by Bruce Feiler
About a week after Aya sat at my desk contemplating the question “What makes people happy?” I arrived at school one morning to find a postcard from her in my chair. On the front of the card was a nativity scene, with Mary, Joseph, and the baby Jesus; on the back was a note in English: “I write you a postcard. My postcard has strange message. Are you vigor? I am vigor, because I decided that happiness can be found on a detail level. In the future, I try sing.”
The voice of hope: a rising daughter.
While most students, like Takuya, will emerge from school with their futures clearly marked and their branches neatly trimmed, a growing number, like Aya, will want to take a chance away from the group and try to blossom by themselves. Japan’s next great challenge will be to broaden its ideal of the model citizen to include this new kind of student—one who wants to play as well as work, to have pride in herself as well as her country, to grow into a full-sized tree. To scorn these students because they resist the orthodox mold would be the greatest misfortune of all. For as all of us in Sano would soon be reminded, even those who live outside the circle need to feel at times that they still belong.
21
OUTSIDE THE CIRCLE: THE INVISIBLE CLASS
At one time
Alone, in a land of strangers,
I denied my childhood home.
Peter thrice denied his Lord.
How many more times did I deny
My humble place of birth?
—Maruoka Tadao, “Why Flee?” 1958
KENZO SAIKAWA SAT UP quickly in bed—yet another fitful, sleepless night. Peering out at his crowded room, he groped at the floor in search of his clock. It was 6:15, an hour before the alarm would sound and his mother would peer around the door. Outside, the first blush of the mid-May sun had already begun to stir the sky. Kenzo had little time to waste. He reached for his creased black pants but paused for a moment, lifting his diary from where it lay on the sheets and stashing it beneath his bed. Someday, it alone would speak the truth.
Kenzo dressed in his formal junior high school uniform. He carefully buttoned the jacket to his chin and removed his bookbag from the back of his chair. The night before, his mother had sat in that same chair as he told her about the boys at school. They had been teasing him for almost a year, he said. At first it was only little taunts. “Kusai,” they said, “you stink.” “Baikin da, you’re a germ.” But later some began to hit him and push him down the stairs. The week before, one of the boys in his basketball club had asked him to steal a box of candy from the 7-Eleven.
“What was his name?” his mother asked.
“Takajima,” the boy said.
“Takajima?” she gasped. “But I thought he was your friend.”
“It’s not true!” the boy screamed. “He’s not my friend. That’s just what my teacher said. Nobody listens to me. Everybody thinks he’s my friend, but he’s not. He hates me. He says that I am different, I look funny, and I don’t deserve to be in school.”
His mother assured him that this wasn’t true. He could attend any school, have any job, or say anything he wanted, she promised. His teachers had told him the same thing. But his classmates said the opposite. They teased him about his name—Saikawa—and the exclusive classes he attended after school with several other students. “You get all this special treatment,” Takajima had chided him many times, “but with me you are not so special.” Kenzo lay crying on the bed when his mother finally left the room: some hurts could not be silenced.
The boy hurried to leave the house before seven o’clock, when he knew his parents would wake up. He tiptoed down the hall, slid on his graying sneakers, and slipped quietly out the front door. Once on the street, he turned in the direction of school.
Several members of the girls’ track team were jogging around the playing field when Kenzo passed through the gate at 7:15. No one seemed to notice the small ninth-grade boy making his way across the track toward the gymnasium. Kenzo had never attracted much attention at school. He was mostly silent. The teachers all thought he was “quiet.”
Kenzo did not stop at the gymnasium, where his fellow members of the basketball club were holding a morning practice. Instead, he went straight into the school building, left his sneakers at the door, and walked in stocking feet up the stairs to his classroom on the third floor. The room was empty when he arrived. The lights were off. He dropped his bag on the floor beside his desk and took his seat in silence. Although he couldn’t see the students outside, he could hear their voices through the open window and again as they echoed down the vacant hall.
His mind was cluttered, and the voices seemed to be creeping closer. He was alone, but somebody seemed to be calling out to him. He heard the voices: kusai, baikin, hinin—dirty, stinking, doglike boy. He pictured them teasing him during lunch and on the way home from school. Takajima was the worst. One day he would call out dirty names; the next day he would act really nice. Kenzo thought everybody knew about this. They could look into his eyes and know he was alone. They could look beneath his clothes and see the scars where some of the boys in the basketball club pressed burning cigarettes against his arms. They could tell all this, and yet they let it continue.
The voices were growing louder now. Perhaps somebody was coming. Kenzo reached into his bag and removed a folded sheet of paper. He placed it on his desk and hurried toward the back of the room, where the sliding glass doors opened onto the balcony. From here he had a view of the entire school and the joggers down below. Kenzo knew they couldn’t hear him, so he didn’t try to speak. He knew they wouldn’t listen, so he didn’t try to scream. At this moment—as always—he spoke only to himself.
