Learning to Bow

by Bruce Feiler

  Immediately I set about devising a strategy to gain my early release. First I made a list of Japanese expressions I could use to impress my visitors with the plight of my captivity. “Don’t worry about me,” I would tell every person who came to catch a glimpse. “I didn’t break a bone. In fact, tomorrow I’ll be going home.” Soon everyone on the third floor of the Sano Kosei Hospital was discussing my injury and, more important, the good news that I would be going home the next day. If the fate of my stay was to be left to the will of the group, I planned to make certain that I had the will of as large a group as possible on my side.

  The first day passed as I received visitors and collected a veritable magazine of gifts, including tangerines, plastic packets of Kleenex, and a bulging watermelon. But on my second day I learned that not I, not the nurses, not even the doctor, would decide when I was ready to leave the hospital: instead, my office elders would choose.

  When Mr. C arrived early Monday, he made the prospects for an early release look dim. “Of course you can’t go home now,” he said. “Who would take care of you?” How pitiful I would be at home, he lamented, without a mother or a wife to tend to me. For safekeeping, it was best that I stay in the hospital for a while, where the “lovely and beautiful nurses” could dote over me. I knew I was doomed. All of the Kleenex packets and the tangerines in Tochigi could not dent the force of this logic.

  Soon Mr. C was joined by Mogi-sensei, the man who had sent me tumbling in the first place, our section chief, and Kato-sensei, the director of the office. The four of them sat on the edge of my bed and talked about this grave situation as if I were not even in the same room. To them it seemed axiomatic that they would decide how long I should stay in the hospital. As a member of the office, and a young single member at that, I would naturally be dependent on them to make this decision. I would feel amae.

  Amae, which can best be described as a feeling of dependence or reliance on others, has been called the core of the Japanese personality. In The Anatomy of Dependence Takeo Doi suggests that this sense of attachment is the glue that binds Japanese people to one another. Feelings of amae form the radii of the circles that link everyone in Japan in a network of interdependencies: children dependent on parents, parents on teachers, teachers on principals, principals on politicians, and politicians on the people. “By becoming one with the group,” Doi writes, “the Japanese are able to display a strength beyond the scope of the individual.”

  Doi stresses that the group does not offer a substitute for individual identity but rather provides a context for assorted personalities to join together in pursuit of a common goal. Over time, I began to appreciate this view. Although I had originally felt an aversion to relinquishing control of my actions, I eventually learned not to resist the group so vehemently. None of these men had ever lived by himself. None of them had ever worked alone. Instead, all of them had come to see their colleagues as part of their uchi, or family. When they referred to themselves at work, they even used the word uchi in place of watashi, the familiar word for “I.”

  I realized in time that if I was to survive in their world—if I was ever to get out of this bed—I would have to satisfy my colleagues’ sense of responsibility over me and at the same time maintain for myself the comforting myth of my own independence.

  “Don’t worry about sending me home,” I assured them. “I will take good care of my leg.”

  “But how will you cook?” Kato-sensei asked.

  “Well…” I paused for a second, then reached out in desperation. “I have friends, and they will bring me food.”

  As soon as I said this, I wondered if it was true. All my friends were busy with school; how could they bring me food at night? Kato-sensei looked skeptical. Mr. C tilted his head and sucked in his breath in consternation. Mogi-sensei nodded quietly. I felt the grip squeezing tighter, as it had in my inaugural bath. Then suddenly, as before, came relief.

  Cho appeared at the door, carrying a bag of pears, and Denver stepped up behind him, toting a small TV set.

  “We heard you were in the hospital,” Cho said. “We thought you might need some help.”

  “You see,” I said, beaming, “I have friends. One of them can bring me dinner on Tuesday, and the other Wednesday.”

  My office colleagues were startled by this turn of events but still gave little indication that they were willing to circumvent doctor’s orders—until, to everyone’s surprise, Dr. Endo appeared at the door with a coffee cake in hand.

  What followed was true theater of the absurd.

