by Bruce Feiler
Compared with the normal drone of classes, events like this were thrilling for the students, and they reinforced the message that community service can be fun when performed in a group. Trash Day was a painless way to teach students that their rights as students go hand in hand with their responsibilities to the nation. The only problem in the course of the afternoon was that the students felt they had not met this year’s goal of greater cleanliness.
“I was embarrassed by how much trash we found this year,” one of the girls in 9-1 complained at the end of the day as she dumped her cans into a recycling bin. “Our city should be ashamed.”
“Our school should be ashamed as well,” her friend added. “The streets around here are just a mess. I think we should ask the PTA to help us with this problem.”
“But what can they do?” the first girl asked.
“Maybe they can go with us,” her friend answered. “We could pick up trash together.”
The first girl thought about this idea and agreed that it was worth a try. “If our parents don’t care about this problem,” she declared, “then we should show them how.”
Japan has no pledge of allegiance. Most classrooms display no flag, and the national anthem—a wistful paean to the imperial line—is rarely played in schools. Yet Japanese schools succeed in teaching students a profound and lasting national pride. From Method Training every morning to Trash Day once a term, students learn the importance of working with a group and serving their community. In short, they learn to be good citizens.
In terms of time, Japanese students spend twenty-five percent more days in school than Americans, so a high school graduate in Japan has spent as much time in class as a college graduate in the United States. In terms of achievement, Japanese students consistently outperform their international peers in math and science achievement tests. In terms of dropout rates, ninety-five percent of Japanese children graduate from high school, compared with seventy-five percent of Americans.
But beyond these statistics, Japanese schools succeed on a more profound level of preparing their students to become productive members of society. In Sano, as elsewhere, schools are the focal points of neighborhoods. Students cycling through town are treated with respect. Teachers hold esteem in the eyes of the community. National news media give extensive coverage to regular school events, like the sports festival, the entrance exams, and the changing of school uniforms in October and June. All this attention serves as a constant reminder that education is vital to the continued prosperity of the country. Schools are successful in Japan for this simple reason: they are seen as a national security priority. Most Japanese know that their country has few natural resources—no oil, few minerals, limited arable land—so they learn to exploit the one resource they have in abundance: people. Beginning on their first day in school, students learn a familiar refrain about their country: “Japan is a small island nation with few natural resources, which is surrounded by countries that are bigger and stronger and out to weaken us. If we are to succeed, we Japanese must work harder and longer to overcome these odds.” In essence, this has become the Japanese pledge. By stressing this code and encouraging children to sacrifice their personal desires for the good of the country, schools have been able to achieve what is, perhaps, their highest calling: to forge allegiance to the state.
Activities such as cleaning the school and clearing the neighborhood of trash are part of the Ministry of Education’s overall plan to encourage a national identity. As expressed in the Course of Study, the government hopes such events will help produce citizens who will “love our nation and strive for our nation’s advancement on the one hand, and contribute to the welfare of mankind on the other.” While these words are lofty, as are those in our Pledge of Allegiance, they seem to hold meaning in the daily lives of students—perhaps more so than the words of our pledge, “liberty and justice for all.”
The exhaustive emphasis on group training in Japan also has negative side effects, especially on students who for one reason or another feel left out of their kumi. In my early months as a teacher, no one mentioned to me that students who live abroad for a while are often shunned by their classmates when they return to Japan. No one told me that the country still suffers from the legacy of a four-hundred-year-old feudal class system that was officially outlawed over a century ago. And no one warned me that certain students are ostracized by their peers because they come from families that are still tainted by this past. In Sano, all of these problems would boil to the surface in the course of my year as a teacher, and one would end in tragedy.
While the kumi network has definite drawbacks, the system triumphs in one of its primary goals: to develop a community ethic among most students. Through repetition and eventually habit, students learn that they should spend a part of their day, indeed a part of themselves, tending the world around them. What begins in the homeroom at school later becomes the spirit of cooperation in many companies which so many Westerners admire. The lesson from the kumi is that this spirit is not mysteriously passed down through management seminars or religious rituals but is systematically and deliberately taught in schools. For students who pass through this system, a simple axiom serves as their personal pledge of allegiance: This above all, to thy kumi be true.
About two weeks after Trash Day, the students at Sano Junior High published the second-term edition of their school newspaper. One page of the four-page “Sano Shimbun” was devoted to the problem of too much trash.
“ARE WE PROGRESSING TOWARD CLEANLINESS?” the headline asked.
The answer, according to a questionnaire distributed by the newspaper staff, was a resounding no. Seventy-two percent of the students said that the amount of trash had stayed the same or increased from the previous year. When asked what they proposed to do about the problem, fifty-seven percent agreed that the school should sponsor more Trash Days. Another third recommended going door to door and asking for cooperation, and a final group suggested that every student carry a bag at all times and pick up trash on the way home from school.
