Today’s the last day of the first term in the Japanese school calendar. What follows are a few observations I’ve made over the past few months about public schools in Japan; things that seem strange or unusual to me.
Japanese Junior High School students are sleep, energy, and liquid deprived.
At my school, club activities occur not just every day, but twice a day. They start from 7:30 to 8:15am, and again from 3:30 in the afternoon for at least an hour (I’m not sure of the exact time they finish, maybe 5.30), totaling somewhere around 14 hours a week. Young teenagers still need their free time, and so as they nearly always get out of school maybe two hours later than we do in most Western schools, it means that to get the same amount of free time, they go to sleep around two hours later than we do. I know of many students who survive on around 5 hours of sleep a weeknight. Together with a considerable amount of overexercising (usually to the point of exhaustion), students in many classes have trouble concentrating throughout the day, especially in the first lesson, and especially if what they learn isn’t being graded towards their final school grade (in the case of the English lessons with an ALT).
As Ｉ’ve mentioned above, at my school, club activities (for example, baseball, softball, athletics [running], table tennis, judo, kendo, music etc) are held for about three hours a day. By my observations, more than half the students who are part of sports clubs suffer from severe dehydration (headache, face completely red, exhausted). Students are allowed to bring a drinking flask to school. Most students have tea. Most teachers too. When I bring a transparent water bottle to lunch, when all the students have glasses of milk (everyday), everyone is surprised and confused as to why I drink water, and not tea. When I was outside watching the first graders competing in a dodgeball competition, one of the Japanese English teachers suggested that I should drink a sports drink. I replied in surprise, ‘Why not water?’. Many times I have been asked by students, ‘Sports drink please’. As I don’t have sports drinks like Dakara, Aquarius and Pocari Sweat, I ask back, ‘Why not water?’. The City of Nagoya website states ‘Please be assured that the drinking water in Nagoya is of the highest quality and thus safe and delicious to drink’.
Now there are many taps around the school, mainly indoors, and there is one drinking fountain outside, which I suggested they use. The students replied, ‘no good; bad water’. The teachers initially told me not to drink the water from the staff room tap. They said the water is brown, even though in my judgement it looks completely clear.
So tap water is bad, due to the age of the school / lack of maintenance/repair, and rainwater is also bad due to acid rain around the Nagoya Area.
I’ve been confused about this issue for a fair while. Apparently there is/was rust in the pipes. Yet the staff also use the same taps to wash their hands, boil water, and clean the mugs and glasses from. It’s a mystery…
Aircon/fans in schools.
Apparently in Aichi, only schools near the airport have airconditioning in the classrooms because of the airplane noise. I assume this is a funding / energy usage problem. The Japanese school I teach in has neither airconditioning nor even fans in the classrooms. As a result, students try to keep cool in summer by having all the windows open. On many occasions I have seen loose papers flying down empty hallways due to the open breeze. If I have an enthusiastic English class, other classes complain. If I close the door then my students complain that it’s too hot (due to the static humidity). When there is a music lesson (usually brass instruments) many classes can’t hear their teachers.
In comparison to the high school I went to in Australia which had airconditioning (before it had airconditioning we had ceiling and portable fans), we had barely any musical instruments. Now, the music instruments available in this Japanese school are all high quality. My understanding is that there are two grand pianos, perhaps three tubas, lots of flutes and other wind instruments, large percussion drums including one more than a metre wide and others, worth goodness knows how much money. Additionally, the teacher’s room and guest/conference room both have near state of the art widescreen computer/tv sets, worth possibly more than 300000 yen each brand new, yet they are never used (they’re covered in dust). I find it very strange that such expensive items exist in the school, yet the students are denied even fans to help evaporate their sweat, keeping them cool and comfortable, making for more efficient study.
Culture Myth - “The Japanese can’t say no”.
Many Japanese teachers (mostly those under 35 years old) lack initiative. In my experience, when asked if the school has something (for example an MD player), many Japanese teachers will say something along the lines of “no, we don’t have it”, even if the school actually does. This answer could be down to laziness and not wanting the hassle of asking the person in charge of resources.
Many Teachers underestimate their students’ ability. This is word for word what not just one, but two Japanese English teachers said to me after I suggested we add the days of the week to the numbers review bingo worksheet: ‘Oh, we can’t teach that because they haven’t learnt it yet‘. I think that quote speaks for itself. If they haven’t learnt it yet, then bloody hell, teach it!!! What has the world come to, teachers who don’t teach, but are drones reading from books?
Culturally, there is a critical lack of independant thought in Japan.
I hope to not generalise, but the will to perform research by themselves seems to be absent from many Japanese people I have met. Everyone thinks the same way. Everyone behaves the same way. Everyone reacts to the same situations exactly the same as each other. By everyone I mean the vast, vast majority of Japanese people. If you watch a TV variety show, the audience will undoubtabley behave as a single being; everyone applauds, everyone sits quiet, everyone shouts “heh~~~” in disbelief at the same time, and everyone laughs at the same jokes. The group / single entity / culture of teamwork may be great for an efficient work ethic and a feeling of belonging, but in my opinion restricts independant creative/critical thought. To think about something differently is strange. To pour milk into one’s rice bowl for breakfast is seen as absurd (but that’s another story). To seek knowledge; to ask questions; to analyse the news; and to question the foundations of things seems to be a strange idea. News in Japan in my opinion is maybe 50% news, 50% speculation and opinion. Newsreaders give opinions after the news reports. Audiences don’t even consider bias. What the media says must be true.
