Learning to Bow

by Bruce Feiler

  “The principal said it is not appropriate,” Denver explained, his voice betraying his distress. “Graduation is a Japanese ceremony, he said, and the format cannot be changed. Since you are a foreigner, he was afraid you might upset our customs. We cannot compromise tradition, he said.”

  Sitting in the audience listening to the principal address the school, I felt the weight of that tradition—the burden of a man who was schooled in the past, and who, when faced with the option of the future, chose the comfort of the old over the risk of the new.

  “Each of you has worked hard since your days in elementary school,” Sakamoto-sensei said to the students. “Now you have the skills necessary to become a successful shakai-jin, a member of society. But I must tell you that your training in life begins now. Graduation marks a change in your life, like moving from one room to the next. But please remember that you must never leave an open door behind. At home, when you go from one room to the next, you always close the door behind you. The same happens when you leave this school today. You must draw a kejime with your former life.”

  Kejime, which can be translated roughly as a “line of demarcation,” is one of the primary pillars of Japanese education. Originally the name for a bamboo screen that divided two rooms, kejime today implies a code of behavior that one accepts upon reaching a certain status in life. High school students earn more free time than junior high students but have the added burden of preparing for university entrance exams. Workers enjoy the perquisites of company life but must accept long working hours in service to the corporate good. The principal may exercise strict control of his school but in return must shoulder the responsibility if any of his troops step out of line. Kejime, in essence, is the law of the land: as one grows from a pebble into a stone, one gives up certain personal freedoms in return for the benefits of achieving a higher position in the community.

  “As you leave here, you will all strive hard in your new lives,” Sakamoto-sensei declared at the end of his speech. “But please remember what you learned in this school: work comes before play, the past before the future, and the snow before the spring. Your parents, your teachers, and your country are depending on you. We hope you do your best.”

  At the conclusion of the ceremony, all the seventh-and eighth-grade students lined up outside the gymnasium in the form of a giant human funnel, like cheerleaders before an American high school football game. As the graduates marched down this open aisle, small groups of underclassmen rushed forward to say good-bye with bouquets of flowers and folded farewell notes. After the processional, the graduates gathered just outside the school’s main gate to savor the moment, hugging, crying, and snapping photographs of one another. Many of the younger girls asked their male idols for buttons from their uniforms to keep as mementos. The girls provided the scissors, and the boys from the graduating class spent the next thirty minutes carefully snipping buttons from their Prussian army-style jackets and presenting them to packs of shrieking girls. Some of the boys were so popular that they soon finished off the buttons on their black jackets and had to begin clipping the ones from their plain white shirts. Even in the excitement, however, the boys were careful never to remove the second button from the top of either their jackets or their shirts, for to hand over this token to a girl meant much more than platonic love and implied some sort of “commitment.”

  After mingling at the gate for nearly two hours, the graduating seniors finally dispersed for more private celebrations away from school. A group of about fifteen students moved to a nearby community center to have a small party of their own. Here, though they were far from school, trouble began.

  Based on what I later learned, this party was innocent enough: there were no drugs, no liquor, no vandalism, and no sex, just a coed group of fifteen-year-olds sipping sodas, eating chips, and listening to Madonna on a cassette tape player. The students had even reserved the room in advance. The problem was that the students held their party at two-thirty in the afternoon, during official school hours. But hadn’t they just graduated?

  “The students are the responsibility of the school,” the principal explained to me after he had summoned the students back to school, reprimanded them, and sent them home with a warning not to indulge in such debauchery again. “Even though they graduated today, they remain our responsibility until the end of the month. Then they move into the care of their high schools.”

  “What about their parents?”

  “They may be at work,” he said, “or out of the house. Or maybe they just don’t care.”

  Such is the essence of child welfare in Japan. As students cannot be entrusted to care for themselves and cannot be left to the random and perhaps less-than-strict rule of their parents, they fall under the complete dominion of the schools. Until the students are finally turned over to someone else the state can trust, the school must open and close the doors of kejime for them.

  “After students leave our doors,” the principal said, “they essentially break from the school. They no longer belong to us. If they return, they must stand at the door of the teachers’ room and announce their names and their reason for entering, just like any other guest. The school cares for students until the end of March. Then we let them go.”

  Considering the severity of this transition, it was no wonder that the ceremony itself proved to be so somber. Graduation is only one in a series of benchmarks that Japanese experience as they are handed from one group to another, all the way through their lives. Given this legacy of supervision, the sense of amae, or dependence, that many Japanese feel toward their employers and their colleagues seems easier to understand: most have never been out on their own.

  On the last working day in March, all the members of the prefectural government who had offices in Sano were called together in one room on the top floor of our office building. Dr. Endo and his Health Department staff were there, as were the forestry, housing, and finance bureaus. Each department stood in a double-file line. Arai-san and Eh-chan wore flowered kimonos and stood in the back of the space allotted for the Board of Education. At the front of the room, on a tiny stage, three objects were lined up in a row: a flag of Japan, a flag of Tochigi, and a Sony reel-to-reel tape recorder on top of a metal folding chair. When the meeting was called to order, an attendant reached over and turned the recorder to “PLAY.”

