Dogs and Demons_ Tales From the Dark Side of Japan - Kerr [128]
Driving through the English countryside, you see many sheep grazing on the hillside, which brings a feeling of peacefulness. This peacefulness is exactly what the bureaucrats want to obtain in Japanese society. But I want to emphasize that they want this peacefulness because their ideal image of the public is one where people are submissive and subservient. With such a group people are easy to control, and the system does not have to change. How do the bureaucrats manage to castrate the Japanese so effectively? The school system is the place where they conduct this process.
Lesson One is the importance of moving in unison. The British writer Peter Hadfield describes accompanying his daughter Joy on her first day to a Japanese kindergarten, which began, as many kindergartens do, with a roll call. After that came a class when all the students had to sit quietly while the teacher taught them how to fold pieces of paper. Only then did she allow the children to go outside:
They scattered outside in different directions, and Joy ran straight for the swings. But no sooner had the children started playing than a barrage of piano music came through a set of loudspeakers, and they all ran like soldiers on parade to the center of the playground. They then went through a series of aerobic exercises to the accompaniment of the music. In other words, they were getting all the exercise they had been getting on the swings and climbing frames, but together, and in response to a set of rules. Finally, the kids were allowed to run around – but not just anywhere. They ran around together, in a circle, in a counter-clockwise direction.
But not all of them. Consternation ensued when Joy started running in the clockwise direction:
The teachers gently encouraged her to run the «right» way, and silently appealed to me for help. I was proud of my daughter for taking a stand, and proud of her for not just following the crowd. But in the end she has to be part of the system or she will suffer for it. «Turn around, Joy,» I said in the end, coaxing her with my hand. «Go the same way as everyone else.»
Lesson Two is to learn that it is a crime to be different. Dr. Miyamoto reports that when one of his friends put her child in kindergarten, the teacher advised her to bring steamed rice for her child's lunch. «Why?» the mother asked. The teacher answered, «If children bring fried rice or sandwiches, some other child may want to have that, and it is not a good idea for children to feel they want something different. If everyone brings steamed rice, then nobody is going to wish for something they cannot have.»
The natural corollary of Lesson Two, unfortunately, is xenophobia. The idea that foreigners are aliens and should not be allowed to mix with the Japanese is an idea for which schools lay the groundwork very early. There are many examples of this, but I'll offer just one: In January 1996, the Iwakuni City Office banned children of U.S. military personnel from the city's nursery schools, because, it explained, the facilities were «getting full.» Yet at that time only three American infants could be found in Iwakuni's sixteen schools.
After kindergarten, students enter Japan's compulsory-education system proper, where schooling takes on the military cast it will have until the end of high school. «Attention!» was the first word that my cousin Edan, age nine, learned in primary school in 1993 in Kameoka. At the beginning of each class, all students must stand up, hands at their sides, «at attention.» Walking in unison, with announcements from loudspeakers, continues throughout the day, and as the children grow, new rules about dress and hair are added, and often uniforms are required.
Teachers assign children to a kumi, or "group," a unit the child will stay with until graduation. «Students