One paradox of Japan's educational system is that juku is considered necessary: if the school system is as advanced and efficient as its proponents claim, this would not be the case. What are the real purposes of these institutions? One is obvious: to fill students' heads with more facts. A similar scenario in the United States would have the majority of American high-school students studying for SAT tests and nothing besides this: they would go to cram school in the afternoon, memorize every word and fact ever asked on an SAT, and strictly avoid everything else. They would stay up until 1:00 a.m. every night memorizing these words and facts.
In the juku, students are learning another important lesson: the hard work, the sacrifice, the exhaustion, the resigning of one's interests and personality to the demands of impersonal rules – this is what juku really teach. The American Ray Eberts relates the following exchange with his friend Mr. Uchimura:
«If Japan's schools are so very good, why do you have to spend so much money for extra education?»
«The children do not learn what they need to know to pass the exams for university in public schools.»
«Well, what are they doing in school, then?»
«They are learning to be Japanese.»
The effect of rules, discomfort, violence both by teachers and by bullies, boring standardized textbooks, juku, paramilitary sports and music clubs, and sleep deprivation is just what one would expect: Japanese children hate school. They hate it so much that tens of thousands of students stay away from school for at least a month each year in a phenomenon known as toko kyohi, «refusal to attend school.» A poll of fifth-graders showed that, out of six countries, children in Japan were the most dissatisfied with their homeroom teachers and the least likely to find school fun – and by a wide margin. Another poll found that only 21 percent of Japanese students said they were interested in their classes, versus 78.2 percent worldwide.
These numbers point to the fact that, under the surface, profound trouble is brewing in Japan's educational system. School in Japan is monochromatic: there's no room, or time, for a student to pour him- or herself into a personal hobby (as opposed to paramilitary club activities), or to read literature, do volunteer work, go to the zoo, get in touch with nature, or learn about other countries. The whole regimen makes sense only if one is determined to battle through «exam hell,» go to college, and become an obedient blue-suited salaryman or even more obedient salaryman's wife. If not, there is no place for you. For the good boys and girls, all goes well. But what of the «bad» ones? In an era of relative wealth and leisure, when children do not feel threatened by poverty as their parents did, students who opt out of the salaryman route tend to opt out of education altogether. They reach a point where they simply snap under the pressure – the Japanese word is kireru – and from then on, the only thing that matters to them is the color of their hair or the speed of their motorbikes. The result is schoolrooms filled with rebellious, rude, even dangerous kids-the exact opposite of what the repressive educational program set out to create!
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 none of the important research and development work found in European and American universities. Only 6 percent of college graduates in Japan go on to graduate school (versus 15 percent in the United States) and, again, men outnumber women by two to one. Even the best colleges are run-down and dilapidated, with shabby, half-deserted laboratories, trash-littered grounds with uncut weeds, and poorly stocked and managed libraries. Mori Kenji, a professor at Tokyo Science University, observes, «Industries were in trouble [in the 1990s] and realized they needed basic science if they hoped to develop their own original technologies.» So industry leaders paid a visit to Tokyo University, Japan's most elite institution. «They came to see what was going on and were shocked to discover that there had been few improvements since their student days.»
Tokyo University (Todai), the very pinnacle of the elite, is an academic shambles by European or American standards. Todai graduates make few important contributions to world scholarship or technology; they go straight into government ministries, where they proceed to collect bribes, lend money to gangsters, falsify medical records, and cook up schemes to destroy rivers and seacoasts – with hardly a dissenting voice from their colleagues or professors. Few important schools in advanced countries can be said to have contributed so little of social value. As Nihon Keizai Shimbun puts it, the work of the elite schools is «to take the finished products of high schools and industry, pack labels on them and ship them out. They are like 'canning factories.'At the 'factories,' they are labeled 'XX Bank,' 'YY University,' but they only ship the same standardized product.» Karel van Wolferen points out that Todai graduates have become the elite because of a selection process that rewards those with stamina in examinations, not necessarily those with superior talents. He writes: «There is no doubt that Todai graduates tend to be 'bright,' but many Japanese with capable minds of a different cast are discarded and doomed permanently to operate on the fringes. Much capacity for original thinking is wasted. The Japanese ruling class is far more thoroughly schooled than it is educated.»