Dogs and Demons_ Tales From the Dark Side of Japan - Kerr [134]
Karl Taro Greenfield, author of Speed Tribes: Days and Nights with Japan's Next Generation, describes his experience as an English teacher in a high school south of Tokyo, a low-level school whose students were not going to college or aiming at white-collar jobs. «These kids were friendly, jovial, and totally uninterested in learning English,» Greenfield writes. «Most of them slept during class, others kept up a steady stream of jabber, and when I tried to quiet them, they simply walked out. This was the vaunted Japanese educational system? The condition I had stumbled upon, a sort of kireru – the nihilism that animates many left-behind Japanese kids – was broader than I realized.»
If tattoos and pierced tongues meant a liberation of the spirit, then all this might bode well for Japan. But what we are seeing is not necessarily a flowering of individualism. The tattoos, the dyed hair, and the pierced tongues all follow more or less the same pattern; even the rebels remain very true to their group dynamics. These youth are unlikely to be the ones who rise above the Construction State and give thought to the environment, or decide to have an impact on local politics, become entrepreneurs and set up Internet companies, or break free of inhibitions and befriend foreigners. Rather, we are seeing an unpredictable nihilism, the birth of a new and truly dispossessed class. What effects this will have in the future on society can only be guessed.
One might think that the grueling training children undergo in their teens would continue at an even more strenuous level in college. But in fact the opposite happens. Once a student enters university, the pressure suddenly lets up. There is no need to study, because grading is lenient, and companies that hire college graduates pay little attention to grades. When a student starts his first job, no matter what he has learned at college he will have to begin training all over again in corporate orientation seminars. Since a university education matters so little for his future, the next four years spent on it are sheer play.
For those who go to college, that is, which is relatively few. The Japanese educational system does not entice students to aim for higher education, and less than a third do (versus almost two-thirds in the United States, a proportion that includes technical schools, however, while the Japanese figure does not). Gary DeCoker, a professor of education at Ohio Wesleyan, points out, «The big difference is that U.S. junior colleges lead to four-year colleges or to jobs, but in Japan they are mostly finishing schools for women.»
And there is a wide disparity between education for men and women: the percentage of men going to college is 40.7 percent, versus 22.9 percent for women. This is a prime example of the ways in which the Japanese educational system perpetuates social backwardness. When the university in my town of Kameoka, Kyoto Gakuen Daigaku, tried to open a women's college in the 1980s, the Ministry of Education refused to allow it, since it considered that more women attending four-year colleges would create social disharmony because the women would seek jobs that major companies reserve for men. Through «administrative guidance,» the ministry forced Kyoto Gakuen Daigaku to make the women's division a two-year vocational school.
The odd thing about Japanese higher education is that it seems so removed from the priorities of Japanese society. Graduate schools are poorly funded and organized and accomplish almost