Читать книгу Japanese Lessons - Gail R. Benjamin - Страница 8

Every morning, six days a week, the streets of Japanese towns and cities are full of lively groups of children converging on neighborhood schools. Elementary school children wearing leather backpacks for books and junior high school students in dark uniforms carrying briefcases, all meeting friends and calling gaily to each other, give the residential neighborhoods a sense of bustle and excitement, which emphasizes the quiet that follows during the school day.

What would it be like to be one of those children? Are the backpacks heavy? What can be in them? All of us were excited and scared at the prospect of Sam and Ellen’s becoming part of these large groups of seemingly identical but animated and happy school children.

We were coming back, really. Our family’s plan to spend ten months in Urawa during 1989–90 meant that we would be returning to the city where we had spent nearly a year during 1982–83. Our experiences during that year certainly colored our expectations of how we would spend the coming year, what we could look forward to, what we worried about, and our feelings about taking two children, ages seven and eleven, to Japan.

Both my husband, Davis Bobrow, and I would be affiliated with the Graduate School for Policy Sciences at Saitama University in Urawa. My plan was to do research on language patterns in schools and other educational settings, and Dave had a research grant from the Fulbright program to study Japanese national security policy. My work could have been done anywhere in Japan; Dave’s required that he be near Tokyo with easy access to government officials and records.

There were several factors that made our affiliation with Saitama University attractive. First, we had made good friends there in 1982–83, and knew the school to be a congenial and helpful host to visiting foreign scholars. Second, the school is located within reasonable commuting distance of the government centers, but far enough away from central Tokyo to make a significant difference in the cost of housing. Furthermore, the school had available an apartment that we could rent on the university grounds. The disadvantages were the distance from central Tokyo, which meant more commuting time for Dave, and being at least two hours away from any elementary schools where English was the language of instruction.

I had read a lot about Japanese elementary education, William Cummings’s book Education and Equality in Japan (1980) and John Singleton’s Nichu (1967) among others, and had a generally positive impression of what life for children would be like in Japanese schools. But I think that without our previous experience with a day care center and a kindergarten, we would have been much more reluctant even to consider dropping two American kids into a Japanese elementary school.

On our first visit Sam had been four and a half, and Ellen six months old when we arrived in Urawa. Sam had needed to be in a kindergarten because he needed to be with children, and Ellen had needed to be in part-time day care because both her parents were doing research. We had no particular plans about how to manage this when we arrived, but by great good fortune we ended up living in a small apartment building with wonderful neighbors. The Li family lived two floors below us. They were Koreans, Mr. Li a businessman, who had been in Japan for about four years. They were members of the Urawa Episcopalian Church and sent their five-year-old son to the church’s kindergarten. Through their intercession Sam was able to enroll in the school also.

We didn’t realize at the time what a stroke of good luck this was. Not only was this school one of the most prestigious and oldest in Urawa, but it was also small and very friendly. The members of the church included both Japanese and Korean families, and the minister had studied in England. Though there had never been a Western child or family affiliated with the school, the teachers and families seemed to have no hesitation in inviting us into the school. Most students did not come from Christian families, so our being Jewish was no barrier and only made us even more exotic.

Sam arrived at this kindergarten able to say “good morning” and to count to five in Japanese. After the first day his teacher told me that they had taught him how to say “Give it to me” because the other children didn’t like it if he just took toys, and so he needed to be able to ask. After that I didn’t hear about any explicit Japanese lessons, only occasional reports that “gradually” he was getting used to things. He was always eager to go to school, and in time my apprehensions gave way to admiration for the school and its teachers and for the students and their families.

I was particularly impressed with the way in which Mrs. Li and a circle of mothers cooperated both to incorporate me into activities with them and to protect the time I needed for my work. They were supportive of both my roles, as mother and as researcher, and made life easier and more enjoyable for me.

