languageofcomp2e

School

Kyoko Mori

Kyoko Mori, who was born in Kobe, Japan, in 1957, earned both an MA and a PhD from the University of Wisconsin. She was a Briggs-Copeland lecturer at Harvard University for several years; she joined the creative writing faculty at George Mason University in Virginia in 2005. She is the author of three nonfiction books, several novels, and numerous essays, many of which have appeared in the annual Best American Essays. In her memoir, Polite Lies: On Being a Woman Caught between Cultures (1999), she reflects on the differences between Japan and America. The following selection is a chapter from that book focusing on differences in education.

During our senior year at college, some of my classmates said they could hardly wait to graduate, to join “the real world.” They couldn’t concentrate on classes, knowing that they would soon be out of school forever. I didn’t feel the same way at all. School seemed as “real” to me as “the outside world”—only more interesting.

I still don’t trust the distinction often made between school and “the real world,” which implies that there is something insubstantial or artificial about school. The business meetings I attended in Milwaukee as an interpreter confirmed my suspicion that arcane and “academic” discussions don’t happen only at colleges. The directors of two small companies, one Japanese and the other American, once had a twenty-minute debate about whether the plastic cover of a particular camera lens should be “pumpkin yellow” or “the yellow of raincoats.” What each man meant by these terms was unclear to the other and had to be redefined many times over. This is the conversation I recall now when I attend academic conferences and cannot understand what is being said about a book I have read more than once.

School and “the real world” both have their absurd moments, but school is where people go when they are not satisfied with their “real world” lives and want a change. Many Americans in their thirties and forties go back to college to get trained for a different line of work or to pursue a lifelong interest they couldn’t afford to study earlier. Until they are in need of such second chances, most Americans take colleges for granted because they are always there—almost any adult can get into some college at any age.

Being able to go back to school is a particularly American opportunity. My Japanese friends will never be able to do the same. In Japan, school does not give anyone a second chance. Many of my Japanese friends are married women with money who already have college degrees. But none of them can go back to college to earn a second degree in art, education, or social work, as their American counterparts may do.

Recently, a few Japanese colleges have started accepting applications from adults who have been out of school for years, but these colleges are exceptions. The only way most people can get into a college in Japan is to take and pass the entrance examination for that particular college immediately after graduating from high school. The number of exams a student can sit for in a given year is limited since many schools give their exams on the same day.

A student who does not get into any college will have to wait a year, attending a cram school. There is a word for a student in this situation—ronin (floating person). In feudal times, the word referred to samurai whose clan had been dissolved. Feudal ronin had to roam around until they could find a new master to serve. To be a modern ronin is scarcely better: while their friends move on to colleges or jobs, ronin must float around for a year without any allegiance. In Japan, anyone who doesn’t belong to the right group at the right time feels like a failure. If a ronin can’t get into a college after a year at a cram school, he or she usually gives up and settles for a low-paying job rather than spending another year floating around.

In the States, young people who don’t feel ready for college can work for a few years and then apply when they feel more motivated or mature. Young Japanese people don’t have the same chance. For older adults to go back to school to have a second chance—at a job or an artistic career or personal fulfillment—is practically impossible.

The very accessibility of schools in America adds to the perception that they are not real or substantial enough. Many Americans who criticize their own school system for being “too easy” idealize the Japanese school system because they are drawn to its rough image. The details Americans cite as the merits of the Japanese system actually reflect their ideal of the mythical “real world” where people must work hard—long hours, the emphasis on discipline and basic skills, the tough competition among peers. These people admire the Japanese school system because they see it as a samurai version of their own fantasies about the American work ethic.

My education at a traditional Japanese grade school was nothing so glorious. Day-to-day life at a Japanese public school was harsh but also boring. Until I transferred to a private school in seventh grade, I didn’t learn anything that I couldn’t have learned at home by reading and memorizing the same books with my mother’s help.

Recently when I was in Japan, I was asked why I did not write my novels in Japanese, why I did not at least translate my own work. The question surprised me at first. The people who asked knew that for twelve years I have lived in a small Wisconsin town where I have few opportunities to speak Japanese. No one can write novels in a language she has not spoken every day for more than a decade. But there is another reason I could not possibly have written my novels or poems in Japanese: I was never taught to write in what was my native language. My public education in Japan prepared me to make the correct letters to spell out the correct sounds, but that is not the same as teaching me how to write.