In a box in the bottom right-hand corner of the Trash Day page, the newspaper staff printed two personal testimonials under the headline “MEMORI GOMI.” In the spirit of the new crusade, the leading item was a “Good Memory” from the ninth-grade student Kyoko Susumu:
It seems that up until now we tossed garbage without really thinking about it. But starting with the teachers and adding the help of other community members, we are attacking this problem with a great deal of enthusiasm.
When we pick up trash, we grow both mentally and physically. At the same time we make our town look beautiful. From here on out, I would like to see the mind-set that holds no connection between throwing things out and the beauty of our town change to one of picking things up.
For equal time, the staff ran a “Bad Memory” from the eighth-grade student Koichi Nakamura. Even in his negative thoughts, Koichi sought to rally the school behind the banner of change:
My negative thoughts about the garbage are that there are piles of trash right next to our school routes and there is hardly any room left to walk. Local factories put their big, bulky garbage here, and people passing by toss their trash on top. This is really disgraceful.
There are many places like this around town, and I think everybody in this area needs to cooperate. The most important thing is to be conscious of throwing things out in designated places. If every single person were to follow this rule, I think we could eliminate these “bad memories.”
In its final article the newspaper reported that the growing problem of trash and the results of the schoolwide survey had been discussed at the most recent meeting of the Sano Junior High School PTA. When faced with the overwhelming evidence gathered by the students, the parents and teachers agreed that the situation was dire. Following the recommendations from the student council, the PTA agreed that the students should post signs around town, distribute leaflets, and even hold an additional Trash Day the followin
g term on a Saturday afternoon so that parents could join in the hunt.
With all of this activity focused on the problem, the newspaper staff concluded that a “new age” of tidiness was about to dawn. They closed their coverage of Trash Day with this manifesto:
With a new tie-up between the students and the parents, we can soon erase this problem. On the day that we no longer need to hold any “Trash Exercises” we will know that our circle of cleanliness has spread throughout the town. Why don’t we work toward this?
10
BOTTLED MILK AND PLASTIC CHOPSTICKS: THE LOST ART OF SCHOOL LUNCH
There is no doubt that the conveniences of modern life, by taking the place of human hands and feet, have robbed our children of the tools they need to succeed.
—Daisaku Ikeda, Glass Children, 1983
AT THE END OF THE FOURTH PERIOD on a cold December morning, an eight-tone chime echoed through the corridors of Sano Junior High. At the tone, time seemed to stop for a moment; thoughts were halted; ears turned to the speakers on the wall. Then the bell sounded a second time, and the silence succumbed to a growing clamor of shuffled papers and screeching desks that ricocheted through the halls. School lunch had begun.
Within seconds, teachers came pouring into the office where I sat preparing for an afternoon class, and students came sliding in after them, lugging stacks of books and carping about the cold. The assistant principal looked up from his desk and smiled at the frenzied scene. A moment later two young boys tiptoed into the room, looked quietly from side to side, and stopped just shy of my desk. Their blue sports suits were zipped to the chin; their name tags announced their class: 7-4. The boys stared at their hands for a second; then the taller of the two whacked his friend on the head and pushed him in the back, saying, “Go ahead, ask him.”
The boy caught himself on the lip of my desk, stared at my face like a frightened deer frozen by headlights, and then pushed himself erect again and addressed me face to face: “Mr. Bruce. Come our class. Lunch?”
The other teachers smiled; the boy looked pleased. I began to gather my papers into a pile when suddenly the first boy rushed forward, slapped his friend again on the head, and shouted, “Hey, stupid, you forgot to say ‘Please.’ ”
“Oh no,” the boy cried, “I make a mistake.” He slapped his knees and turned back toward me. “Mr. Bruce. Come our class. Please?”
The teachers applauded, and the young solicitor drew his hands from his pockets and pushed his friend out the door. “There,” he said. “I did it.”
In the hall, dozens of students rushed around with great intent, shouting orders to one another and hurrying along in small platoons. It looked at first as if a student-run coup d’état was in progress. Sano Junior High, like all others in Japan, has no central cafeteria. Instead, students ate lunch in their classrooms. At the sound of the twin chimes every day, each kumi separated into predetermined teams to prepare for the midday meal. One team from each homeroom raced to the kitchen on the first floor and returned lugging huge pots and plastic bins containing the day’s supply of salad, stew, and rice; another group rearranged the room by pushing the desks into six tablelike formations; another donned white aprons and linen kerchiefs and prepared to dish out the food to the class. The idea of having the students arrange and serve lunch every day, then clean up afterward, clearly saved money for the school, but the primary reason was for students to practice working together in a noncurricular activity.
Every day I ate with a different group of students; this day I would spend with Denver’s homeroom class. Although Denver was only what he called a freshman teacher, he assumed the role of my elder in school. He would explain minor rules, interpret fights between students, and inform me of any points of history he thought I should know. In the same way he took care of me after I got out of the hospital. He brought me not only a television set but also a VCR, some tapes, and some English-language books, including Ezra Vogel’s Japan as Number One, which he had been assigned to read in college for his English debating society. Like Cho, Denver had attended high school in Sano and then gone to Tokyo to attend a private university. After graduation Denver worked for several years at a bank in Tokyo before returning to Tochigi to become a teacher. In his spare time he still read business gossip magazines and toyed endlessly with his computer. Every night after returning from work, he would sit in his tiny second-floor room at his parents’ home, smoke cigarettes, drink orange soda, and enter grades and comments about each of his homeroom students into his NEC personal computer.
