by Bruce Feiler
“When I was a junior high school student outside Tokyo, a soldier from America came to my school. The soldier was tall, with bright red hair and a shiny blue uniform. When he came to our class, he spoke too quickly for me to comprehend. I wanted to speak to that man, but I was afraid I could not catch what he was saying. I was very shy.
“After class, I spied the soldier walking out the back gate. I ran over to him, panting and out of breath, and uttered only one word, ‘Where?’ At first he looked at me for a moment, then he pointed out the gate and said some words that were too fast for me to understand. But that didn’t matter at the time. I was so happy that this foreigner—this big, important man in a uniform—could understand me, that right there, standing in the middle of the school yard, I began to cry.”
She smiled, fighting back tears again, and ran her hand across a photograph of her homeroom class that she kept on her desk.
“I want my students to have the feeling that someone important understands them. It doesn’t matter what language, as long as they know that someone cares—not about tests, or grades, or colleges, but about them. In my class, I try to do that.”
The third-period bell sounded in the middle of our conversation. Students and teachers flooded into the office. Mrs. Negishi motioned for a tall boy standing at the door to join our conversation.
“This is Sugiyama-kun,” she said. “He is one of my best students, and next year he is going to attend the most prestigious high school in Tochigi.” The boy blushed. “He has been having some trouble with English, so last week I went to his house to help him prepare for the test. I am sure that he will do well.”
I wished the boy good luck.
“Thank you very much,” he said. “I’ll do my best.” He bowed and scampered out the door.
The profound attachment between teachers and students is the main reason why teaching remains a popular profession in Japan. Especially in small communities like Sano, teachers have genuine stature in the community. But sadly, intangibles like respect from parents and love for children have become the last job benefits to attract young people into education. As in the West, more and more people in recent years have been turning to the more lucrative and “exciting” careers of international business and finance. Although Japanese teachers earn high marks for their community service, they also must work painfully long hours, teach in overcrowded classrooms, and earn low wages. The starting salary for a university graduate like Denver with a comprehensive teaching certificate and three years of training in the system was roughly fifteen thousand dollars a year, before national and prefectural taxes and a monthly deduction for school lunch. A teacher like Mrs. Negishi, with over fifteen years’ experience, earned less than twice that amount. All this is true in a country where the cost of living is significantly higher than it is in the United States.
As much as she loved her job, Mrs. Negishi regretted that it left her little time for her husband and her children. She was a doting mother and often showed me photographs she had taken of her two boys as well as pictures they had drawn. In a show of professional prudence, however, she kept these pictures hidden in her desk.
As we walked to the fourth-period class after our talk about teaching, Mrs. Negishi seemed unusually distracted.
“Is something wrong?” I asked.
“Oh, nothing,” she said.
“How are your boys?” I asked, suspecting a problem.
“One of them has a cold today, so he is staying at home. I couldn’t be there with him, so I had to ask my mother to come and stay for the day.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I hope he gets well soon.”
“This morning, as I was leaving for school, my son said to me, ‘Mommy, which do you love more, your students or me?’” She paused before entering the classroom and stared down the empty hall. “Of course I love my children,” she said, “but I spend so much time at school.”
In the seventh-grade game of English charades which had launched my search, a young girl drew the word “mother.” She walked to the center of the circle, raised her hands to her head like a pair of horns, and wagged her finger in front of her face in a nagging, menacing way. In no time the students had guessed the word.
“When mothers get mad,” the girl explained, “they become like the devil, and all children know that the devil has horns.”
After several more rounds of charades, a boy drew the word “teacher.” He marched to the blackboard and began writing furiously in the air. Without stopping for an answer, he sat on the floor and started scrawling on an imaginary pad. Finally, he pretended to take a mop and run it across the floor. Writing on the board, scribbling at a desk, cleaning the classroom floor—again the students had no difficulty guessing the word.
After class I asked these seventh graders who they thought did the most to prepare them for everyday life. The results were overwhelming: one student said his father, six said their mother, and the rest of the class—thirty-five students—chose their teacher.
While mothers remain at home, pushing their children to study hard for exams, teachers take over at school, mothering their students to work with others and develop strong moral values. This arrangement breeds tension between parents and teachers, who often have different goals. A well-known expression in Japan warns, “Any nail that sticks up must be hammered down.” This means that any student who shows exceptional ability must be muted to fit in with the group. In the classroom, students are taught not to flaunt their talents, “but,” Denver explained, “mothers want their children to succeed, to earn merit—to be protruding nails.” The Kyiku Mama is born of this system.
To be sure, Japanese students still love their mothers. “Just remember,” Denver said, “mothers are still mothers. Japanese boys may complain a lot, but they always go crying on mama’s shoulder.” The difference between Japanese and Americans, he said, is that Japanese children don’t think of their mothers as the apple of their eye. To make his point, Denver told me a story about an American football game he had seen on television. One of the players had worn a headband that said “HI, MOM.”