When I started the first grade at six, I had not been taught to read at home—at least not in a formal way. Because my mother read to me all the time, I had memorized my favorite books and could read along with her. Sometimes, when my mother and I were standing on the street corner waiting for a taxi, I noticed that I could read the license plates of the cars passing by. I would read the plates and she would nod and smile because I was right, but no big fuss was made about my being able to read. Most of the other kids starting school with me were the same way: we sort of knew how to read because of our mothers, but we hadn’t been formally trained.

In first grade, we were taught the fifty phonetic signs that make up the Japanese alphabet, a dozen simple pictorial characters, and the basic numbers. By the end of the year, everyone in our class could read our textbooks and write simple messages to our family and friends in our sprawling, uneven handwriting. People who admire the Japanese education system are partially right. Japanese schools are very good at teaching skills like basic writing—which can only be learned through memorization and repeated practice.

Once we learned the alphabet and some pictorial characters, my classmates and I wrote compositions about our families, our vacations, our friends. Occasionally, our teachers had us write stories and poems as well. In summer, we were given notebooks in which we had to keep “picture diaries”: on the upper, blank, half we drew pictures, and on the lower, lined, half we wrote sentences about what we did every day. These assignments gave us a lot of practice at writing.

When we got to the upper grades, though, our assignments changed. We no longer wrote stories or poems; our compositions weren’t about our personal experiences or feelings. Almost every writing assignment was a book report or a summary of our reading. We had to follow a very strict formula, organizing our thoughts under predetermined headings like “plot,” “characters,” “setting,” “themes,” “what we learned from the book.” If we didn’t follow the format, we got poor grades.

The grades didn’t always make sense. Luckily, I did well most of the time, but I wasn’t sure what I did right aside from adhering to the format. The only suggestions I got were circled corrections where I had used the wrong pictorial characters or general remarks about my bad penmanship.

A few of my friends didn’t do so well, but they were never given suggestions for improvement. They would simply get low grades and comments like “Your writing needs improvement,” “You didn’t really follow the directions for the assignment,” or “I can see you tried some but you still have a long way to go.” Often, our teachers openly scolded pupils. In front of the whole class, my friends were told to “pay better attention” and to “try harder.” It didn’t matter that most of them were serious and well-behaved students, not lazy and inattentive troublemakers; they were already trying hard, trying to pay attention.

No matter what the subject, our teachers never gave us very clear advice about how to do better. When I couldn’t understand long division or fractions and decimals in math, I felt bad at first. On the timed tests we had every day, I could finish only half the problems before the teacher’s stopwatch beeped, telling us to put down our pencils. The results were put up on the wall, and my name was always near the bottom. I was told to “try harder,” but none of my teachers spent extra time with me to go over what I was doing wrong. Since I wasn’t given a real chance to improve, I decided after a while that I didn’t really care how I did.

Over and over again, our Japanese education offered this sort of harsh judgment combined with vague exhortation. In every subject, kids who didn’t do well were made to feel ashamed and yet given no chance to improve. The humiliation was especially obvious in physical education classes. At our grade school we were expected to learn to swim in the same way we were expected to learn to write: by sheer repetition and “trying harder.” We were left to swim around on our own, but the pool hours weren’t just for fun. Each of us had to wear a cloth swim-cap with the symbol that indicated our skill level. Students who couldn’t swim at all were singled out by the big red circle sewn on top of their caps. “Red mark, red mark, you’ll sink like a big hammer,” some of the other kids taunted, and the teachers did nothing to stop them. I was glad that I already knew how to swim by the time I started school.