Arranging care for Ellen was a bit more of a problem; it was through our landlady’s efforts that we succeeded. She was not only the wife of a local politician and real estate developer, but also a pharmacist of traditional medicines with a business of her own and two grown children. She first took me to several private businesses that take care of small children, but we discovered that they would take children only on a full-time basis, six full days a week. I wasn’t prepared to leave Ellen for that long. We then went to city hall to inquire about municipal facilities, and it was that office that directed us to the university’s own day care center, where I was able to enroll Ellen for three days a week.

Here, too, we were very favorably impressed with the individual, loving care that children from six weeks to three years received. And here, too, the caregivers seemed neither daunted nor rigid about the prospect of dealing with a foreign family.

These two very positive experiences with our children were the deciding factors in our decision to live in Urawa again and to send the children to the local Japanese school. We also shared the feeling of many American parents that what our children would miss in a year away from American schooling wasn’t too important, that it could easily be made up. We believed that the immersion experience of a year of life in a different culture and language would in itself be valuable education for the children and ourselves, valuable enough to offset the inevitable frustration and despair of having to deal with an unknown language and a strange conception of school, children, and life. Such a dramatic change can be hard for both parents and children, though there’s no doubt that the major difficulty is faced by the children, who have to spend more than forty hours a week in the school environment. The year was not always easy, but we have had no reason to regret the decision.

Urawa is a typical Japanese city in many ways. It is an old city, the capital of the prefecture, a center for administration, agriculture, and industry for several centuries. It is now also a bedroom community for families of Tokyo workers; its main train station is about an hour from central Tokyo. The university was moved from the center of town to its fringes after the war, but the city has grown out around it in the haphazard “mixed use” way of Japanese cities. The neighborhood of the university also includes farms, commercial areas, temples, light industries, and some heavy industry, along with housing for families of all economic levels.

On their daily walk to school the children passed homes, shops, small apartment buildings, a kiwi orchard just behind the auto repair shop, and a big old keyaki tree fenced off from the surrounding paddy fields and marked as a Shinto shrine by the straw rope with paper streamers around it and by the plaque saying it had been recognized as a shrine by the Taisho emperor. Farther on, past the paddy fields where we could see the whole process of growing rice as the year went on and hear the frogs that lived there when the fields were flooded, a Buddhist temple with its graveyard provided an oasis of green. Gardens around the older houses also held trees, the noisy cicadas that are an integral part of Japanese summers, and an occasional Inari shrine. Right across from the school a small shop sold school supplies and snacks to students and to people who waited for the bus there.

Coffee shops and small restaurants crowded together on this major street and on the four-lane street closer to our home where the traffic also supported a number of fast-food chain stores. It soon came to seem perfectly normal to us to see a shop, carved out of a paddy field, selling small electrical appliances, next door to an old farm house, across the street from a six-unit apartment house and a small factory making aluminum window frames and doors.

We decided not to have a car, so I rode my bicycle to the supermarket about a half mile away several times a week to shop; I was glad to join a food co-op that would deliver some foods, once a week. For other shopping we took the bus downtown from the university stop about three blocks from our building. We rented a car for weekend trips a few times.

Our own apartment was in a building owned by Saitama University and used for housing the foreign students and their families who were at the Graduate School for Policy Sciences. These are primarily mid-career level civil servants from Southeast Asian countries who come to Japan for two years of study. Many of them have young children who attend the local kindergarten and elementary school. That makes these schools among the most cosmopolitan in Japan; at least our children would not be the first non-Japanese students encountered by the school, the teachers, and the students.

Our apartment was the largest in the building, because Dave was the most senior resident, and at 700 square feet was considered very spacious. It had a small entryway for storing shoes, umbrellas, and other outside gear, two bedrooms, a bathroom, a large (comparatively speaking) kitchen-dining-living room, and a balcony for hanging laundry. Perhaps the greatest luxury in the apartment was its view of Mount Fuji a hundred miles away to the southwest, visible during the clear winter days.