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