feels he has no other place where he can just be himself. “Hikikomori can see the intangibles, but cannot speak out because there is no place in Japanese society that allows them to …So,” she concluded, “a person who challenges, or makes a mistake, or thinks for himself, either leaves Japan or becomes a hikikomori.”

And, indeed, leaving Japan has been a partial solution for some like  Shigei, who has been hikikomori for the last thirteen of his thirty years. He told me that he was able to relax and meet others only when prompted by a friend to get out of Japan and visit Thailand on a trip his parents paid for. “I felt different in a country where the buses don't always run on time,” he told me. Jun found temporary relief from his anxieties during a visit to India. 3 Another hikikomori, thirty-five-year-old Yasuo Ogawara, went into hiding in his twenties after being badgered and rejected, often cruelly, by residents of the provincial town where he had relocated with his wife. “In this society, anyone can become a hikikomori,” he told me, describing how his in-laws had ostracized and bullied him to the point where the couple divorced. “It's the nature of our social system that is really the cause. It's a system operated by factions, and you have to understand the very nature of the social system to understand this problem.

“Today the values of parents and of young people are completely different,” he went on. “The post-bubble bills are coming due, and we have just started to pay for our decades of focusing only on the material.”

* * *

After listening to the tales and predicaments of dozens of these isolated men, I began to better understand the behavior of Jun and other hikikomori as their extraordinary but utterly rational indictment of a postindustrial monoculture. It isn't that these adults choose isolation out of indulgence, but that they see no other course. They need some “free space” in which to breathe, without the prying eyes of outsiders constantly judging them, forcing them to join the herd. The only space they can control is their own bedroom.

Hikikomori instinctively know that the world outside Japan—and the way that world works—has changed dramatically in recent years as Japan lags behind. They seem to perceive the nature of Japan's economic and spiritual crisis far more acutely than do the hundreds of bureaucrats and politicians I have met over the years.

Yet if what makes Japan seem so foreign and incomprehensible to  most Westerners is its insularity, homogeneity, and lockstep conformity, then it would seem logical that this syndrome—where the young try to escape that singularly compressed and restrictive life—may exist only in Japan. And since every social system is likely to foster its own unique afflictions, investigating this unusual behavior could lead me to deeper truths about Japan and its current malaise. My journalist's intuition was essentially confirmed by Satoru Saito, one of Japan's most prominent psychiatrists, who has practiced psychotherapy and taught psychoanalysis for years. An avuncular, gentle man who wears sweaters and smokes a pipe, Saito counsels dozens of hikikomori patients, as well as abusive husbands and troubled families, at the Institute for Family Function, his narrow concrete slab of a clinic in Tokyo's Azabu neighborhood. Saito is one of many specialists who also see Jun's and Kenji's and the other hikikomori s' social isolation as reflecting a rational, Japanese style of coping.

“Many Japanese kids don't express themselves. They would rather express themselves in a fantasy world and through passive-aggressive behavior,” he told me one afternoon when I visited him and asked him to analyze this syndrome. “They go on behavior strike, they go into emotional shutdown. This is one of the ways of expressing a Japanese way of life. But in acting this way, these children are simply mirroring the behavior they see among adult Japanese, especially those from elite or privileged backgrounds.”

Kenji's willful retreat into the bedroom, his unwillingness to fit in, can be sensibly explained, Saito told me. Japan's traditional family structure is splintering, he said. Its educational system, which emphasizes rote learning over critical thinking, is being questioned as never before. Young people now sense that the old rules don't work in a global age.

In the 1980s, when Japan's economy was still humming, no one had ever heard the term hikikomori. But after the economy began to sputter and misfire, the pistons began to fail and fluids began to leak, exposing the rigidities and social dysfunction that had finally made the gears seize up.

From Shutting Out the Sun ..

By Michael Zelenziger 

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.

**

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