At 7:25 in the morning of a bright Tuesday in May, Kenzo Saikawa walked alone to the edge of a third-floor balcony at Sana Junior High, stepped over the concrete rail, and reached for a sound that would silence the words that echoed in his heart: “You are different. You don’t belong…”
The sudden death of Kenzo Saikawa stunned the entire community of Sano Junior High. For several days afterward, through a series of memorial services, discussions, and counseling sessions, the school grieved the loss of one of its own and tried to understand what had precipitated this act of self-destruction. From a series of these discussions we were able to piece together an account of Kenzo’s last hours.
About a week after the suicide, I sat with Denver at a local teachers’ hangout, eating sushi and drinking watery beer, as he explained to me that for much of Japanese history, while samurai warriors freely roamed the country battling one another for territory, a special class of menial workers known as burakumin, or hamlet people, was confined to ghettoes and legally isolated from the rest of society. Though modern laws have eliminated this segregated system, its legacy still pollutes the minds of some children today who have inherited the prejudices of the past.
“I don’t know if it is good to tell foreign people,” Denver said, “but this is a problem in Japan. The distance between these people and the rest of the population is the same as that between Japanese and foreigners. They are treated like aliens.”
Denver seemed fatigued, his tie hung loose around his neck, and his hair was disheveled from running his fingers too many times across his scalp. He was weary from talking with students, frustrated at their parents, and tired of sustaining the dam of silence that had risen around the school. He took a napkin from the bamboo box on the table and quickly sketched a pyramid, which he split into four separate tiers.
“In the Tokugawa era,” he said, “Japanese society was divided into four categories: the samurai were at the top, followed in order by farmers, artisans, and merchants. But below those people was another group.” He drew an oval beneath the pyramid and shaded it black like a puddle of mud. “They were called the eta, the ‘people of filth.’ Everyone studies the top four groups, but not everyone knows about the eta. It was not until I became a teacher that I became fully aware of this exclusion.”
The people confined to this grou
p were mostly those who worked with animals—butchers, tanners, and leather workers. Buddhist taboos against killing animals, combined with Shinto fears of uncleanliness, conspired to isolate this entire class of laborers.
“They looked the same as other Japanese,” Denver explained. “They even talked the same language. The only difference was their work. The samurai lords assigned them special names and forbade them from walking, talking, or marrying with people from other classes. The eta weren’t exactly slaves, but they certainly were not free.”
Denver looked around to make sure no other people were listening. We were alone in the bar except for three men drinking on a raised platform in the center and a couple eating dinner at a freestanding table in the corner. A light breeze blew through the navy blue curtains that hung over the open door, jingling a chime that dangled over the bar. The master rolled a piece of sushi at the counter and tallied the cost on a tablet by his side. Denver refilled my glass with beer and continued to talk.
The legal segregation continued until the 1890s, he said, when Japan’s first constitution officially outlawed all class distinctions. But the discrimination persisted. The burakumin, as the eta came to be called in the twentieth century, could still practice only certain professions, and unlike the displaced samurai, they received no money from the state to help them integrate into the mainstream of society. Although they looked, talked, and dressed like all other Japanese, the burakumin still lived apart. They remained, in effect, an invisible race.
“Many of these people changed their names and moved into new neighborhoods,” Denver said, “but, of course, everybody still knew. Each person in Japan used to have a personal record at the courthouse which listed his relatives, birthplace, and occupation. Nobody dared get married without first checking this record. Japanese people can be very wary, you know.”
At the close of the Second World War, a new emancipation effort emerged. A group of buraku leaders, calling itself the Liberation League, began to focus attention on what it saw as the best avenue for salvation: the schools. The group pressed the government to meet two key demands: first, teach all students about the problems of discrimination; and second, hold special classes for minority students after school to help them prepare for entrance examinations and thus gain admittance to more competitive schools—a sort of school-sponsored juku for burakumin.
“The situation is getting better,” Denver told me. “Unlike twenty years ago, almost all buraku students attend high school, and some continue to universities. Also, we have eliminated the system of personal records at the courthouse. Our ancestors created the problem; it is our duty to solve it. The afterschool classes are one way.”
Yet for those four or five students in Sano who went off twice every week to these sessions, the benefit gained by specialized attention was often overshadowed by the stigma attached to attending. The other students quickly realized that those who attended these meetings were somehow different from the rest of the school. The buraku students were often hazed in return as dirty, filthy, children of dogs. And as any person who has lived through junior high school can attest, such curses are as sharp as swords.
“It’s a shame about that young boy,” the sushi master said as he came to clean our trays at the end of the meal. His lips were puckered around a cigarette, his eyes squinted from the smoke, and a hint of white beard peeked out from his chin. “I sure hate to see a student—” He stopped himself suddenly in midsentence and tilted his head toward me. “Does the gaijin know what happened?” he asked.
I told him that I did.
“Where does he come from?” he said to Denver.
“The United States,” I answered.
“America,” he said. “That’s great. Me, I don’t speak English. It’s a shame he doesn’t understand Japanese.”
“But I do understand Japanese,” I said.
“Oh,” he answered, now turning toward me. “I guess you’re right.” He stacked the empty trays atop his right arm and took a drag of his cigarette with his left.
