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I have several purposes as I write this book. It is an attempt to put together in one package my concerns with Japanese education as a parent and an American citizen observing and participating in American education in the 1980s and 1990s, and as an anthropologist interested in modern Japanese culture and society.

The research on which the book is based is a combination of two approaches. A growing body of observational research on Japanese education has recently been developed in English and in Japanese. This has enriched our potential for understanding the implications of Japanese education beyond the spectacular headlines about school suicides, bullying, and the rat race for entrance to the best kindergartens that have been featured in the popular press. That research informs the observations reported here. Second, the data that really bring this material to life are those gathered from living and doing research in Japan for three years and having two children enrolled in Japanese educational institutions: being an observer and participant in the Japanese educational setting as a parent and anthropologist during that time.

As an American parent and citizen concerned about the education of my children and others in America, I share the ambivalent feelings of many about education here and now. I think public education has been a positive integrative force in American society in the past; I worry that it is no longer so. I favor public education in principle but worry that it might not be the most effective way to achieve the goals it seemed to achieve in the past. I worry about the great disparities in education and opportunity that the public schools offer different children in America. I am concerned about the quality of teachers and curriculum in the United States, and about the unofficial lessons in life that children learn from the social and institutional settings of education. I look at the international achievement test comparisons, and I think the United States shouldn’t rank so low. I teach college students, and I find their brightness and interest hampered by their ignorance.

The newspapers and magazines of contemporary America are filled with fixes for American education—longer school days, a national curriculum, vouchers for private schools, jail terms for the parents of truant children, more centralized control, more local control, fewer functions for schools, more community functions for schools, funding equity, more individualism, more discipline, and on and on. A central but less articulated question asks what schools can do in the face of societal breakdown, the unemployment, poverty, and unstable family situations that seem to many to be characteristic of this era.

In Japan, by contrast, there is general public satisfaction with the educational system. No one regards it as perfect or beyond improvement, but people generally regard it as academically effective, psychologically healthy for children, and supportive of Japanese society and culture and of Japan’s economic needs. There are social problems in Japan, which find their expression in schools there, too, but the public, the parents, and the children in Japan are generally satisfied with the education system. Public elementary schools in Japan enroll 99 percent of the school-age children (Japan Statistical Yearbook 1989:646), and there is no movement for changing this pattern. In the ubiquitous public opinion polls, which reach even elementary school children in Japan, high proportions of Japanese children assert that they like school. They are happier with this part of their lives than Japanese adults are about most aspects of their lives, and happier than American children are with school. During high school almost 30 percent of Japanese students are in private schools, but this is because the public schools don’t have room for everyone, not because private schools are generally preferred. They are usually a second choice (James and Benjamin, 1988; Rohlen 1983).

According to international comparisons of achievement, Japanese students do very well. Mathematics and science seem to be the subjects most amenable to testing across different languages and cultures, and in these areas Japanese students have been at the top or near the top in every international study since the 1950s (Lynn 1988). I don’t want to labor this point too much, but it is important to understand that we are not talking about schooling that is only marginally more effective in Japan than in other countries, but education that is dramatically more effective. The charts below, adapted from figures in Lynn’s summary of the comparative achievement tests that have been given in Japan and other developed countries periodically over the last several decades, show clearly superior achievement levels of Japanese children, not subtle statistical differences. Table 1 shows the test scores for ten-year-olds and fourteen-year-olds in science in Japan and in the United States. Both countries have compulsory universal schooling for children at these ages, so neither school population is an elite one. At ten years of age the Japanese are ahead of Americans, but there is great deal of overlap in the range of scores. By the age of fourteen, however, the overlap has diminished considerably; almost half of the Japanese score above the eighty-fifth percentile of American students.

In a mathematics comparison reported by Lynn, based on the American High School Mathematics Test given to fifteen-year-olds in Japan and Illinois, the Japanese lead has increased so much that the two distributions do not even overlap: the lowest-scoring Japanese do better than the highest-scoring Americans.

