by Bruce Feiler
Tomo rose quickly to his feet and took his place in the center of the room. He stood still for a moment, his arms at his sides, his face stern with concentration. The girls laid down their chopsticks. The old woman peered out from behind the door.
Tomo bowed slowly to three sides. “Hai, hai, hai,” he grunted, drawing his hands into the air with razor-sharp precision and jabbing them into the room in rapid succession. “Now is the time,” he cried, “push toward the line. Banzai! Banzai! Banzai!” He clapped his hands together three times, bent down, and with the sudden thrust of a catapult vaulted into the air, turned a somersault, and landed on his feet. The others gasped, then started to applaud. Tomo snapped to attention, bowed to the table, and returned to his seat.
“That’s amazing,” Emiko crooned. “He must have learned that in school. He sure is not a ‘new type.’”
Laments about “new types” are quite old in Japan. In the 1860s, trendy young men were assailed for cutting off their topknots and eating Western beef. In the 1920s, young people (including Crown Prince Hirohito) were labeled mobos and mogas—“modern boys” and “modern girls”—for wearing bob cuts, carrying pocketbooks, and walking hand in hand with their lovers down the Ginza in Tokyo. In the 1950s, delinquent youngsters were scolded for listening to jazz and watching the ultimate token of Western lasciviousness, the kiss, depicted on the silver screen. Before the war, kissing had been banned in films and was edited out of imported offerings.
While each of these generations has been lambasted as heralding the end of Japanese culture, none in fact has brought its demise. Just as Japan’s native Shinto creed made way for imported Buddhist temples and Christmas trees, so Japanese popular culture has made way for Swiss watches, American jazz, and now—gasp!—the French kiss. Even the idea of love, once considered a mortal threat to the Japanese family, has become as much a part of contemporary life as the arranged marriages of old. Each new generation of Japanese youth takes another step closer to the Western fold, but each one stops short of the line that would mean abandoning its identity.
After dinner we moved from our formal table back to the main lounge. Again we sprawled on the straw mats with our feet under the quilt. The Snow Country mama brought out cups of Earl Grey tea and plates of prepackaged cream cakes. Hara rose to replay the videotape he had filmed that afternoon on the slopes.
“Oh, you’re soooo talented,” the girls said as Hara came down the mountain.
“Oooh, purofeshionalu,” they said when Cho appeared on the screen.
As I watched this group of young Japanese lolling around on tatami mats and watching a homemade videotape, I thought for a moment that they were close to achieving a balance between East and West. These people did not want to become Western, they just wanted to have a few more of the freedoms and trappings of Western lifestyle. Their faith in their country was profound, verging at times on arrogant, and they had no intention of forsaking the pledge they had made to Japan while they were still in school. This was, in the words of the T-shirt, the “way out, but classic” generation. They may hang out in big-city nightclubs and chase fairy tales of love, but they still feel most at home when their legs are under the kotatsu and their feet are over the fire.
14
BASEBALL, APPLE PIE, AND DRAGON MOTHERS: THE TEACHER IN JAPAN
To honor the teacher is a means of honoring the Way.
Therefore, the teacher shall possess the justice that
reigns between a ruler and his subject and the love
that exists between a parent and his child.
—It Jinsai, Japanese philosopher, 1666
ONE MORNING IN EARLY FEBRUARY, I sat down with Denver to plan a game of English charades for his seventh-grade students. On a list of vocabulary words that students would be asked to act out in front of the class, I wrote the word “mother.”
“What can the students do to act like a mother?” he asked.
“Oh, that’s easy,” I said, cradling my arms around a make-believe baby and pretending to croon a lullaby.
“But that won’t work,” he insisted. “That’s not what Japanese students think about their mothers. Motherhood doesn’t have the warm image in Japan that it has in America.”
“Okay, what is the image of mothers?” I asked.
“Kyiku Mama,” he said. “The Education Mother.”
The Japanese have borrowed baseball from the United States; they have lapped up apple pie as their own; yet they have stopped short of borrowing the American exaltation of motherhood. Mothers occupy a social position in Japan somewhat akin to that of teachers in the United States: they are essential for the welfare of the state, most people have fond memories of their own, but basically they are taken for granted, and certainly they are not lionized. The expression Kyiku Mama, similar in tone to the term “stage mother,” is used to describe women who pressure their children to study constantly in order to excel on standardized exams. Other nicknames for overbearing mothers include Onibaba, “Devil Woman,” and Mamagon, “Dragon Mother.”
After learning these terms from Denver and hearing them repeated all over school, I set out to learn why mothers earned such ignominy, and who took their place as the keepers of the flame. My first stop was the Cherry Blossoms’ home.
About once a week while I was in Sano, I would visit Mr. C’s home after school, spend the evening with his family, then drive with him the next morning to our office at the Board of Education. During these relaxed times, the evening pattern around the Cherry Blossoms’ comfortable, two-story home was almost always the same: Mrs. C, a home economics teacher at a nearby junior high school, would prepare, serve, then clean up from dinner, and finally emerge from the kitchen around nine o’clock to straighten the house or do the laundry. Mr. C, who usually returned home after his wife, would rush through his meal, take a quick bath, and then do leftover office work on his personal computer in the den. Though they had been a “love match” in their youth, never once during the year did I see them make physical contact, share a flirtatious glance, or exchange more than passing words with each other.
