Students who have studied abroad are obvious targets; so alien is their upbringing to that of their classmates that educationalists have created a new word for them: kikokushijo, «returnees.» Kikokushijo attend special schools to reindoctrinate them into Japanese society. Foreigners are another matter. For decades, the Ministry of Education refused to accredit the special schools attended by many of the children of Japan's 680,000 resident Koreans; these schools teach the same subjects that are taught in other high schools, in the Japanese language, yet until 1999 the ministry pressured high schools and universities not to admit students who had graduated from them.
Far more effective than violence or overt Ministry of Education pressure in enforcing obedience and group identity are behavioral patterns of walking, talking, sitting, and standing in unity, which are instilled through drills and ceremonies, typically to the sound of broadcast music and announcements. These begin in kindergarten and continue in ever more elaborate form right through to graduation from high school. Many of the drills involve the repetition of stock phrases known as aisatsu, usually translated in English as «greetings,» a ritualistic round of hellos, thank-yous, and apologies. These make up an important part of Japanese etiquette, and are one of Japan's attractive features in truth, smoothing the flow of social life and contrasting sharply with curt New York and rude Shanghai. At the same time, aisatsu are the ultimate tool in teaching conformity, for their reflexive use makes it unnecessary for students to think up original responses by themselves.
The effect of the violence administered by their peers and of the broadcast round of drills and rituals is to make Japanese students very good boys and girls indeed. Dr. Miyamoto compares Japanese schools with the chateau in the famous sadomasochistic novel Story of O. In the chateau, where О is locked up, she learns to become a good sex slave by following every little rule to avoid being whipped – and she learns to cherish the reward for good behavior, which is also a whipping. «O became a prisoner of the pleasure of masochism... Now let's replace the chateau with Japan's conformist society, O, with a salaryman, and masochistic sex with work.»
So far, I have dwelled on the ways in which schools teach children to behave and conform, not on the curriculum, and that is because obedience is largely what Japanese education is about. «In some sense it appears that Japanese schools are training students instead of teaching them,» Ray and Cindelyn Eberts wrote. (Dr. Miyamoto goes so far as to call the Ministry of Education the «Ministry of Training.») Nevertheless, what of the curriculum that teaches so much mathematics and science- the envy of foreign educational experts?
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 eating for dinner, but there is another, more serious problem: the facts taught in school are not the ones that university entrance exams test for! Students must therefore attend cram schools (juku) after school – two-thirds of all students aged twelve to fifteen attend juku, which accounts for between two and four hours each day. In addition, extracurricular activities like sports or music clubs function along the lines of paramilitary organizations, with a host of extra duties that exhaust both students and teachers.
This brings us to another vital and distinctive rule of Japanese education, which sets Japan apart from every other nation in the world (with the possible exception of North Korea). It is the principle of keeping a student busy every second. This successfully eliminates any time for independent interests and results in constant fatigue. «Children often tell me, 'I'm tired,' » says Kanno Jun of Waseda University. «They are busy with school, cram-school, and other activities-way beyond their natural limits.» Sleep deprivation is a classic tool of military training, its use well documented in the prewar Japanese army. Being constantly exhausted and yet exerting oneself to gambare is one of the best lessons in masochism. One private poll of sixth-graders in Tokyo found that one in three students went to bed at midnight, at the earliest, because they were studying for juku.