Dogs and Demons - Керр Алекс - Страница 68
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The kumi system is certainly a lesson for future workers in industrial Japan, perhaps the biggest lesson they ever learn. As the noted scholar Edwin Reischauer has written:
Their emphasis is on the individuals' own groups – the «we» of the classroom, company, or nation as opposed to the «they» of all other groups. It is somewhat frightening to realize that in the uniformity of Japanese education all the children of a given age group are learning precisely the same lesson in much the same way on the same day throughout Japan, emerging with the same distinctive and often exclusive ideas about their own little groups or the large group of Japan. Broader world interests are given lip service, but in reality very little emphasis is given to the essential «we» group of humanity.
In grade school, subtle distrust of foreign people and things becomes a part of the curriculum. It's not intentional; the schools do not consciously set out to teach xenophobia. But so innocent are Japan's educationalists of the real issues of racism or ethnic bias that they end up teaching a condescending, if not fearful, attitude toward foreigners anyway. Textbooks depict foreign products as dangerous and Japan as the victim of international pressures. A typical lesson reads, «Chemicals prohibited in our country have been used on some of the food imported from foreign countries. It would be terrible if chemicals that harm humans would remain on the food.» Many textbooks feature photos of angry American autoworkers bashing Japanese cars, to impress upon children that the Japanese suffer from irrational foreign hatreds.
Nevertheless, in view of their power in the international economy, the Japanese learn that they must get along with these difficult foreigners. «At first, because of differences in language and culture, work didn't go well,» a character in a textbook states, referring to a Japanese factory abroad. «When we tried to have morning assembly before work, or radio calisthenics [exercising in unison to recorded music], they said, 'Why do all of us have to do this?' When we tried to cut tardiness and waste, they said, 'You're too strict.' » One little girl in a textbook cartoon series concludes, «Working with foreign people is awfully difficult.» The undercurrent: foreigners are lazy and unable to understand our advanced Japanese ways – dealing with them is a painful trial. Perhaps this is not the message that was originally intended, but it is the message that comes across, not only in this example but consistently in Japanese classrooms.
There is one more important lesson to be learned: schooling in Japan involves a surprising amount of pain and suffering, which teaches students to gambare, a word that means «to persevere» or «endure.» On this subject Duke writes: «To survive, the Japanese people have always had to gambare – persevere, endure – because life has never been, and is certainly not now, easy nor comfortable for most Japanese.» Definitely not. Even when suffering is not naturally present, schools add it artificially. Elementary-school students must adapt their bodily functions to the rules – or suffer. The city of Kyoto, for instance, did not provide toilet paper to elementary and junior-high schools during most of the 1990s. Morihara Yoshihiro, a member of the Kyoto Municipal Board of Education, said, «Students should carry tissues with them, and if they use the toilet in the morning at home, they won't have to do so at school.» Students may not change out of their winter uniforms even if the weather is hot – everyone must sweat until the appointed day comes for the change into spring clothes.
Life in grade school is wild, heedless abandon compared with what follows in junior high and high school. Hair codes and uniforms become nearly universal, with everything prescribed, right down to the socks. Boys wear military-style uniforms with brass buttons, and girls wear a sort of sailor suit. In 1996, Habikino City, near Osaka, introduced uniforms for teachers as well.
The uniforms and dress codes are intended to enforce harmony. «In my mind,» Dr. Miyamoto writes, «the concept of harmony means an acceptance of differences, but when the Japanese talk about harmony it means a denial of differences and an embrace of sameness. Sameness in interpersonal relationships means a reflection of the other, the basic concept of which derives from narcissism.»
Punishment for dress- and hair-code infringements can be severe. In one case, teachers stopped a student in Fukuoka Prefecture at the school gate and ordered him to go home after he refused to get the regulation buzz haircut. Later, they allowed him back, but he was separated from other students and made to study by himself in an empty room – in solitary confinement. «Psychologically speaking hair symbolizes power,» says Dr. Miyamoto, «and at the same time it is an expression of one's thoughts, emotions and conflicts... As you may recognize, through hair, the educational system demands that students share the illusion that all Japanese are the same.»
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.»
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