  Bow, bow.

  “Oh thank you very much for your trouble.”

  Bow, deeper bow, bow.

  “You took such good care of him.”

  Bow, bow. Step backward.

  “Oh no, not me.”

  “Oh yes, just you.”

  Bow.

  Nod.

  “He’s so far away from home.”

  The other patients marveled at this motley crew assembled in Room 306: four members of the local education office, two young teachers, one doctor with a coffee cake, and a six-foot foreigner with an engorged leg and a year’s supply of Kleenex.

  Dr. Endo sized up the problem immediately and signaled a breakthrough by suggesting that since I would be unable to prepare food for myself, perhaps I could use crutches, or matzubazue, to leave the house and eat. I watched as the idea was nodded up the chain of command, from my doctor to my boss, to our section chief, and finally to the approving glance of the director of our office. Just like that, I was free to go. All I had to do was clear two minor hurdles: first, get the doctor’s approval; and second, find a pair of matzubazue, or “pine branches,” that would work for me. The first task was easy, as the doctor had no choice but to relent when faced with the consensus of all my protectors, but the second proved difficult, as the nurses ran into unexpected trouble finding a pine tree with branches long enough to fit my frame.

  Giant trees are not unknown in Japanese lore. Legend holds that the Sun goddess Amaterasu once planted a pair of chopsticks in the ground near Kyoto and that these sticks later grew into towering Japanese pines. In another instance, a Buddhist priest exhausted from a long pilgrimage planted two chopsticks in the ground to pray for a safe trip home, and these blossomed into giant willow trees. (The moral of these fables is that chopsticks do not grow on trees; they grow into trees.)

  The first pair of crutches the nurse found were antique and wooden and reached about as high as my navel. The next pair, when extended to full length, actually reached my shoulders, but the handles remained at my knees. I had begun to fear that we would have to send to Tokyo for a suitable set when a nurse came running in with a new pair of pine branches made of aluminum. Everyone pulled in close to watch as I suspended myself from the handles, lifted my foot from the floor, and—behold—did not tumble to the ground. At last I was free to go.

  Hurriedly I packed my bag and collected my towel, clothes, and chopsticks. I dispersed the various cakes, comic books, and packets of Kleenex to the other patients, and set out with my entourage. As I shuffled down the hall toward the elevator, already learning to bow from atop my branches, the head nurse came rushing out of her glassed-in office. By now, this woman knew me well. She had heard me speak Japanese and seen me eat rice; she knew exactly how many times I had been to the bathroom in the previous forty-eight hours. But the foreigner in Japan never seems to lose his ability to surprise. The nurse came to a sudden stop in front of the elevator, gaped at my leg, gazed at me standing there in front of her, and in an earnest, concerned tone asked, “Can you use crutches?”

  We had come full circle. “I sure can,” I told her. “After all, they’re just like chopsticks.”

  9

  TRASH DAY: PLEDGING ALLEGIANCE IN JAPANESE SCHOOLS

  In the administration of all schools, it must be kept in mind that what is to be done is not for the sake of the pupils, but for the sake of the country.

  —Mori Arinori, Japan’s first M
inister of Education, 1885

  THE FORTY-FIVE STUDENTS in the first homeroom class of the ninth grade were all seated at their desks when the opening notes of the Brahms symphony roared from the loudspeaker at precisely 8:30 A.M. Soon the violins faded and a slow, synthesized pulse spread across the room, numbing the mind with its smooth, hypnotic gait. The room was cold and slightly dank. No sun shone through the plate glass panes overlooking the balcony. The clouds, like the students, were still.

  In a moment, a soothing, resonant voice began to speak. “Good morning, boys and girls. Let’s begin another wonderful day. Please close your eyes…”

  For ten minutes every morning the students at Sano Junior High sat in quiet meditation to prepare themselves for the day ahead. The principal, Sakamoto-sensei, had introduced this system, known as Method Training, several years earlier in an attempt to quell the growing incidence of school “violence,” mainly minor scuffles and hair violations. The program consisted of a sequence of twenty-five tapes for total mental and physical conditioning. Each day a different tape was played.