For those of us who could swim, there were monthly tests to determine how far we could go without stopping. For every five or ten meters we could swim, our mothers sewed red or black lines on the side of our caps. Those who could swim fifty meters in the crawl, sidestroke, or breaststroke got the best marks on their caps: five all-black lines. In fifth grade, when I passed the test for fifty meters, my teachers praised me for having “tried so hard,” even though I was able to do so well only because my mother had taught me to swim in the river near her parents’ home. Unlike my teachers, my mother enjoyed giving specific instructions. She drew diagrams on paper to show me what my arms and legs should be doing for crawl and sidestroke. Then she made me lie down on the sand on the river bank to practice the arm and leg movements. Once I was in the water, she stood on the bank shouting out instructions like “Stretch your arms all the way,” “Turn your head sideways.” When my form was wrong, she showed me by imitating me—exaggerating my awkward movements and making me laugh. “I don’t look like that,” I protested, but I knew exactly what I needed to improve.

I did not learn how to write in Japanese because even at the private school I attended after seventh grade, Japanese language classes were taught by older men who had studied classical Japanese literature or Chinese poetry at the national universities before the war. They were the most conservative and traditional of all our teachers. In their classes, we read the works of famous authors and wroteessays to answer questions like: “What is the theme?” “When does the main character realize the importance of morality?” “What important Buddhist philosophy is expressed in this passage?” All the writing we did for our extracurricular activities—for skits or school newspapers and magazines—was supervised by younger teachers who did not teach Japanese.

During those same years, we learned how to write in English. Our English teachers were young Japanese women who had studied in the States or England, and American women from small Midwestern towns who had just graduated from college. In their classes, we wrote essays about our families, friends, hobbies, future dreams—personal subjects we had not written about at school since third grade. We were given plenty of instruction about the specifics of writing: word choice, description, style. Our essays came back with comments both about our writing and about the thoughts we had expressed. I looked forward to writing essays and reading my teachers’ comments. By the time I was a high school senior, I wanted to be a writer, and English was the only language I could write in.

To study writing, I had to go to an American college. Creative writing was not—and still is not—offered at Japanese colleges, in English or in Japanese. I don’t know how Japanese writers learn to write, since most of them, as children, must have had the same kind of education I had. There are no schools or writers’ conferences where a person can study creative writing as an adult. I have never heard of people getting together to form a writing group or workshop.

Writing is not something that comes naturally to the chosen few. Most American writers of my generation didn’t just learn to write on their own. Without the classes we took in creative writing and modern literature, we wouldn’t have known what to read, how to read it, how to pay attention to form and content. We needed to be shown how to write good dialogue, smooth transitions, pared-down but vivid character descriptions. These things didn’t come naturally. It would have taken us thirty years to learn, on our own, the same skills we learned in eight years of college and graduate school. My friends at graduate school came from average Midwestern homes; they were not children of famous writers. School gave us a chance we would never have had otherwise. In America, we are proof that the romantic notion of the natural writer is a myth. In Japan, where no formal training is offered in writing, the myth may be a sad reality that prevents many people from becoming writers.

My stepmother used the traditional method of harsh judgment even though she was not a teacher. When Michiko came to live with my family, I was twelve and already knew how to cook and bake simple foods like omelettes and chocolate chip cookies and how to clean up the kitchen. But my attempts to help Michiko always ended in disaster. She complained endlessly about how I had not been taught to do things the “proper way.” Everything I did, from drying the dishes to sweeping the floor, was wrong. “I can’t believe that you don’t know how to do this,” she would scold in her shrill voice, and yet she never showed me exactly what the “proper way” was. When I asked, “What do you mean? What am I doing wrong?” she would scream, “If I have to tell you, then it’s no good. I can’t show you something you should already know.” I was supposed to watch her silently and learn on my own through observation, but she made me too nervous to concentrate. I had no idea what I was supposed to be looking for. If I gave up and asked, “Do you mean the way I am holding the broom or are you saying that I should start over there instead of here?” she would stomp out of the kitchen without a word.

I know that Michiko’s silent and judgmental manner was a manifestation of her meanspiritedness, but she didn’t invent the method. The tradition of not giving specific instruction comes from Zen. In traditional Zen philosophy, satori or enlightenment is considered to be beyond human description. Since no one can describe satori or ways to attain it, the teacher-monk asks his disciples a series of koans—questions meant to puzzle and disturb rather than to provide answers. The whole purpose of the koan is to break down the disciples’ reliance on their own intellect by humiliating them. At its worst, the teaching technique amounts to intellectual or spiritual hazing. The disciples are supposed to hit bottom and suffer terrible despair before they can open their eyes to satori and experience beauty and peace that is beyond logic or description.