TABLE 1

TABLE 2

One of the best and most recent studies of achievement in Japan and the United States is that done by Harold Stevenson and his colleagues at the University of Michigan and Tohoku Fukushi University. They compared achievement levels, as measured on tests based on common elements in the curriculum, in a number of different classrooms and a number of different schools in Minneapolis with achievement levels in a matched set of classrooms and schools in Sendai, a similar city in Japan. In each country there is variation within each classroom; the Japanese classes show perhaps more variability than the American ones. In first-grade, there is considerable overlap in the achievement of classes in the two cities, though it is striking that all the bottom classes are American ones. By the fifth grade, however, there is no overlap in the average levels of achievement in the two cities; the lowest-scoring classes in Japan score above the highest-scoring classes in the United States (Stevenson et al. 1986:201–16).

Because comparisons between Japan and other countries show the relative superiority of Japanese students increasing more and more as the number of years of schooling increases, it is not unreasonable to suppose that it is their schooling that gives them their advantage.

Attempts to measure achievement in reading and social studies show that, again, Japanese students do very well. Test scores in these subjects show less variation among students of similar grade levels in Japan than in the United States. More students in Japan are found to be close to grade level, neither very far behind nor very far ahead, than in the United States (Stevenson et al. 1986:227). The appendix, “Reading and Writing in Japanese,” shows why this is an expected result of the writing systems and will also dispel any thoughts that it is easier to learn or to teach reading in Japanese than in other languages.

In physical education, art, and music, the general levels of Japanese children’s performances are less easily measured but easily observed, and they are very impressive. These are also important parts of the curriculum, approached in much the same way as “academic” subjects, learned and practiced with gusto.

Some of the suggestions for improvements in American schools come from the Japanese example, so it is important to look closely at how that system really operates. This book combines a down-to-earth, day-to-day ethnography of what happens in a Japanese school with a description of the structural institutional base for the system and an appreciation of the cultural understandings that permeate the actions and structures of Japanese education. No one knows better than anthropologists that cultural features taken out of one context and inserted into another are more often than not altered beyond identity in their new setting. But anthropologists also know that cultures are constantly changing and adapting, reacting to stimuli within the culture and imported from outside. Examples from outside can often, with care, become the medium for effecting changes desired within a culture. And Americans do seem to desire changes in their present education system.

As a parent and a citizen, then, I undertook this study to find out what really happens in Japanese schools that is different from what happens in American schools and how those differences in practice affect differences in outcomes. I hoped to find paths for improvement in American education.

As an anthropologist I am interested in Japanese culture and Japanese society, without necessarily wanting to do anything more than understand it, in itself and in comparison with other cultures and societies (a modest goal!). One of the important ways in which anthropologists try to obtain cultural understanding is by asking the question, How do they get to be that way? This is the question of socialization, of how infants who arrive at their birthplace with no culture, no language, and no social patterns become socialized, encultured members of their group, passing on the thoughts and behavior patterns they have learned to new generations.

Although our individual experiences result in unique individual histories, personalities, and selves, anthropologists have seen that cultural groups have certain ways they view and treat children that are relatively the same for all individuals in that cultural group and relatively different from the patterns found in other cultural groups. Anthropologists have long felt that in order to understand cultural groups, and the individuals who grow up in cultural groups, we have to pay close attention to socialization practices.

It seems to all of us that childhood experiences have a lasting effect on our lives and that if we want to understand the lives of other people we need to know something of their childhood experiences. In most modern settings school is a major component of those experiences. Education, in the sense of formal schooling, is only one aspect of socialization, and we understand that in some senses socialization continues throughout a person’s life—there are some things about how to behave effectively in work situations that we don’t learn until we finish school and find ourselves in that situation, and there are some things about being a grandparent that we don’t learn until we reach that life stage. Many Western people, however, share a feeling that the most important socialization takes place in infancy and childhood. For these reasons, derived from our own cultural and scholarly frameworks for understanding individuals and groups of people, the study of Japanese education is important. By learning about the experiences that Japanese encounter as children, we expect to learn something important about the kinds of adults they turn out to be.

These inclinations on our part as Westerners intersect nicely with Japanese notions of the importance of education. The Japanese approach socialization with a particular view of individuals in mind, the view that experiences are more important than innate differences in shaping personalities and adult characteristics. They do not seem to have a strong feeling that the very earliest years, say up to age five, are of overriding importance in forming permanent characteristics of individuals. Because in Japanese thinking, experiences, including those of older children, are important in forming individuals, education, what happens at school, is important enough to be of great cultural concern to them.