  “Good morning, ladies and gentlemen,” said a scratchy male voice on the tape. “Thank you for coming today. The governor wishes he could be with you this morning, but instead he will now deliver his year-end greeting.

  “Kiritsu,” the voice shouted, and everyone snapped to attention.

  “Rei.”

  And without further instruction, the several hundred professionals who had assembled in the fifth-floor meeting room of a white stucco building on the outskirts of Sano-shi, including my boss, my doctor, and even myself, bowed together to a tape recorder that sat on a chair in the front of the room. At that moment, as my head dipped toward the floor and my palms brushed over my knees, I realized that Japanese students can never claim that what they learn in school will not serve them in the “real world.” In Japan, it most certainly will.

  19

  COUNTRY BUDS AND FADED DREAMS: A CHERRY BLOSSOM SPRING

  The spring has come, and once again

  The sun shines in the sky;

  So gently smile the heavens, that

  It almost makes me cry,

  When blossoms droop and die.

  —Kino Tomonori, c. 90s

  CHO CAME TO MY HOUSE EARLY. Tufts of clouds drifted across the azure Sunday sky, and the pale green blush of newborn leaves enlivened the drowsy air. Instead of heading far away on this morning, Cho took me back to his hometown for the annual April extravaganza known as the Kuzu Genjin Cherry Blossom Jubilee. This celebration draws people from all across the Kanto Plain into the quiet mountain hamlet of Kuzu to celebrate the coming-out of the national flower, sakura, and to honor the town’s most famous son: the Kuzu Genji
n, the oldest human remains ever found in Japan. “He’s in every high school textbook,” Cho boasted like a proud father. Although the esteemed Genjin-san amounts to a mere three broken bones and a sliver of skull, he is immortalized on T-shirts, banners, and coffee mugs as a squat, affable man with a bushy beard, an animal-skin tunic, and a bulging hunting club. “Discover Kuzu Genjin,” the town slogan cheers, “Oldest Man in Japan.”

  After a fifteen-minute drive north from Sano over two-lane highways pocked by the constant trampling of dump trucks and cement mixers, Cho parked his Nissan Sunny behind the elementary school where his father served as principal. The three-block area of downtown Kuzu had been gussied up for the fair: pink streamers wafted from every light pole; red and white tents lined the side of the main street, where vendors hawked hard-boiled eggs soaked in soy sauce and bananas draped in chocolate; a green portable house of mirrors had been wheeled in front of the town hall.

  “Sensei, sensei,” a girl called to Cho, “do you want to go inside?”

  “No, thank you,” he answered. “I’m scared of ghosts.”

  As we weaved through the maze of food stalls and up the daffodil-lined stairs toward the cherry grove at the top of a hill, Cho began to relate the sad story of Kuzu. Like a boom town in the American West, it had sprung from nowhere a century ago after a rich lode of natural stone and chalk was uncovered deep in the hills just outside of town. For several generations the stone from these quarries was used to cover buildings and build bridges all across the archipelago.

  “Thirty years ago, Kuzu was a rich place,” Cho explained. “We had many big companies, and the big companies paid big taxes. We were a developed town.”

  But over time the big companies merged with bigger companies and developed even bigger interests beyond the mines of Tochigi. Eventually most of them moved their headquarters to Tokyo. In a story that has been played out in rural communities across time, the hinterlands—rich in natural resources—became subjugated to the city as managers took the profits with them and left the workers to labor in the country, slowly stripping themselves of their only source of wealth. With most of the mines soon emptied of their cache, stagnation slowly spread across Kuzu, then malaise, and finally the inevitable disintegration.

  “Now that all our companies are gone,” Cho said, “all we have left is dust. We used to produce the finest stone in all of Japan, but now we make only chalk that is used to line high school baseball diamonds.” He stopped on the stairs and scanned the decaying tableau of tin-roofed buildings, blistered roads, and barren mines—like open sores—that scarred the surroundings of the somnolent town. “When I was a student, almost thirty thousand people lived in Kuzu,” he said. “Now I’m a teacher, and that number is less than half.”

  We arrived at the top of the hillside park, beneath a thicket of arching trees that erupted into a gossamer of miniature blossoms. The pale pink branches reached across the sky and linked arms overhead in a cotton-candy arcade. Children climbed up the boughs and out on the limbs to shake the petals from their clusters into a shimmering pastel rain. Their parents sat on straw mats on the ground, drinking beer from plastic kegs, roasting beef on open grills, and belting kara-oke classics from battery-generated portable stereos: “It’s spring; the cherry blossoms are warm; my heart blooms for you…”

  The first time I heard about sakura, I assumed that after the deluge of blossoms in early April, most of the country would be rolling in plump, juicy cherries. Not only was I incorrect—these trees bear no fruit—but even to consider such a thought was to miss the point of the season. Sakura is the national flower for a reason: the blooms come and go, tantalize and evaporate in a single moment of brilliance that transcends time. For centuries the sakura has symbolized a pure brand of beauty, tinged with elegy. During the Pacific War the cherry blossom became the motivating symbol for a special band of pilots who fought with sublime inspiration but knew that they would die. These martyrs were named kamikaze, “the Divine Wind”:

  You and I, companion cherry blossoms,

  Flowered in the garden of the same military school.