“I’ll tell you something about Japan,” he said, wagging his cigarette in my direction like a teacher gesturing with chalk, “compared with America, we seem very equal here. But that’s not completely true. There are a lot of things you don’t see, and a lot of problems you don’t hear about. Me and sensei here have the same heart, we can understand each other, but there are a lot of people in this country who don’t treat others right. This is the shame of Japan.”
After the master had returned to the bar, Denver laid another napkin on the lacquer tabletop and began to draw what looked like a solar system, with a large sun in the center and a group of smaller planets around the outside.
“A long time ago,” he said, “this was the shape of Japan. We call it bushid, the ‘Way of the Samurai.’ In the center was the lord—the chief of a tribe—and around him was a band of retainers.”
“A kumi,”I said.
“That’s right,” he said. “Above all, each person in the group was required to remain loyal to the clan. To make sure this happened, the samurai developed a special code: if any member of the group committed a shameful act, then the lord—the leader—must take the blame. He must seek an honorable end.”
In the Way of the Samurai, an “honorable end” meant a ritual form of suicide known as seppuku or harakiri—literally, “cutting the stomach” with a sword. Japanese literature is full of melodramatic legends such as “The Tale of the Forty-seven Samurai,” based on the true story of a band of retainers who avenged the death of their lord by assassinating his rival. The royal court, forced to respond to the murder, ordered the retainers to commit public suicide, thus fulfilling the letter of the law but still allowing the warriors to rejoin their leader in the afterworld. When I saw this story performed in the stylized kabuki mode in Tokyo in early spring, the audience cheered its uproarious approval as the forty-seven men dressed in brilliant purple kimonos lined up across the snow-covered stage and disemboweled themselves en masse.
“Of course most modern Japanese can’t imagine doing this to themselves,” Denver said, “but suicide is still an honorable way out of a desperate situation. Just as a samurai lord killed himself in the past if his retainers committed a shameful act, so a section chief or leading politician might kill himself today if some member of his staff is caught breaking the law.”
The effects of this legacy are dramatic. Japan has an annual suicide rate that is fifty percent higher than in the United States and places Japan among the leading countries of the world in the percentage of self-inflicted deaths. But while adult suicide is common in Japan, teenage suicide is not. In 1987, about 1,700 Japanese between the ages of fifteen and twenty-four killed themselves, at a rate that was fifty percent less than in the United States. In a broader comparison, Sweden, Switzerland, Hungary, and El Salvador all have higher teenage suicide rates than Japan.
A prevailing myth about youth suicide in Japan is that those who take their own lives do so because of “examination hell.” The anthropologist Thomas Rohlen conducted a survey, however, which revealed that youth suicides were distributed throughout the entire year, not just at test-taking time, and that the reasons for the deaths ranged from a lack of motivation to study, to a problem with the opposite sex. As the case of Kenzo Saikawa shows, the death of a student is often the result of tensions among children themselves, not just between children and adults.
Although Japan has a long and honorable tradition of self-inflicted violence, it does not have a legacy of violence against others. The number of people killed by handguns in Japan in a recent year, for example, was 35, compared with 9,104 in the United States. Japanese people are justly proud of this tradition. Their country may be small, they brag, but it is “safe.”
Like most other tenets in the canon of Japan, this one is changing. Japan’s recent economic success is helping to create a new generation of youth that does not blindly follow the old rules. In 1987, for example, teenagers committed almost
half of all crimes in Japan, including shoplifting, burglary, and car theft. Soon after the suicide at Sano Junior High School, I clipped a page from an English-language newspaper in Japan. Side by side on the top of the page were two banner headlines: “POLICE ARREST I6-YEAR-OLD IN STABBING DEATH OF TEACHER” and “JUNIOR HIGH TEACHER NABBED IN FATAL STABBINGS OF RESTAURANT OWNER, WIFE.”
These two incidents were not directly related, yet in a larger sense they were. Violence seems to be gaining currency in the lives of Japanese children, and many people fear that schools may be encouraging this trend.
Although disciplining students with a whip, a stick, or a slap across the head was outlawed after the war, almost three quarters of all Japanese teachers admitted in a recent poll that they still used corporal punishment. In Sano I regularly saw teachers force students to sit on their knees for long periods of time; other teachers slapped offenders on the head. Teachers who occasionally pushed students, kicked them, or shoved them away were common. But often the line is blurred between gentle reminders of who is in charge and more serious efforts to inflict pain on students. In a notorious 1986 incident, a teacher in the south of Japan beat a student to death for bringing an outlawed blow dryer on a school excursion. At least one teacher I knew in Tochigi kept two hollow bamboo sticks under his desk for more serious transgressors.
While it would be an exaggeration to say that Japanese students go to school in an atmosphere of violence, it is fair to say that schools generate a high level of stress in the form of pressure to conform and comply with the rules. This invisible violence in schools, like “white noise” in cities, lingers in the air, constantly reminding students of the threat of force that surrounds them at all times. A growing number of children, called “school refusers,” have responded by staying home. Other students take out their anxiety on one another in the form of teasing, taunting, or bullying.
