Читать книгу Japanese Lessons - Gail R. Benjamin - Страница 11

On the appointed day we went to school with our colleague, the last school meeting he would be required to attend. We met with the principal, the assistant principal, Sam’s teacher Ohshima sensei and Ellen’s teacher Kuroda sensei. Sensei is a Japanese word that means “teacher,” and teachers are addressed either by their family name followed by this title or, more commonly, by the title alone. Because of the honor attached to this role, the same title is used for other people to whom respect is given—medical doctors, religious leaders, and some politicians.

There was a sense of ceremony surrounding the introduction of the children to their teachers and the presentation of backpacks for the children. These were the standard ones we had seen worn by elementary school children all over Japan. They are made of heavy leather, black for boys and red for girls, designed to survive 240 round trips to school each year for six years. They have several compartments and attachments, and all the school equipment sold in Japan is sized to the dimensions of this pack. Sam and Ellen’s shy grins as they tried them on showed that they too felt this was an important moment.

The school gave these packs to our children, a gesture we appreciated on both a symbolic and a practical level—they cost a minimum of one hundred dollars each, usually closer to two hundred dollars. Later in our stay as we watched Japanese children prepare to enter first grade, we became more aware of the importance of the packs. They are bought after much discussion within the family about price and quality and are often a present from grandparents. They are the badge and uniform of a child’s status. Just as other occupations are marked by appropriate clothing and accessories, the occupation of schoolchild in Japan is announced through the wearing of the backpack. Though public school elementary students do not wear uniform clothing, this backpack is as much a marker of status as a blue suit and white shirt for salaried employees, split-toe boots and gaitered baggy pants for construction workers, or briefcases for professionals. Sam and Ellen could now be identified by anyone in Japan as proper elementary school students, especially when they also had the official school name tags they were to wear each day pinned to their clothes, giving their name, the school name, and their grade and class.

Next, each teacher gave them their textbooks. Sam received fifteen, Ellen ten. Besides the ones we expected for mathematics, social studies, and Japanese, there were texts for physical education, music, morals, art, and calligraphy, among others. Ellen also had a communication notebook, which a parent had to sign each day, used for sending individual messages between parents and teachers as well as notations about special things needed the next day at school and homework assignments. I was familiar with this concept because the preschool and day care centers had also used such booklets.

The textbooks are free and do not have to be returned to the school at the end of the year; only replacements for lost ones must be paid for. The books themselves are attractive, nicely illustrated paperbacks, smaller than most U.S. textbooks, most of them nine by five inches or ten by six inches, 100–130 pages. They are light in weight and all of them are supposed to come home every night, the idea being that if there’s no assigned homework, students should still review and study. It turned out that Ellen’s teacher was much stricter about this than Sam’s, as she was about many things.

Besides the backpacks and textbooks there are other materials required for school that must be provided by parents. The next part of the discussion took us through the list of these items and where to purchase them. First there were the sorts of things we expected—pencils, erasers, crayons, and exercise books for each academic subject. But we didn’t expect that the hardness of the lead in the pencils would be a matter of concern, as it was, or that there would be instructions about the kind of erasers to buy.

In the case of uniform erasers, however, the school is fighting a losing battle. Because of the nature of the writing system, people in Japan seldom use typewriters and make a fair number of mistakes when handwriting. So they use a lot of erasers, which have become something of a minor art form. They come in many colors and elaborate designs, from flowers and flags to cars and cartoon characters. Children much prefer these fancy erasers to the plain white ones we were told to buy, and almost no one at school follows the eraser guidelines.

The clothing requirements, which we learned about next, were also more elaborate than we expected. Most important are the shoes for school. Outside shoes are not worn in Japanese schools any more than they are in Japanese houses. Slippers are provided for visitors at school; we were all wearing those for this meeting. (Somehow, getting dressed up to look serious for such an important meeting and then wearing sloppy bedroom-type slippers during it struck us as incongruous.) In the school building children wear special shoes, white canvas slip-ons with rubber soles. The soles and trim are colored, and each grade at the school is assigned a different color. Ellen’s first-grade color was green, Sam’s red. These are washable shoes and indeed are supposed to be washed each weekend and taken back clean on Monday. Again, it turned out that Ellen’s teacher was more strict and made sure this happened every week, while Sam often left his shoes at school for weeks on end.

There is an outfit for physical education: white shorts for boys and blue ones for girls, with white T-shirts and a reversible red and white cap for all. The T-shirt must be marked with the crest of Okubo Higashi Shogakko, and a large patch must be sewn on the front of the shirt. This patch has a colored strip corresponding to the grade of the child and is also marked with the child’s last name in very large writing. These clothes are brought home in a drawstring bag for washing each weekend. For swimming, a part of the physical education program, there is an ugly navy blue swimsuit for girls and navy blue briefs for boys, and a cap in the class color, both to be marked with the child’s name.

The children wear protective clothing at lunch, consisting of a white smock apron with sleeves, a white cap to cover hair, and a surgeon’s face mask that is worn while serving food or going through the line. Our kids called these their “doctor clothes.” They too, are brought home for laundry each weekend in their own drawstring bag, along with a place mat, a napkin, and chopsticks. Finally, there is a triangular white head scarf to be worn each day during the cleaning time.