  After a pause, the breathy voice returned. “Concentrate on relaxing your body. Allow your right arm to hang loose by your side. Focus your energy on that arm. You feel a strong, heavy sensation. Deep…Heavy…”

  As the students followed the invisible commands, Mrs. Negishi, the homeroom teacher for this class, wandered among the rows of desks and monitored the appearance of each child. As she walked, she jotted comments on a small notepad in her hand. “The ones who open their eyes or who totter in their chairs are the poor students,” she confided to me. “Those who do not concentrate now will not be able to work well later in the day.”

  On this day especially, students would have to cooperate with one another. They would attend regular classes in the morning, then take the afternoon off to join in the annual prewinter ritual known affectionately as gomi-no-hi, Trash Day. Working with their classmates, students would file out into the alleys and vacant lots around town and spend several hours picking up litter. Because of the importance of this day, Mrs. Negishi asked if I would like to join her class. Although my leg was still encased in a walking cast—the crutches were long since gone—I readily agreed.

  After ten minutes the music dissolved, the voice disappeared, and Mrs. Negishi—standing erect before the class—took control of the homeroom meeting.

  “Stand up,” she commanded, and the students rose to their feet.

  “Attention,” she said, and they dropped their arms to their thighs.

  “Bow.”

  It was 8:42 in the morning.

  In every school across the country, students are assigned to a homeroom class, or kumi. The word kumi, which is rooted in the Japanese character for thread, was first used several hundred years ago to describe small bands of samurai warriors attached to a feudal lord. Like these faithful fighters of the past, students learn today that duty and honor begin with dedication to this group.

  The first kumi of the ninth grade, under Mrs. Negishi, epitomized the intensity of this group affiliation. The forty-five students of the “9-1” class remained in the same room, at the same desks, for seven fifty-minute periods a day, five and a half days a week, forty-five weeks a year, with only brief escapes each day for physical education and science lab. Because the government allows no tracking of students based on ability, the members of this class reflected a true cross section of the west side of Sano. Future scientists learned alongside future truckdrivers, future poets along with future store clerks. While this system presents countless problems for teachers, who at any given time are speaking over the heads of some students and under the heads of others, the government feels the advantages for social relations are more important. The future doctor learns early to give assistance to those who are less capable.

  Because they spent so much time together, the students in this class had developed an intimate bond with one another, not unlike the “relationship without clothes on” that office workers strive to achieve with the ritual bath. The students meditated in their chairs in the morning, ate lunch at their desks at noon, and changed clothes in the middle of their room at least several times a day. Like most tight-knit teams, the students teased one another inside the locker room, but outside of class they maintained a common front. During recess after lunch, for example, most baseball games were based on homeroom loyalties. The boys chose teams; the girls cheered; and other classes were not invited. Once, as I arranged to take a picture of one of these games, the leaders of the class shooed away stray fans from a neighboring kumi: 9-1 students only, they insisted.

  The importance of the kumi as an educational tool, however, goes beyond this good-natured team spirit. The classroom that the students inhabited had been, in effect, leased to them by the school, in an arrangement not unlike the way a feudal lord lent land to a group of serfs. By taking possession of this plot, the students were able to practice tending their own home, cultivating their own garden. They made posters of their class motto to hang on the wall; they kept plants on the balcony rail; and they sometimes brought flower arrangements from home to put on the cabinet in the corner. Every morning before school, students rummaged around the room, sponging down the blackboard, replenishing the supply of chalk, and writing the day’s schedule on the board. The chores changed on a rotating schedule and gave each student a chance to practice “preparing the farm” for a day.