“Would you like something to drink?” Mrs. C politely asked her husband after dinner on the night I came to talk about motherhood.
“After my bath,” he said, standing up and unbuttoning his pants. “Then I’ll have some sake.”
“And Mr. Bruce?”
“The same,” he answered. “And make it warm. The rice tonight was cold.”
He dropped his pants and shirt on the floor and walked off toward the bath.
“My husband never waits for anything,” Mrs. C said as soon as he had left. “He eats fast; he walks fast; he even speaks fast. Sometimes I think he knows only three words: gohan, furo, futon; food, bath, and bed.” She picked up his clothes and laid them over a chair. “Do your mother and father talk to each other?” she asked.
“Yes,” I said. “Especially before dinner. They call it ‘cocktail hour.’”
“You mean they drink together, too? I can’t believe it.” She poured hot water from the teakettle into the sink and began to wash the dishes. “My father talked with my mother when I was young, so I thought this was typical. But my mother says no. She says my husband’s character is normal for Japanese men. I wish I had married an American.”
Japanese families, unlike those in the West, are not a haven for private love between individuals. Because most marriages in the past were formally arranged, the family has traditionally been seen as a functional social unit in which the husband earns the money and the wife tends the children. Japan has no ideal of Mom and Dad gathering the kids and the dog and heading out in the station wagon for a Sunday drive. Instead, the Japanese family is often lampooned as comprising an absent father, a nagging mother, and two children who go to school all day, attend cram classes all night, and rarely see their parents together.
Fathers have long been derided. According to popular lore, the four biggest fears of the Japanese are earthquakes, thunder, fire, and
fathers. In the popular media, men are ridiculed as bumbling alcoholics who stumble in late from drinking parties every night and are wholly dependent on their wives when they are at home. “What is Boston Club Bourbon to you?” an announcer asks a typical Japanese man in one television commercial. “Boston Club is my wife, my son…my life,” the man answers.
Women get even less respect. Despite the preeminence of mothers within the walls of the family, where they control the money, the household, and the children, outside the home they are shunned, and often mocked by both their children and their husbands.
“All my wife thinks about is entrance exams,” Mr. C said to me after his bath, as he poured me a cup of warm sake from a two-liter bottle with a rattlesnake coiled inside. “My older son, Yuji, must take exams next year for university, and Takuya for high school. All we talk about is these idiotic tests.”
“But aren’t they important?” I asked.
“Sure they’re important. But children have other things to do. Sometimes I think that my wife knows only one word: benky, benky, benky study, study, study.” He offered me a plate of raw horse meat, which I politely declined. “It’s very good,” he said. “A delicacy. Anyway, what did your mother say to you?”
When I was a child, my mother nagged me with a different refrain, I told him. “Hobbies, hobbies, hobbies,” she preached. “You must do more than homework; you must develop ‘personal interests’ as well.”
Mr. C slammed his cup on the table, clapped his hands twice, and bowed his head as he did at the Shinto shrine. “You don’t know how lucky you are,” he said. “Japanese mothers never say that to their children. Ail they push is homework. Learning is not important, only studying.”
Several days later I broached this subject with a group of young male teachers at a Denny’s family restaurant. It was late on Friday night, and we had stopped off after an informal drinking party for a late-night bowl of rmen noodles.
“I am really worried about my students,” said Machida-sensei, the stylish math teacher who had objected when the principal told him to wear a tie to class. “They seem to have no character. When they go home in the afternoon they should be doing warm things like reading books or playing sports. Instead, they are always studying. They get this from their mothers.”
“Last night a mother called me at eleven P.M. to talk about next week’s exams,” complained Hongo-sensei, a physical education instructor. “I couldn’t believe it—eleven o’clock at night! I have no privacy anymore. I never get any sleep. For the students it must be even worse. They have to live with these people.”
“Is she a Kyiku Mama?” I asked.
As soon as he heard this term, Hongo-sensei jumped to his feet, wrapped a napkin around his head, and pretended to draw a sword from his waist. “Kyiku Mamas beware!” he sneered. “We know where you live.” He thrust his imaginary saber into the air with a snarl. Several couples in the restaurant glanced over at our table, and Hongo-sensei returned to his seat with one final riposte.
“I think the problem is that parents don’t like to teach their own children,” Machida-sensei said when the saber-rattling was done. “Even if it’s using chopsticks or getting dressed, they expect the school to do everything. Several mothers even called the principal over the New Year’s holiday and complained that we were not giving students enough to do.”
“You’ve got to be kidding,” I said.
“It’s true,” Hongo-sensei added. “The principal called me on the telephone and told me to start basketball practice a week before classes began. That’s crazy.”
“Would this happen in America?” Denver asked. “How much time do teachers spend in school?”
