There's a Lot of Paperwork Involved with Intruding

I don’t think there are very many places on the planet where putting in eye drops during class is considered acceptable behavior, but drinking water is not. Where sixteen year old boys have stuffed bear pencil cases and folders with pictures of their favorite members of J-idol boy bands printed on them. Where ping-pong is a legitimate sport, even for those cool enough to be on the rugby team.

But that, friends, is high school in Japan.

Every day I see these kids, and although many of the things that initially struck me as very odd I can gloss over without noticing now, there are still moments when I think, How has your society led you to this and you think it’s normal?

Students at a tea festival

 Take the very structure of students’ world. They come to school in the morning, by themselves and sometimes traveling great distances. They have been doing this since elementary school, where they are taught how to come and go from school alone and be safe. Although at first this might seem to encourage a level of independence largely missing from American schools, it is immediately tempered by other aspects, like the hour-by-hour record of how they spent their time they are required to turn in to their homeroom teachers every day. In high school. The homeroom teacher is then supposed to evaluate these forms and determine if each individual student is studying enough and sleeping enough in a day. Every moment is accounted for and judged for its prescription to the sanctioned standards.

When I learned of this, I was immediately shocked at the intrusiveness of it, and was further shocked that my supervisor was shocked that American schools did not require students to do likewise.

“So, you know how many hours a day a student studies?” I ask.

“Yes,” she says. “We are supposed to tell them if it’s not enough.”

She admits that, mostly, it’s just annoying busywork for the teachers, but in their roles as moral guides for students’ wellbeing, they are culturally obligated to both know and care about literally every minute of their charges’ time.

“Why don’t students just lie?” I continue.

“What?” she exclaims, now the one shocked.

“Yeah, I mean, they can just say they are studying for three hours, but really they study for one and watch TV for the other two. Who’s going to know? They could just lie,” I tell her. “If we had to do this in America…well, first, no one would, but if we did…students would just lie.”

“I suppose they could lie,” she ponders, like the idea has never occurred to her before, that one of her brood could have been untruthful on official paperwork.

Before class

The idea, to them, really is that shocking.

Later, I brought the idea up with students, to see how they would react. We were discussing admission to Tokyo University, Japan’s version of Harvard. Commonly known as Toudai, the university recently started allowing September enrollment as an alternative to April enrollment, in order to encourage more foreign students to come and to make it easier for Japanese students to study abroad. When Japanese students apply, they came opt to begin school in September, but a condition of this is that they provide an account of how they plan to spend the summer in between finishing high school and starting college. What they plan to do – travel, work, study independently, etc. – is a factor in whether they are accepted to the university at all.

“You tell the university what you want to do, and that can affect if you get in, but do they check?” I ask.

“Check what?” students ask.

“Check if you did what you said you were going to do. Do they talk to your boss or your parents about what you did over the summer?”

“Maybe they don’t check,” they say.

“So, you could lie.”

“Lie?” they ask.

“Yes, you could say you were going to do something, get in to the school, and then not do it. If they don’t check, then it doesn’t matter, right?”

They all look at me like they don’t understand. Lie?, their faces puzzle over the word, again like it’s something that has never occurred to them. It’s shocking, even the suggestion of it. Mostly because it’s really not something they’ve ever thought about doing before.

The rugby team making lunch

I don’t think there are very many places on the planet where people have their lives so closely monitored, and yet have never considered the possibility of being untruthful about any of it. That’s an aspect of life here that I both admire and which concerns me. At its most basic level, it’s the result of people who don’t think outside the box that has been prescribed to them, and that, I think, inherently limits Japan. Although their honesty is honorable, I think the extreme to which it is carried out here results in naiveté and lack of imagination in problem-solving. They do precisely as they are told. Never will it occur to one of them to drink water in class – though all of them will put in eye drops.

Originally published at akitaculture.wordpress.com

My Other Blog

Recently, I started blogging with some fellow ALTs in Akita-ken about our beloved prefecture. Our goal is compile not only information, but mainly the cultural activites and oppurtunites that are available here by looking at musuems, restaurants, books, movies, festivals, exhibitions, and culture more generally.

We'd love it if you could check it out, or contribute, if there's something about Akita you'd like other people to know about. Here's the link:

http://akitaculture.wordpress.com/

どうもありがとう!