  At 2:30 every weekday afternoon and at noon on Saturdays, classes officially ended and the daily ritual of cleanup began. The students changed from their formal dark uniforms into their colorful sweat suits, covered their heads with white kerchiefs, and dispersed into small groups to tidy the room. As Madonna or some other pop star blared on the loudspeaker, students stacked desks and chairs into a corner, soaped down the blackboard, and threw out the trash. Boys cleaned the windows and girls vacuumed the erasers (every classroom in the school had its own electric, dust-sucking machine that automatically inhaled residue from erasers). Cleaning time, like lunchtime and homeroom before it, was often frenetic and fun. A group of boys would stop to arm-wrestle while some girls arranged a tournament to find out who could crawl the fastest across the floor with a dampened rag. It was hard work, but as one student said, “If the room is clean, we like to study more.”

  Although many teachers resented having to mop the floor when they had more important work to do, they still viewed their role as vital. Mrs. Negishi also changed out of her skirt and into a sweat suit (although not in the classroom), wrapped a kerchief around her head, and scrubbed the floor alongside her students. She taught by example. “If I don’t clean, the students don’t clean,” she told me. “It’s part of my responsibility.” This is one of the main tenets of the kumi system: a partnership between students and teachers. Together they work to promote the welfare of the community and foster the hygiene of its members. Students and teachers have clear roles, but the success of each depends on the cooperation of the other. At times the teacher plays disciplinarian, at times counselor, at times trusted friend. It is no wonder that students who grow up in this nurturing and protective environment learn to be dependent on those around them for everything from answering questions in English to deciding when to leave the hospital. From here students need only make a short leap of faith to transfer their trust in the kumi to reliance on their corporate co-workers later in life.

  Beyond their commitment to the homeroom, however, students also learn to be aware of the higher structure that allows their kumi to prosper. Once a week students deferred tidying their own rooms to clean the entire school. They emptied the ashtrays in the teachers’ room, scrubbed the toilets in the bathrooms, and pulled weeds from the garden in the parking lot. Before the und-kai in October, students even clipped the grass on the playing field with classroom scissors. But the ultimate lesson for students is that they must look beyond their homeroom and their schoolyard to fulfill their obligation to the community as a whole. For this purpose, schools developed T
rash Day.

  “EVERY DAY WE ARE AWAKENING TO OUR OWN NEIGHBORHOOD,” screamed the headline atop the student handout. “LET’S FRESHEN OUR CITY TODAY.” At an outdoor rally just after lunch, each student received a mimeographed map, marked with a route for his or her kumi to follow, and two empty plastic bags: one for paper, the other for aluminum cans. After the guidelines had been explained, the principal took to the pitcher’s mound and reiterated the theme of progress. “This year we want to press toward greater cleanliness,” he yelled. “This year we want to achieve a new order. Let’s go out and make our city proud!”

  After the pep talk, the members of 9-1 headed west out the back gate, toward the span of factories and small plants that lined the outer fields of Sano. Like other events during the school day, this seemingly burdensome activity was carried out with great verve and enthusiasm. The students raced in and out of muddy ditches as well as up and down trees in search of unsightly debris. The local newspaper sent a photographer; shopkeepers and mill workers emerged from their buildings to cheer the students on. The whole experience felt like a holiday parade. My students were so spirited that they even carried their class flag on the hunt, a red and white banner with a caricature of Mrs. Negishi, emblazoned with the slogan “9-1 IS NUMBER 1.”

  As I limped along with the students, I decided to teach them an American game, I Spy.

  “I spy something red,” I would cry, and the students raced to retrieve the prize. Eventually I began giving points for every item I spied that students named in English.

  “A box.”

  “One point.”

  “A bottle.”

  “One point.”

  “A potato chip bag.”

  “Two points.”

  This little diversion occupied the students for most of an hour, especially after they realized that I would give extra points for complete sentences. “This is a pen” earned four, and “I see a tire” earned five. But the biggest awards of the day went to objects so extraordinary that they needed no verb. I gave a ten-point bonus for a Georgia Coffee can and a five-point penalty for an “adult magazine.” This phrase was Living English, all right, but not what the government had in mind.