In the context of this orientation toward the importance of educational experiences, the regimentation that so struck us in our first encounter with our elementary school takes on a different meaning. Instead of being, as we tended to feel, the arbitrary imposition of authoritarian power, it becomes the expression of a concern for fairness and equality of opportunity.

American conceptions of personality and development tend to focus on the differences inherent in different people, to see life and education as fostering tendencies that are inborn in each individual and unique to each individual. Japanese conceptions of personality and development tend to focus on experience as the source of both the unique characteristics of the individual and of the qualities that all people have in common. Individuals are not inherently very different, so it follows that by having common experiences, they will all learn the same things and develop the same characteristics. If they are given different experiences, they will turn out to be different kinds of people.

In premodern Japan this view of individuality and education was used to support a social system based on hereditary occupations. There was no problem with sons and daughters simply following in their parents’ footsteps, so that the sons of farmers became farmers; the sons of craftsmen, craftsmen; the sons of political leaders and rulers, the political leaders and rulers of the next generation. All were educated to their tasks, and no one was expected to show any great talent for his destined job. Everyone was educated to become the right kind of person for the job he would inherit. But with the great leap into modernization that Japanese society took about the middle of the nineteenth century, hereditary occupations could no longer supply the education needed: there were too many new kinds of jobs, and the skills and personal qualities they required were different from those embodied in the older social structure.

A new and modern universal education system was instituted, based on models from the United States and France, but the cultural understanding of education did not fundamentally change: Japanese still feel that education, not unique inborn differences, is the key to individual development. What is required for a well-functioning and fair modern social system is to give all children, at least at the elementary school level, the same education, so that they have the same chances for success in the modern world, where hereditary occupations are much less important.

Education in this sense is given a wide meaning in Japan. For children to have the benefits of the same education for all, they must experience even the details of school life in the same ways. Within a class, within a school, within the country, many aspects of life that in the United States are treated as inconsequential are regulated, because regulation ensures that everyone has the same experiences and that each child will have a fair chance to succeed in education. Perhaps the most fundamental expression of this approach is a taxation and funding system for public elementary education that guarantees that schools throughout Japan have the same resources for their students. The feeling that it is right for them all to use the same textbooks, wear the same physical education uniform, and carry the same backpack is simply another expression of the same philosophy.

In examining Japanese education, we are looking at an area of life that the Japanese themselves have thought about deeply and at practices that they also consider to be both formative and revealing of their cultural values. This is not to say that teachers and others involved in education do not act most of the time in ways that just seem “natural,” because no one can be introspective all of the time. However, a great deal of thought has gone into setting up schools as institutions where behaviors that seem “natural” to the socialization agents, teachers and parents, will be “naturally” adopted by the pupils.

Modern Japan is presented to the West as a very homogeneous nation, a nation without important internal ethnic, religious, language, or class cleavages. Modern Japan is experienced by most Japanese as that sort of place, too. Nevertheless, the modern education system was conceived and set in place soon after a major political upheaval, the Meiji Restoration of 1868. This political revolution in favor of modernization instead of isolation, a “beat them at their own game” approach to the impending threat of Western colonialism, established Japan’s course in the modern world. Some scholars have compared the impact of the political and military struggles leading to the new Meiji government system in Japan with the Civil War in the United States. The sympathies, allegiances, convictions, and divisions of that period did not disappear overnight. Like many new nations, Japan was faced with the prospect of solidifying a disparate population into a coherent modern nation-state, and like most countries in that situation, Japan’s government expected the education system to be a crucial agent in the change.

Decisions about the academic content of education, about the target populations for education, and about the nature of experiences at school were made quite self-consciously by the government of the time and by succeeding generations of governments and educators. Though the Japanese education system certainly incorporates many features that are simply taken for granted as “natural” by Japanese, it is not a system that just grew haphazardly, an amalgam of uncoordinated local or special interest groups patched together into a somewhat coherent national system at a later time—a description that can be applied to the education systems of most English-speaking countries.

The plan of this book is to use ethnographic observations to explain how Japanese elementary education takes place, in order to understand how Japanese children become Japanese adults and how they achieve high levels of academic learning, then to examine what aspects of educational practice—together with the cultural underpinnings of such practices—might be usefully adapted in order to improve American education.