I came to resent the necessity of doing this laundry each Saturday afternoon or Sunday morning no matter what other weekend activities might be planned, worrying about the weather and whether things would get dry on time, coordinating the drying space school clothes needed with other laundry needs. In the telling, it seems like a minor thing to be bothered by, but for me it was one of the irritations of life in Japan. Clothes dryers are expensive and not very effective in Japan. Having to rely on a limited amount of outdoor drying space for the laundry did make me more aware of and attuned to the weather and the “natural world”; that was some compensation.

The next topics covered in our discussions were the monthly fees for lunches, PTA dues, and special purchases of supplies made by each teacher, finally, there was the walking group. Each child is assigned to a group of children living close together, who meet at a specified place each morning for the walk to school. A mother from this group is in charge of gathering everyone together, and one child is designated by the school as the group leader. The route they will follow to school is also laid out, and where several groups converge on the way to school the roads are marked with a sign telling drivers that the road is a school path. Children from our apartment building joined with those in the next building to form a walking group of about fifteen children led by a sixth-grade girl. The meeting time was forty minutes before the beginning of school, and the walk took about twenty minutes, guaranteeing that everyone would not only be on time, but have time to play before school began. This also gave the mother in charge time to round up any children who did not appear on time. The first day Sam and Ellen were sick, she came to our door looking for them. After that I went down to notify her if they were not going to school.

Then it was time for Sam and Ellen to join their classes. The principal asked if they knew what to say or do, and we said they had practiced bowing and saying “Bobrow desu. Dozo yoroshiku onegai shimasu.” This is a standard phrase said on introduction, meaning approximately “I am Bobrow. Please be kind to me.” So they were hurried off by their teachers to confront their new classmates for the first time, and Dave and I went home. We felt as though we were abandoning them.

I also felt I had been plunged rather abruptly into the world of the kyoiku mama—part of my plan for the year, but startling nonetheless. Kyoiku mama is a slightly derogatory job description for modern mothers. Literally it means “education mom,” and it points to the intense involvement of many Japanese mothers with the education of their children. There is a hint in the use of the term mama that this is a new phenomenon, since mama is a term for mothers that has been borrowed from Western languages, replacing the native okaasan in some families.

The job of the kyoiku mama is a complicated one, revered, accepted, gently ridiculed, and sometimes resented by Japanese mothers, children, and families. The term indicates the widespread feeling in Japan that education for children is of crucial importance to their lives and that children cannot succeed in the job of getting educated for adult life without significant help from their mothers. Effort, persistence, and commitment are required of both mothers and children in the business of education. Mothers’ efforts encompass the physical health of their children, loving support, willingness to have them place school responsibilities above family ones, willingness to absorb the frustration and rebellion that school demands often engender in children, and the ability to cajole children into the homework, study, and drill that school success requires. The modernity of this role has two aspects. First, only very recently have many mothers had the leisure, the release from more directly productive economic activities, to pursue this job. Relatively low employment rates for Japanese mothers of school children, and most strikingly the move away from farming, are necessary for mothers to have the time to make these efforts.

Second, calling a mother mama instead of okaasan imparts a sense that the motivations operating in the relationship between mother and child that induce a child to accept a mother’s guidance and control have changed. The children of okaasan, children in a “traditional” Japanese family setting, are motivated to cooperate by love mixed with respect for the mother’s rank and power. A modern mama, most often found in the context of families that depend on salaries for their livelihood, must depend on love alone, without much rank or power, to entice children into the desired paths of education and socialization. The emotional intensity of the relationship between mothers and their one or two children in this situation inspires some ambiguity in contemporary Japanese.

In spite of a popular media image of modern Japanese mothers as totally absorbed in their children, however, it is not clear that this is a wholly accurate picture. First, nearly half of the elementary school students in Japan in the 1990s have mothers who are employed full time or part time. These women, by all reports, work for money as well as personal fulfillment, and the jobs they are most often found in certainly do not seem likely to be very enjoyable in and of themselves (Kondo 1990; Roberts 1994). There is no reason to doubt that their earnings make either crucial or significant contributions to the family quality of life.

At the same time, it is true that one of the culturally acceptable reasons a woman can offer when she seeks full- or part-time employment is that her earnings will contribute to the educational success of her children, by making available to them the supplementary schooling called juku, commercial tutoring for elementary, junior high, and high school students. Many students attend these schools to receive the supervision, help, and emotional support to accomplish drill work and study imposed by school. Their mothers’ jobs both make it impossible for mothers to do all of this and make it possible to pay someone else to do it. Some women openly acknowledge this tradeoff; others I think make it but less openly. Some women decide that they will sacrifice the income they might make and the satisfaction they might find in jobs for the sake of a personal investment in their children’s education. Several of my friends, though, were quite aware of the implications of this choice for their own lives; they had not been brainwashed into thinking it was the only available path for Japanese women.

One of the questions I wanted to be able to answer after this year as an observer and participant in Japanese elementary education concerned the relationship between school and home and how each one was implicated in the academic performance standards reached by Japanese children and in the quality of life for Japanese children and mothers. I wanted to see just why “it’s hard to be the mother of an elementary school child,” as one of my Japanese friends put it. Although I had her as an example to watch (and she was much better at the role than I), I was already well on my way to finding out through personal experience.