To my American friends who took up Zen in college, this style of teaching seemed liberating because of its apparent emphasis on a larger and unexplainable truth instead of minute and trivial details. After years of American education, my friends were tired of specific instruction. All the rules they had to learn about writing good paragraphs or improving their tennis swings struck them as fussy and superficial. Zen taught them that everything they had learned in their Western education was an illusion that needed to be shattered. The very destructiveness and uncertainty of enlightenment sounded uplifting.

But in the Zen-style teaching actually practiced in Japan, students are not liberated from minute details. The details are everything. A beginning calligraphy student writes the same letters over and over, trying to make her brush strokes look exactly like her master’s. If she puts one dot five millimeters too far to the right, her work is considered flawed. The master does not point out her mistake. “No, not right yet,” he grunts. “Do it over.” Until the student can see for herself that her dot is in the wrong place, she will have to keep copying the same letters—she has not reached “enlightenment.”

In America, students are often drilled on the details of grammar or form and yet are forgiven for the minor mistakes they make in their writing. Their teacher might say, “You have a couple of awkward sentences and punctuation mistakes here, but your paper is excellent overall. Your ideas are good and you write with a wonderful voice.” Hearing comments like these, my friends concluded that their teachers were being inconsistent. If the minor details weren’t important in the end, why did the teachers spend so much time on them?

The paradox about the two styles of teaching is that neither emphasizes what it considers to be truly important. In calligraphy and other traditional arts derived from Zen, following the correct form is everything—there is no possibility that you can make a few minor mistakes and still “get” the spirit or the essence of the “truth”—and yet instruction consists of vague exhortation about “following the right balance” and “working hard.” In America, where teachers actually value the overall spirit of the work, they spend most of their time talking about details.

This paradox reflects a common ground all teachers share. No matter what and how we teach, we believe that what we value the most is beyond our meager ability to describe. We are struck dumb with admiration at the things we value, so we try to teach the secondary things that we think are easier to talk about. Like most American writing teachers, I value the overall spirit or genuine voice in my students’ work and yet nag them about the smaller details of technique like trimming their lines or writing better dialogue. Mine is a Western approach—the same method of instruction is apparent even in the Bible, which gives God a name that cannot be spoken, while offering book after book detailing the laws about how to build a temple or what foods should not be eaten together.

My Japanese teachers, who thought that detail was everything, must have felt that precision was so important that it could not be described: only the truly enlightened can be in perfect harmony with the correct form. In the meantime, they must have reasoned, they could at least talk about the value of hard work, something everyone can easily understand. The contradiction we share points to the difficulty of teaching anything: trying to pass on knowledge that seems so clear to ourselves to people who don’t have that knowledge. When my stepmother complained, “How can I teach you something you should already know?” she was expressing in its meanest form the universal frustration of teachers.

In spite of our shared frustration, though, I have a hard time forgiving some of my former teachers in Japan because they never seemed humbled by the near impossibility of their task. Many of my teachers felt entitled to be both strict and arbitrary—strict about their own authority and the rules of the system and yet so arbitrary and lax about helping us.

In Japan, whether you are in school or at your private karate, judo, or ikebana¹ lesson, you can never question the authority of the teacher, whom you address simply as “sensei,” literally, “one whose life comes first.” Unless there are multiple teachers who need to be distinguished from one another, you do not even use their family names, much less first names (which you most likely do not know). The teacher is like the biblical God, whom you cannot name.

Students are not expected to question the competence of their teachers or the usefulness of their assignments, any more than Zen disciples can rebel against their master and his koans. Japanese students who study at American universities are amazed that at the end of the semester most universities ask their students to evaluate their teachers. Even though students in Japan complain to each other about their teachers, they would never think of writing an evaluation or filing official grievances.