Rumor Has It You Ain't Got Her Love Anymore

I am sitting in the teacher’s room after school. A few students absently clean the area around me, occasionally exchanging solemn whispers. Everything is peaceful. Then, one of my favorite ninenseis boys comes bounding in and plops violently in the chair next me.


“Jeshii,” he says, “My girlfriend…Divorce!”

Divorce?

Through a series of questions, I learn that although he and his girlfriend had not broken up yet, there was a rumor going around school which he had heard from a few other people that his girlfriend intended to break up with him.

Do you want to break up?, I ask.

Well, I love her, buuuutttt....maybe she does not love me, he says.

Have you talked to her?

No.

Are you going to talk to her?

No, no, no…, and he looks at me like this is a ridiculous suggestion.

I laugh. So you are just going to wait and see?

Yes!

He then bounds out of the teacher’s room in the same manner in which he had entered, the sole purpose of his visit being to tell me about his love life, and I realize…that I am in the know, in the school gossip circle! They now tell me things, rumors, about their lives!

I also realize how much high school really is the same everywhere.



Author’s note: A few weeks later it was reported to me that they had in fact not broken up, and as far as I know, are still together. I asked him if he thought it was "rabu rabu" forever. He thinks maybe not. Ah well.

Korea and My Grandfather

I recently read an article, and it got me thinking. Here’s the link if you’re interested in where this all started:


http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=157396344

I also, a little less recently, visited South Korea for the first time. I didn’t think about it much during my stay, but that trip was the first time anyone in my family has been to Korea since my grandfather was in the war there in the 50’s. Presumably, my trip was only the second time anyone in my immediate family has ever been to Korea.

Obviously, Seoul is a very different place now from when my grandfather drove ambulances during the war. Obviously, he wasn’t there as a tourist. I remember when my grandmother died, and as we were going through all the many, many things in her house, we found a trunk of souvenirs my grandfather had brought back from that tour – I want to say there was a jacket, but I could be remembering that part incorrectly. Mostly, I remember the silk scarves printed with famous Korean scenes on them. They seemed paralyzed into the creases and folds the years they had spent buried in that truck, with no one looking at them, had put them in. I was eleven when I saw them, and even then I realized how little I knew about the places my grandparents had seen on the trips their kids, my dad and aunt and uncles, hadn’t gone on and therefore couldn’t tell me about. I wanted to know about the Korea he had seen.

I also remember a photograph of my grandfather positioned in the front seat of one of those ambulances, knees drawn up because he was very tall, wearing his uniform. It was a beautiful picture, and I remember looking at the trees in the background behind the ambulance, visible through the windows of the drivers’ cockpit.

Thinking back on what I saw of Korea myself, I can imagine that photograph superimposed over the scenes I witnessed. Even in the city there are patches that seem quite rural, and there are such trees there even now. Did he visit the Secret Garden while he was there? I did – but I don’t know how much our experiences overlap, even sixty years apart, if they do at all. A soldier then and a teacher now, sharing even a little of the same experience. That I, eleven years after being eleven and looking at those old trifles in a chest, would go there myself. I wouldn’t have thought it. I would have liked to talk to him about it, to share.

So even though he wasn’t buried on Korean soil, his gravestone has the mark of his war – like all the gravestones in that cemetery do, a cemetery for veterans. I had never thought much of the fact my grandfather was a veteran. Because I hadn’t needed to. He died when I was eight, and his war experience was far removed by both time and space from when I was part of his experience, singing songs in a rocking chair, not thinking about death. But, now, having been there and having a better understanding of the nature of that war and the nature of war in general, I wish he and I could have talked about it – for him to see it then and me to see it now, and across all those years between our times and between the last time I saw him and now, he is still an intrinsic part of my experience – an experience I am only partly alone in.

In the article I link to above, families talk about going to a certain cemetery in Korea because their family members had died in the war. Mostly, these families are Chinese. In a way, I understand that sentiment – a connection to someone gone and far away, someone you still love and wish you knew more about, and their intrinsic connection to a place far away. So my Korea is just that, also my grandfather’s. My visit there was more than just a weekend – it was a red thread around a finger sixty years old, to always remember and to never forget.