“I love my mother, too,” he explained, “but I could never wear that. I would be too shy.”
Although Japanese sumo wrestlers are not likely to shout “Hi, sensei!” into waiting television cameras anytime soon, perhaps that gesture would come close to capturing what students feel toward their teachers. “While my chess-loving father failed even to entertain me,” Natsume Soseki wrote in his famous novel Kokoro, “Sensei gave me far greater intellectual and spiritual satisfaction as a companion…Indeed, it would not have seemed to me then an exaggeration to say that sensei’s strength had entered my body, and that his very life was flowing through my veins. And when I discovered that such were my true feelings toward these two men, I was shocked. For was I not of my father’s flesh?”
Parents may provide the flesh and blood, but teachers provide the powerful example of their own commitment to serving the state. In our discussion after class, Denver put it best when he told me that the prevailing icons in Japan are not baseball, apple pie, and motherhood but yakyu, miso shiro, and Nekketsu Sensei—baseball, miso soup, and the Hot-Blooded, Warm-Hearted Teacher.
15
LEARNING TO CRAM: THE JUKU GENERATION
I memorize French declensions until midnight.
I wonder, what’s the name of that insect?
Shouldn’t I be able to memorize more easily?
Half of my life—blank spaces in this homework.
—Anzai Hitoshi, “Homework,” 1960
“ARE YOU READY?” Hiroyuki Arakawa called out in halting English. An actress straightened her skirt on the fringe of the makeshift stage. A few stragglers whispering in the corner turned their eyes toward the center of the room.
“Take one,” he cried, drawing his arms together with a crisp snap. “Begin!”
Kumiko Yamaguchi walked slowly across the bare floor in oversize slippers and stopped just shy of a man s
eated alone on a bench. The Wednesday afternoon sun cast its last shadow across his face.
“Excuse me,” she said. “What time is it now, please?”
“It’s six o’clock,” the man answered.
“Thank you very much.” She turned quietly and retraced her steps.
“Cut,” Hiroyuki cried. “Let’s try that again…”
Hiroyuki Arakawa has never directed a film. In fact, he had seen only one movie in his life before he walked onto this set. Hiroyuki was nine years old and a fourth-grade student at Sano Elementary School. Although he would not begin formally studying English until seventh grade, Hiroyuki learned this director’s shtick and several other routines at a private English academy he attended twice a week after his regular school day was over. For one hour every Monday and Wednesday afternoon, Hiroyuki joined his eleven-year-old sister and three neighbors to practice the fundamentals of Living English at an after-hours cram school, or juku.
While others might be playing baseball or watching TV, Hiroyuki learned some basic English questions (“What day is it today, please?”), some simple responses (“Today is Wednesday”), and the numbers from one to one hundred. Hiroyuki is part of a new breed of Japanese youth who spend their childhoods in preparation for the double jeopardy of high school and university entrance exams. He is a member of the juku generation.
Hiroyuki’s teacher was a thirty-two-year-old former sushi chef named Nobu Ishikawa, who was a high school acquaintance of Cho’s. An unusually tall and lanky man with large hands, a pointed nose, and round, expressive eyes, Ishikawa learned English through years of reading grammar manuals and collecting conversational guidebooks. His private English juku, which he nicknamed SPEL, for Sano Preparatory English Lesson, was his sole source of income. His classes ranged from “Getting to Know English” sessions for elementary school students to rigorous exam-cramming courses for anxious high school seniors preparing for the February exams. The proliferation of this type of school represents one of Japan’s fastest-growing industries in recent years—the business of English.
“To master English is very important, especially for Japanese,” Ishikawa said between classes in his stark two-room schoolhouse above an abandoned garage. “Japanese students have entrance exams; Japanese companies do business abroad. I even have some students who are over sixty years old and are studying English because they can’t read the labels in a 7-Eleven. It is not necessary for you to learn Japanese, but it is necessary for us to learn English.”
Compared with the English spoken by most junior high school English teachers, Ishikawa’s speech flowed smoothly and without hesitation. His pronunciation was clear, and his style relaxed and colloquial.
“At my school we have a philosophy,” he said, using one of the many English expressions he liked to sprinkle in his speech: “Slow and steady wins the race.”
The modern juku arose from a century-old tradition of preparing students for higher education. In feudal Japan, a person’s rank, family, or class determined the path that he or she would follow through life. The sons of samurai had the opportunity to land prestigious jobs with the state; the sons of peasants did not. With the elimination of the caste system by the Meiji emperor in the late nineteenth century, education replaced class as the new stairway to success. In 1877 the government established the Imperial University of Tokyo, Todai for short, which quickly became the ultimate goal for students who wished to join the civil service or become business executives. Even after the government set up five more universities around the turn of the century, competition for slots was fierce. In response, government officials were forced to devise a demanding selection process. Following the Confucian tradition, they chose exams as the best measure of success.
