Dogs and Demons_ Tales From the Dark Side of Japan - Kerr [132]
It is true that Japanese children score consistently higher on mathematics tests than students in most other countries. However, they have only a middling rank in science, and even in math their scores drop as soon as tests diverge from application of cookie-cutter techniques and focus on questions that involve analysis or creative thought.
Literacy itself is a famed accomplishment of the Japanese educational system, and Japan's high percent of literacy is often compared with low numbers in Europe and the United States. But, according to recent studies, absolute illiteracy-the inability to read and write-accounts for 0.1 to 1.9 percent of the American population, and it is very nearly the same percentage in Japan. Experts have never properly defined «functional illiteracy,» and researchers take it to mean all sorts of things, from the ability to read and write well enough to do a job to the ability to fill out an application form or understand a bus schedule. (If the test is how well a person understands forms and bus schedules, then I, for one, would definitely rank as a functional illiterate.) Based on such criteria, people have come up with figures for functional illiteracy in the United States that range from 23,000,000 to 60,000,000, or 40 percent of the population.
In Japan, on the other hand, functional illiteracy is not a concept. There is no way to know what the results would be if it were measured in ways similar to those used in the United States. One can only hazard a guess. For example, what is one to make of the fact that the favorite reading material of wage earners coming home on evening trains is not books or newspapers but manga comics? Manga now account for a huge share of Japanese publishing-as much as half of the magazine market. The point is not that Japanese schools fail to make their students literate – clearly, they do – but that they are not necessarily doing it better than schools in other countries.
To pass examinations in Japan, students must learn facts, facts that are not necessarily relevant to each other or useful in life. The emphasis is on rote memorization. The Ministry of Education reviews all textbooks and standardizes their contents so that pupils across the country, both in public and private schools, read the same books. Unfortunately, the «facts» are not necessarily the facts as the world sees them-especially the history of World War II. The 1970s and 1980s saw frequent protests from China and Korea, for example, when the ministry tried to insist that all textbooks describe Japan's «invasion of the continent» as an «advance into the continent.» Officially approved texts teach that the facts of the Nanking Massacre are «under dispute»; recently, they finally mentioned «comfort women» (women who were forced to serve the Japanese army as prostitutes) but did not say what they did. There is no information about the infamous kenpeitai (secret police), who administered a reign of terror before the war, no description of Japan's colonial rule in Korea, and so forth. The authorities have effectively removed from students' education the period 1895-1945, a crucial half century in world history. Courts have ruled that the purpose of the ministry's textbook review is strictly to check facts, but it has become another unstoppable process that officials hold dear. In recent years, textbook review has gone beyond war issues to other matters: the ministry scratched a sixth-grade textbook because the onomatopoeic sounds that a poet used to describe a rushing river differed from the officially recognized sounds. Textbooks may not mention divorce, single-parent families, or late marriage. Or pizza. The ministry commented, «Pizza is not a set menu for a family.»
It is bad enough when bureaucrats in Tokyo start telling families what they may think about