  Just as the blossoms calmly scatter,

  We too are ready to fall for our country.

  Autumn is a time to venture into the forest and seek tranquillity; spring is a time to wander among the trees and consider life’s impermanence.

  “In America we have an expression,” I said after we stopped to buy a snack of tangy rice balls and green tea. “In spring, a young man’s fancy turns to thoughts of love.”

  “I’ve been thinking about love,” Cho said, not changing the solemn look on his face, “and I’ve made a decision.”

  “About what?”

  “About Chieko…I’m not going to marry her. I’ve decided she’s not the right girl for me.”

  I stopped for a second, but Cho kept moving as if nothing had happened.

  “I’m sorry to hear that,” I said, trying to catch up. “When did you decide?”

  “About a month ago.”

  “Have you told anybody?”

  “Only her. Otherwise, I have nobody to tell. But this is a small town. Soon everyone will know.”

  For the long months that Cho and Chieko were dating, they were constantly shadowed by the web of unwritten rules which still controls small-town life. During their courtship they never appeared alone in public. If they planned to have lunch on Sunday, they would drive to a neighboring city. If they wanted to see a movie on Saturday night, they would travel to the next prefecture. The contrast with life in Tokyo could not have been more pronounced. While Cho and Chieko were driving surreptitiously around south Tochigi lest a colleague spot them together, Hara and his girlfriend were parading around steamy nightclubs in Tokyo and returning to his apartment for casual sex.

  “Life is different for teachers,” Cho told me. “We are public servants. But what is bad for teachers all over Japan is even worse for us in the country.”

  Strolling among the cherry blossoms, I felt for one of the first times a gap between our lives. Did Cho not mention his breakup to anyone because nobody cared, or because he preferred to keep his feelings to himself? Did he want to talk about what happened, or let it pass silently? I resisted asking too many questions at first, for fear of intruding. I had often noticed the lack of public discussion in Japan about private lives. While the men in my office loved to go drinking, joke about sex, and make passes at kara-oke mamas, they rarely talked about their families or their lives at home. Japan does not have the ubiquitous call-in radio talk shows where people can confess their marital infidelities or sibling jealousies. I sometimes thought that the most telling difference between the United States and Japan might be that Americans thrive on this kind of public therapy and Japanese do not.

  After several minutes of silence Cho did begin to talk. The story he told was less about two people who could not love each other than about two worlds that could not converge.

  “Chieko and I are both teachers,” he said as we moved to watch the finish of the annual Genjin Run. “She grew up in this area, and so did I. She went to high school here, and so did I. Then we both went off to university. But I went south to Tokyo, and she went north to Utsunomiya.”

  Utsunomiya, the capital of Tochigi, is a low-brow, low-tech city of several hundred thousand. Utsunomiya University, or Udai for short, was originally a teachers’ college before the Second World War but became a “general education” school during the postwar reform movement. This reform, like many others, did not take hold, and today the university still produces an abundance of teachers, who in turn go on to populate area schools. Since most teachers in Tochigi graduate from this program, the prefectural school system is run like an exclusive club whose members work with their friends, marry their colleagues, and rarely leave the nest. In my office at the Board of Education, for example, fourteen of the sixteen teachers graduated from Udai.

  Cho, because he went to a university in Tokyo, was excluded from this clique. “People
I didn’t even know would come up to me and say, ‘I hear you are going to marry Chieko,’” he said. “I would wonder where they had heard this information, and then the person would say, ‘I was her classmate at Udai.’ No matter how hard I try, I can never get away from this circle. I will always be an outsider, just because I studied in Tokyo.”

  Cho also discovered that Chieko and he had learned different things while they were away. “I like to travel,” he said, “but she does not. I like to think about the world beyond Tochigi, but she does not. She is content never to leave her parents’ home. Everybody says that our students have to learn to live in a world that is larger than just Japan. But first, our teachers have to learn that this world exists.”

  Eventually, perhaps inevitably, Cho and Chieko parted ways. What seemed in the fall like a promising match, by the spring had withered and died. We walked among the falling petals alone.

  “How do you like the festival?” Cho’s mother asked me several minutes later when she found us waiting by the finish line. A former teacher herself, she was a pleasant woman with graying hair around her temples, round glasses clipped to a silver chain around her neck, and, on this special day, an indulgent touch of lipstick on her smile.

  “Kuzu is beautiful in the spring,” I said.

  “This is our second most important festival,” she said with the bubbling enthusiasm of a practiced tour guide. “The first is the fireworks extravaganza in the summer. I hope you can join us for that. This year’s theme has just been decided: ‘Come Back to Kuzu: Oldest Town in Japan.’”

  “It sounds similar to the Cherry Blossom Festival,” I suggested.

  “We are trying to attract people from Tokyo this year. We want to increase our tourism.”

  “Cherry blossoms and fireworks are all we have left,” Cho said. “Maybe they won’t notice that all our shops are closed.”