“Not as much as you do,” I said. “American teachers seldom come to school on weekends, and almost never during vacation. Of course they have a lot of work to do, and often take papers home, but most would never put up with this.”
“Do they have to make home visits?” Hongo-sensei asked.
“What’s that?”
“We have to go to every one of our students’ homes at least once a term,” he said. “Next week I have to visit forty-five houses in three nights and write a report on each one. The report has to say how much time students study, how much television they watch, and what their rooms look like. The principal makes us do it. He thinks we are the education police.”
“We don’t do that in America,” I said. “Parents sometimes come to the school, but teachers rarely visit homes.”
“You see what I mean,” Machida-sensei said. “We have to do too much. We hardly have time to teach.”
The teacher in Japan has long been accorded a special, almost sacred status. In a country that views schools as secular cathedrals, teachers have become lay priests. The word sensei, though commonly translated as “teacher,” in truth has no equivalent in English. The two Chinese characters that make up the word literally mean “one who was born before.” The essential ingredient for a sensei is the wisdom he or she has gained through experience, not through reading books. In Japan, the wise one learns through time. Even today, the use of the word sensei as an honorary appendage to names is not limited to schoolteachers alone. Any valued adviser or mentor can earn the respect inherent in the word sensei.
In premodern Japan, schools were built around the personality of an esteemed instructor. The Tokugawa shoguns who ruled the country between 1603 and 1868 established schools in many regions to train bureaucrats to run the state. In these Confucian schools the master-disciple relationship was central: instructors led through the example of their own character and conduct. “The teacher,” proclaimed one of the most widely used textbooks at the time, “is like the sun and the moon.” In many cases the students moved to these schools and ate, slept, and even bathed with their sensei.
In the years leading up to Japan’s war effort in the 1930s and 1940s, military discipline became even more central to schools, and teachers were required to undergo martial training themselves. Eventually military officers were assigned to schools to work alongside teachers. The old master-disciple relationship was not abandoned but rather was co-opted by the state. Teachers were still expected to lead by example, which in the new nationalistic context meant showing the utmost respect for the emperor. A “Memorandum for Elementary School Teachers” of the era advised: “Loyalty to the Imperial House, love of country, filial piety toward parents, respect for superiors, and charity toward inferiors constitute the Great Part of human morality. The teacher must himself be a model of these virtues in his daily life, and must endeavor to stimulate his pupils along the path of virtue.”
When the American education authorities examined Japanese schools after the war, they vowed to eliminate these “authoritarian ideas” and replace them with “democratic values.” One of their initiatives was to encourage teachers to form unions. Within several years the newly formed Japan Teachers Union (JTU) boasted membership of almost eighty-five percent of all teachers in the country.
Much of postwar education history in Japan has been dominated by a struggle between the conservative national government, led by the ruling Liberal Democratic Party, and the liberal teachers’ union, controlled by the Socialist and Communist parties. While the JTU has been a vocal proponent of reduced federal control in education (as the Americans had hoped) and has gained some limited victories, it has been unable to withstand the monolithic pressure of Mombush, Japan’s Ministry of Education. From JTU’s peak in the late 1940s, both its power and its membership have declined precipitously in recent years. In Sano and southeast Tochigi, the JTU had no presence at all, and the teachers I worked with were affiliated with another, less vocal union.
Teachers often complain that they have little freedom over what material to teach. With curricula written and approved in Tokyo, all classes follow predetermined schedules which ensure that all students in Japan study the same material at roughly the same time. Just as Napoleon censored school textbooks to stress the state over the individu
al, so the Japanese government strictly controls what information arrives on students’ desks. This oversight is so extensive that in the case of junior high school English, the Ministry of Education publishes a list of 350 English words—from “a” to “young”—that all students are required to know before graduation. Yet despite the solid state control of classroom content, teachers still feel responsible for the lives of their students. In the week leading up to our Friday night conversation, Machida-sensei had to be called away from class twice to retrieve a student who had returned home during the day, and Denver had to cancel dinner plans with me because of a special meeting with the principal to handle an incident in which a student had been caught drinking at home by a neighbor.
Compared with the United States—and most European countries as well—Japan has an essentially homogeneous culture, with a common moral and religious heritage. Parents are more willing to give schools the authority to teach their children the common “Japanese” values of hard work, self-sacrifice, and national pride. Teachers, the ones who assume this burden, are thus given responsibilities that stretch far beyond their classroom door. As Machida-sensei said after he retrieved his student from playing hooky, “If I don’t get him now, who will? If I don’t help him today, who can?” This type of teacher, one who takes responsibility for the personal development of his students, who not only teaches science by day but coaches tennis in the afternoon and makes house calls at night, is lauded in Japan as a Nekketsu Sensei, roughly translated as a “Hot-Blooded Teacher.” In a straight popularity vote, the Nekketsu Sensei would outpoll the Kyiku Mama by a margin of ten to one.
On the Monday morning after the gathering at Denny’s I went to see Mrs. Negishi, who in addition to being the teacher of forty-five ninth-grade students was the mother of two preschool boys. During a break between classes she leaned on her desk and told me the story of why she became a teacher.