About a month ago, one of my friends’ school lunches was whale meat. My understanding of the main reason why Australia is against whaling is that Japanese whalers are killing endangered/near endangered species of whales in Australian protected waters for research, of which there has been no evidence (no published papers). Whale meat is apparently a fairly common school lunch around Japan, although it hasn’t been on the menu at my school this year yet. As it doesn’t sell well to the Japanese public, it is often sold very cheaply to Japanese public schools. When one of the Japanese teachers saw my friend grimace when he found out his lunch was whale meat, they said (in full seriousness, unaware of the irony), ‘It’s ok, it’s for research’. The teacher had no idea that what they were essentially saying was that eating whale meat was “whale research”.
Spoon feeding information is a Japanese specialty.
On TV variety shows, possibly the most common genre on Japanese TV, the screen is commonly littered with names of people speaking, dialogue of what’s being said, and one or more ‘picture in picture’ to show different people’s reactions to whatever is happening. Information is abundant, allowing for audiences to choose by what medium they want to understand the program by - images, sound, text and of course the combination of everything. However, an excess of information increases the required amount of brain processing power, and reduces the amount of analytic thinking power.
The same goes in Japanese schools. The good teachers try and get the students to think about answers before giving them. The not so good teachers give a speech of everything they know about an answer and expect the students to memorise every word.
There seems to be too much emphasis on the textbook, and not enough thinking outside the square. For example, the first grade teachers teach the way to write ‘w’ and ‘W’ as four downward strokes (what the Japanese English textbook says), and not as a single line going down, up, down, up. ‘A’ apparently has two downstrokes and a sidestroke. As a result many student’s letters look like ‘VV’ or ‘\ / \/’ instead of ‘W’, and ‘/-\’ or ‘H’ instead of ‘A’ with the top joined. The teachers don’t realise the pointlessness of teaching a technique that they will never use. Sure, it makes the alphabet look more like kanji, making learning the alphabet possibly easier to learn for students who have already learned katakana and kanji, but kanji and katakana is made with straight lines and some slight curves. The English alphabet is mostly made of complete circles, with some straight lines and curves. Lines and circles are different styles of artistry. Lines are typically one dimensional, whereas circles require a complete change in the direction of flow on the paper; a second dimension of control, and so should be taught differently.
I also don’t understand why they still teach an old style of romaji, where shi is si, chi is ti, and tsu is tu. This really really messes up the student’s understanding of the differences in the Japanese language, and messes up their future spelling abilities. I’ve encountered some students who can write in cursive but still can’t spell their name correctly. I’ve forgotten at what year of education we learn cursive in Western schools, but in Japan they start learning to write the alphabet in the first year of Junior High School (Year 7), and the cursive alphabet in the third grade…
Their consideration of the environment is sometimes good, sometimes surprisingly lacking.
Many teachers and administrators go through paper without thinking. There is a reusable scrap paper box, but I haven’t seen many people use paper from it (There seems to be a habit when printing a test page on the photocopiers of using the new paper. One teacher who was helping me find out through the internet the travel time from the school to the city hall for my monthly Board of Education meeting, showed me the required travel time on screen (I said ok, I understand), then without thinking printed out an A4 page with the time written on it to give to me, as though I have no memory or couldn’t write it on some scrap paper or in the diary on my phone.
Another example is at convenient stores and other take-away shops in Japan, eg Macdonalds (an apparently waste-concious company, as engraved on their plastic trays). If you order take away (to go), they will usually put your wrapped meal in a paper bag (designed for 8 items from memory), and then again in a plastic bag. I assume the reason for the plastic bag is that it has handles (the paper bags have none), so people can hold the bag on their arm around their elbow, like many Japanese women do for their handbags (no shoulder staps). Aichi prefecture has one of the most complex recycling systems, in that consumers at home have to presort plastics, papers, newspapers, magazines, plastic bottles, cans, combustables, and non-combustables into separate garbage bags. Now I’m not sure of how efficient the plastic recylcling system is (at a bad guess, perhaps 20% actually gets reused), but if the consumers are aware of an efficient recylcing system, then perhaps they will be tempted to not recycle themselves (eg to reuse plastic bags). Plastic bags are designed to survive for perhaps a hundred years, but are often used for perhaps a few minutes, then discarded.
School resource management.
Most teachers are provided with a laptop computer on their desk, attached to the network. My desk is empty. At my school, there is an entire cupboard of laptop computers that apparently are for student use, yet I myself am denied one.
6/08/2008
Blah blah the list goes on and this post has been a draft for a while so I might as well publish it before it never gets published at all 