In the teaching of many traditional Japanese art forms, the teacher’s authority is backed up by a complete hierarchy called ie that controls instruction. Even the choice of this word, since it means both “house” and “family origin,” reflects high expectations of allegiance. What is described in English as a “school” (such as a school of writing or painting) is actually a “family” in Japanese. Each ie is structured like a family hierarchy: at the top is the head teacher, called iemoto (source of the house), and under him are various assistant teachers who, in turn, take their own assistants. All these teachers are licensed by the ie. A beginner in ikebana or Japanese dance will study with a minor assistant teacher for a few years and then move on to a more advanced teacher. There are various levels of competence awarded along the way, but every advancement must be approved by the ie.

The system makes it impossible for a student to challenge any teacher’s decision, since the teacher can invoke the authority of the whole clanlike hierarchy. Teachers can make any arbitrary decision so long as it can be backed up by the ie. When my cousin Kazumi studied ikebana, she was disillusioned by the unfair judgments her teachers made every year about who should be allowed to advance to the next level of competence. There were no tests or lists of tasks and qualities that determined the advancements. Who advanced and who didn’t seemed entirely up to the teachers’ whims. People who were related to any of the teachers rose through the ranks much faster than those who weren’t.

Whether or not they won an advancement to the next level, all the students were required to attend the annual certificate ceremony in their best kimonos. The year of the Kobe earthquake Kazumi received a letter from her ie advising students to rent a good kimono to attend the annual ceremony if theirs had been destroyed in the earthquake.

“I had been disillusioned with ikebana for some time anyway,” Kazumi told me, “but the letter was the last straw. I couldn’t believe that the teachers thought this was a time for people to be worrying about their kimonos. Even though the letter said that we didn’t necessarily have to have a nice kimono if our family had suffered such a great damage that we had no money, the tone was very condescending—and it was obvious that they were really saying that we should rent one no matter what the cost. They didn’t write and say, ‘We are so sorry about the earthquake. We would be so happy if you could still come to the annual ceremony in spite of the damage many of you must have suffered, and of course, you can wear whatever you would like.’”

She switched to Dutch-style flower arrangement even though it, too, has a nationwide association that oversees its teaching and licensing. Like ikebana, Dutch flower arrangement has different levels of teachers and different levels of competence, but Kazumi sees a big difference between the two. To advance from one to the next in the Dutch style, people take tests in which each person is given a bucket of flowers to make into a table arrangement, a small bouquet, and a corsage; a group of judges scores the results. Everybody has the same amount of time, the same number of arrangements to complete, similar flowers in the bucket, and the same group of judges. Evaluation isn’t arbitrary the way it was for ikebana. In the lessons she took—mostly from Dutch teachers—plenty of specific instruction was given about colors, textures, shapes, and the flowers themselves. Her teachers looked at her work and gave her suggestions—something none of her ikebana teachers ever did.

Until I talked to Kazumi, I was hoping that even though my Japanese friends could not go back to school in their thirties and forties, they might be able to take private lessons or receive training through volunteer work in order to pursue some of their interests. Even in small towns like Green Bay, many people my age can learn new skills, pursue their hobbies, or work for causes they believe in without enrolling in school.

My Japanese friends do not have similar chances to learn something new or feel useful. There are very few volunteer organizations in Japan for nature conservation, crisis intervention, helping children, or working with families who are poor or homeless. The few soup kitchens one might find in big Japanese cities are operated by international organizations like the Salvation Army. People who work at them are mostly foreigners. A nice Japanese housewife is not expected to do volunteer work for strangers. “If she has time to help people she doesn’t even know,” her relatives would grumble, “why doesn’t she do more to help her own kids study? Why doesn’t she run for an office in the P.T.A. at their school?” Most middle-class Japanese people seem to think that poor people deserve to be poor—it’s their own fault or the fault of their families and relatives. Nobody should expect help from total strangers. As for conserving nature, that is the job of biologists. My friends have a hard time justifying their passion for gardening to their husbands and in-laws. If they were to spend their afternoons taking care of injured wildlife or clearing marshes of trash instead of cleaning their houses and preparing special meals for their children, their families would probably disown them.

Nice housewives like my friends can take private lessons only if they can be justified as genteel means of cultivating fine, feminine tastes—like ikebana, tea, koto and samisen² music—but these are the traditional Japanese arts with the strict ie structure. Joining the ie would involve my friends in another burdensome system of duties and obligations, something they already experience in every facet of their lives.