Denver, like all other teachers, joined his homeroom students in their classroom for lunch every day. While this might seem a sure-fire formula for a burdensome hour, the mood was quite relaxed. Lunch hour was lively, at times raucous, and almost always jovial. Denver loosened his tie, changed from his black blazer into a fire-engine-red sweat suit, and seemed to savor the change in tone from the morning classes.
“Hey, sensei,” one girl shouted from the back of the room, “got a girlfriend yet?”
“Not yet.” He shook his head.
“Guess not,” cried another. “You’re getting too fat.”
When the lunch pots arrived, I took my place in line with the students. The menu for the day consisted of steamed white rice, salted cucumbers, oranges, and a creamy stew with sautéed beef, carrots, and konnyaku, a rubbery gray substance made from the root of a Chinese tree and nicknamed “devil’s tongue” by the Japanese. After receiving my food, I was handed a single metal eating utensil that was shaped like a spoon but had tines like a fork. “This is a spork,” the girl explained.
Denver led me to the back of the room and a seat across from him. As I squeezed into the chair, stretching my legs around the outside of the desk because they refused to fit underneath, Denver surveyed the meal.
“This is a typical Japanese lunch,” he said with a satisfied look. “Do you know how to eat it?”
I thought this was a joke about chopsticks until I recalled that we had sporks instead.
“Sure,” I said with deep sarcasm. “Take the spork and eat some rice. Then take the spork and taste some stew. Then take the spork and eat some salad. Just as we do in America.”
“Oh no,” he protested. “You cannot eat this meal as you do in America. That would be a mistake. You have to use the sankaku-shiki tabekata.”
“The what?”
“The sankaku-shiki tabekata,” he repeated. “The triangle eating style.”
By this point all the students had been served, and Denver stood up to call the class to order. The students settled into their seats and drew their hands together as in prayer.
“Ready…,” Denver called. “Begin.”
“Itadakimasu,” the class said in unison, repeating the simple expression of thanks that is said before all meals in Japan.
“Now I will teach you the proper way to eat Japanese food,” Denver said with characteristic enthusiasm as he returned to his seat. “First, take a little rice and put it in your mouth. Then take some meat, and finally some salad.”
I followed his instructions as he spoke.
“Now chew them all together at once. Rice. Meat. Salad. These are the three sides of the triangle.”
Soon all of the students at our table of desks were demonstrating the proper technique. “One, two, three, chew. One, two, three, mix.”
“You see, rice has no taste,” he explained. “So it is best to take other food and mix it with the rice. This is why we don’t use plates at home. Each person holds a small bowl of rice while we place several serving plates of food in the center of the table. We pick up the food with our chopsticks, bounce it on our rice, and then put it in our mouths. This way the food tastes more delicious, and it’s better for our health.”
“How can putting all of that food into your mouth at one time be good for your health?” I asked.
Some of the students giggled at the question.
“It’s not how you eat,” he said, “it’s what you eat.�
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By now most of the students had finished their meal and were straining to hear our conversation.
“In Japan, we have certain eating habits,” he continued. “When we are young—like these students—we eat a lot of meat. It’s good for us while we’re growing up. But when we get a little older—like I am—we begin to eat more and more traditional Japanese food, such as mountain vegetables and miso soup [a plain broth made from soybean paste]. By the time we get older—like the principal—we eat only Japanese-style food.”
“It sounds like a diet triangle,” I said, sporking a last mouthful of rice, stew, and salad and swishing them like mouthwash from side to side.
“Americans only eat meat,” he said. “Children, parents, even grandparents eat meat. I hear you even eat meat for breakfast. I think this is not very healthy. You should try the Japanese way. Then you would live longer.”
“sensei, sensei,” a young girl said from the front of the class. “Look at the time.”
Denver glanced around the room and realized that we were the only ones still eating. Standing on his chair, he called the class to order and thanked the students for their patience.
“Are you ready?” he said, and the students again grew quiet and raised their hands to pray. “Okay.”
“Gochis-sama deshita. Thank you very much for the treat.”
Nothing symbolizes Japan’s shifting attitude toward the West in the last 150 years more than its views on beef. For most of its history, Japan was a land of vegetarians. Buddhist taboos against eating animals and the scarcity of game in general meant that red meat was considered a foreign food. But with the coming of outlanders in the mid-nineteenth century, red meat quickly became a status symbol, and restaurants specializing in beef dishes popped up in major cities. Among the new urbane class, a man was not considered civilized unless he strapped a Western watch on his wrist, sprayed himself with eau de cologne, and dined on gunabe, beef stew.