Since its inception, the university selection process has been pivotal because of the importance placed on graduating from a select institution. In 1937, for example, seventy-five percent of the people accepted for upper-level civil servant jobs and almost half of company presidents came from Todai. In 1987, the figures were almost identical. This connection between jobs and schools has not been lost on ambitious mothers, who explain to their children that in order to achieve a prestigious career, they must attend an elite university; in order to attend an elite university, they must pass that university’s entrance exams; and in order to pass the exams, they must begin preparation at an early age. Thus, even as the number of publicly funded schools increased in the twentieth century, so did the number of private academies, which—for a fee—promised to prepare students for the exams.
If anything, the plight of students has gotten worse in the wake of the postwar educational “reform.” One of the principal tenets that the American authorities introduced into the Japanese schools during the Occupation was the idea of “total equality” based on merit, which they viewed as a means of guaranteeing democracy and avoiding the elitist domination of prewar Japan. The Allies abolished the imperial university system and opened up higher education to a greater number of people. The number of universities in Japan surged from 48 in 1945 to 201 in 1950, and continued growing to reach 500 by 1980. The number of students in these universities increased accordingly, from three percent of high school graduates after the war to thirty-seven percent today. To make this system more meritocratic, the Americans insisted that candidates for admission to universities earn no special points for a stunning letter of recommendation, a powerful backhand, or a talent for the oboe. Only test scores would count.
Unwittingly, this plan pushed competition even lower down the age scale. Under the new system, access to competitive high schools would have to be determined by additional entrance exams at the end of junior high school. These days, any student who realistically hopes to attend a first-rate university must not only pass that school’s exam at age eighteen but also pass an exam to enter an academic high school at age fifteen. As a result, seventy-five percent of all students attend some kind of cram school.
The entrance exams in Japan are unlike any tests in the West. First, they are not required for graduation from a particular school—like the “O level” in England or the baccalauréat in France—but are used solely for admission to a higher-level school. In addition, unlike the SAT in the United States, one test does not work for all institutions: different schools use different exams. Finally, all universities hold their exams at roughly the same time, so that most students can take only one test at a time. If an applicant fails, he or she must wait an entire year for another chance. About fifty percent of students do fail the exams for the college of their choice and take an additional year to study exclusively for these tests. Such students are called rnin, a name once given to samurai who were cut off from their masters and forced to roam the countryside. An average of three quarters of all students admitted to the University of Tokyo have been rnin for at least one year, and some have done nothing but study for the Todai exams for three or four years.
The reason for this high rate of failure is the nature of the entrance exams. At the university level, the tests are complex trials that require multiple sittings on successive days and cover a wide range of subjects from the theories of ancient Greek philosophers to the lengths of major rivers in Africa. At the high school level, the entrance exams take one day and contain sections on most subjects taught in junior high school, from Japanese to mathematics, history to science. Although the material changes from year to year, one part continues to give students the most difficulty. Every exam, for both high school and university, contains a section on English.
“Good evening,” Ishikawa said to the five high school boys trudging into the SPEL classroom at seven-thirty that night. “How are you today?”
’Tired,” one boy grunted in Japanese as he slumped into a seat in the first row. “I can’t believe how much work I have to do. I have a test tomorrow and a basketball game on Friday night.”
“Let’s begin our English class for today.”
There are basically two types of cram sch
ools: huge chain stores that pack students by the dozens or even hundreds onto long benches where they watch video lectures about English grammar and sentence structure, and smaller, more intimate academies where one teacher works closely with a limited number of students. The larger houses often have computers to evaluate students’ test-taking skills, while the smaller ones offer individual attention by a teacher who can spend more time with each pupil. Their advantages are different, but their objectives are the same: to help students through the teenage rite of passage known as juken jigoku, “examination hell.”
“Tonight,” Ishikawa continued, “I have prepared a short vocabulary test for you to take. This is material you should have studied for today. You have fifteen minutes. Please begin now.”
The test consisted of twenty-one English words; students were asked to supply the officially sanctioned antonym for each one. Gallant. Righteous. Sagacious. Frugal. Friendly. Figurative. Fantastic…The items came directly from the approved list of five thousand words that all graduating high school students are required to know in order to pass the English portion of most university entrance exams. Silence descended as the severity of the assignment sunk in. Ishikawa graded some papers at his desk; the students squirmed in their seats. Painful. Destruction. Consumption. Pessimist. Utmost. Treachery…At the quarter-hour mark the test ended. A quick survey of the room revealed that none of the seven students had successfully completed more than five pairs. The teacher was concerned.
“I see you have not studied hard this week,” Ishikawa said, glaring down at the boys. “We have a lot of work to do. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.”
As the students began their review, I soon realized that none of these boys would be angling for a slot at the University of Tokyo. Indeed, none of them would be heading outside Tochigi after high school. Yet each one still willingly paid more than $240 a month to study English twice a week. At the end of the hour, I got a chance to ask them why.