No one would suppose that observations in one American school could adequately represent understandings of elementary education in America. We are all too aware of the range of cultural worlds to be encountered in the United States. It is legitimate to ask whether such an objection is not valid for Japan also. One stereotype of modern Japan is that it is a “homogeneous” nation. To what extent, in what ways, is this true or untrue, particularly with regard to the topic of this book?

To some degree the two related cultural hallmarks of modern Japan, that it is homogeneous and that its central defining value is harmony, are inaccurate. Outside observers of Japan in the social sciences have by and large come from countries like the United States, even less homogeneous than Japan, and so they may have been too susceptible to the view of Japan as a relatively uniform, relatively undifferentiated population. To some analysts the notions of unity and harmony are simply malicious propaganda, foisted on Japan and the rest of the world by a governing elite intent on its own political ends. Many Japanese social scientists and historians have documented the political rhetoric and actions that support the notions of homogeneity, common interest, and harmony, and the importance the ruling class places on maintaining these fictions. In English, work by Mouer and Sugimoto (1990) and by the journalist Jon Woronoff (1991, 1992) are easily accessible analyses in this vein. Certainly no serious look at the history of Japan over the last two hundred years can escape the conclusions that there are and have been many groups with disparate interests, overt and covert conflicts, and suppression of dissidents. It is obvious that Japan as a unified nation-state has been and is a political creation.

Still, there are fashions in emphases on diversity and unity, and it is equally inaccurate to magnify cultural differences within Japan, especially in comparison with many other nations. Political and economic conflicts within a nation are not the same as cultural differences within a nation. Many of the tactics designed to reduce diversity in Japan—political, economic, religious, linguistic, and cultural—during the last hundred years have been successful, and in the field of education in particular, reports from ethnographers in many areas of Japan and in many contexts support a high degree of consensus on cultural understanding and practices throughout Japan.

There are even serious reservations as to whether the two most frequently cited minority groups in Japan, Koreans and burakumin, should be considered culturally distinct or simply people who are culturally Japanese but discriminated against. Surely, recognition of the different life experiences of these people, or of women, or of the handicapped, or of people in different occupations, does not require us to assume they are not culturally Japanese. To hold that Japanese culture encompasses a multiplicity of thought, practice, and experience is different from saying there is no common ground of thought, practice, and experience in being Japanese.

Ethnographic truth lies in two dimensions, great underlying generalizations and nitpicking, consequential details. This book offers both. It is focused around the experiences of a school year in Japan, as our family participated in all its everyday concrete reality and as we used our increasing encounters with Japanese culture to relate the experiences of school to life in Japan.

Most chapters of the book are organized around particular recurring events in Japanese school life. Some are annual events, for example, Sports Day. Some are frequent events like daily reading classes. In each case close attention is paid to the organization of time, to the talk and activities of students and teachers, to the physical accoutrements of education such as textbooks, uniforms, space, and equipment. Relationships between what happens in schools and what happens in life outside schools in Japan are made explicit. Often our American and personal reactions to events at school are contrasted with Japanese reactions. The work of other scholars is presented to augment our experiences.

A few other chapters offer new theoretical insights on some issues in Japanese ethnography, for instance the structure of groups and group memberships. The book ends with an overview of the role of education in modern Japan and the history of Japanese education. I offer some suggestions about what might be borrowed into American schools and in what form.

The ethnographic bases for the conclusions presented in this work are the time I spent in Okubo Higashi School as a parent and as a recognized researcher; the written materials and communications from school collected over the course of the year; reactions to school events we experienced; reports on “what happened at school today”; interviews with Japanese parents, teachers and other adults, including some whose children had been in American schools; what we learned and experienced when our children were younger in Japan; participation in other Japanese groups; and friendships with Japanese people.

Working as an anthropologist in Japan is not like being dropped onto a newly discovered small island; every scholar who works in Japan benefits in ways that cannot be adequately acknowledged from the work of previous scholars. This is certainly true in the fields of anthropology and education. Many previous works are cited in this book, but some understandings have become background to the thinking presented here, and although that debt is not easily cited, it is nonetheless real.

I alone wrote this book and am responsible for interpretations made here, but there were two other field-workers involved in the project: my children, Samuel and Ellen Bobrow. I observed Japanese elementary education and experienced it as a parent, but they underwent the life of Japanese school children in its unrelenting ordinariness. Their reports and reactions are an integral part of what is presented here. Their cooperation, fortitude, and openness were essential to learning much of what I have learned and tried to convey.