In so many ways, Japan is a place of no second chances. Many of my friends are in very unhappy marriages. They write to me about the shouting and shoving matches they have with their husbands, about the night they tried to run away, only to have the husband chase them down the street, catch them, and drag them home. Unable to run away, my friends lock themselves up in the guest room or sleep in their daughters’ rooms to avoid sleeping with their husbands. For most American women, leaving a bad marriage like theirs would be nothing but happiness. My friends stay because divorce still carries a big stigma in Japan. If they leave their husbands, they may never be able to see their children again. Certainly, they will not be able to marry again and try another chance at marriage. Nobody marries a divorced middle-aged woman in Japan.

Life in Japan is like an unending stint at a school where you have to keep taking tests—giving your answers under pressure without help or guidance, knowing that you will get no second chance if you make a mistake. Japanese people have to make many of the big decisions of their lives—whom to marry, what company to join—without detailed information, since it is rude to ask direct questions even at omiai meetings³ and job interviews. They have no choice but to trust authority and do their best, just as they were supposed to do in school. If their job or marriage turns out to be a disappointment, they will be given the same vague exhortations they heard from their teachers: keep trying, work hard, pay attention.

There is nothing intrinsically wrong with trying harder. Sometimes when I see my former students in Green Bay seeming to flounder—waiting on tables or working clerical jobs they hate, the whole time talking about their big plans to “go back to school” soon—I think maybe a little Japanese perseverance might not hurt them. I know that for them or for anyone else, going back to school does not guarantee a job or happiness. Within school, too, when my students complain that everything we read in a modern American literature class is depressing or that I simply do not “like” their work (when every poem they wrote in the class is a love poem in couplets), I long for a little Japanese respect for authority. Some of my students would be better off if they trusted me a little rather than questioning my decisions at every turn. Still, I would rather have students who question too much than those who assume that I know best and don’t owe them any explanations. No one should have power that is unjustified and unjustifiable, regardless of how convenient or efficient it may seem for the smooth running of the classroom, the educational system, or the country.

The problem with the Japanese system, ultimately, is that individual freedom—to question the teacher, to disagree—is sacrificed for the supposed convenience and protection of the whole group. The system works well for people who feel no desire to rebel. The Japanese ie system my cousin complained about does ensure that anyone who perseveres in a given art form will have some recognition; periodically, every student is asked to take part in public exhibitions or concerts. Most Japanese students have public-performance opportunities many of my American friends—artists and musicians—don’t.

But for me—as well as for my cousin—the price is too high. The security comes with too many obligations. The ie system asks that you trust your teachers who have not earned or deserved your trust. What you are required to have is blind faith in the ie: like the church or the mosque, the ie is an institution that is designed to inspire total obedience to its rules. In Japan, if you reject your chance to enjoy the security that comes from joining the right group such as an ie, an elite school, a good company, or a respectable family, you will have to leave the country or live in it as an outcast. Life in Japan resembles the harshest interpretation of a religious faith: the Koran or the sword, either you are with Christ or against him, either you join the sheltering umbrella of Japanese security or you have nothing. In school and elsewhere, people are rewarded for obeying the rules diligently, never for taking a chance and being different, or for asking good questions.

But words like security and uncertainty are misleading. Because Dutch-style flower arrangement is not as popular as ikebana and the association does not provide the same kind of protection that a traditional ie gives its teachers, my cousin is struggling to get enough students for the classes she offers. She has quit her clerical job, which she did not like, and committed herself to the life of a flower-arrangement teacher. She isn’t going to get a second chance at being a clerk or going back to ikebana. My cousin’s life is uncertain and insecure. But daily, as she arranges her own flowers and watches her students cutting and arranging theirs, she is certain of other things. She knows when she is making a good arrangement and when she is not. In Dutch-style arrangements, my cousin has learned what colors and shapes look pleasing; she has a firm sense of what she considers beautiful. She also knows that she will tell her students exactly what she thinks about their work rather than keeping her criticism to herself or being vague. Kazumi feels a certainty about truth, beauty, honesty. That is the only certainty worth choosing.