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By: Gerald LeTendre
Toru Kobayashi is an eighth-grade student in one of Naka City's junior high schools. He lives in a small apartment with his parents and sister, a short walk from a nearby bus and train station. Now that Toru and his sister are in school, they occupy the two small bedrooms in the apartment while Toru's parents convert the living room into their bedroom at night by rolling out a futon. Both Toru and his sister sleep in beds, and both have a small desk, lamp, and book shelf in their room.
The family rarely eats breakfast or dinner together. Toru's father and sister are up early because they both have a long commute to school and work, so Toru and his mother enjoy a more leisurely breakfast. At 8:00 a.m. on most mornings, Toru leaves the house, dressed in his school uniform, to make his way to the bus stop. The bus passes coffee shops, convenience stores and a pachinko parlor before it gets to the stop at his school, giving him a few minutes to chat with friends before the school day starts at 8:30.
Toru's friends are all dressed in the same black uniform, while the girls at his school wear navy skirts and a blouse with a dark red scarf. Groups of boys and girls laugh and talk as they pour into the student entrance where they remove their street shoes and put on school slippers. As they pad down the hall to their homeroom, Toru and two of his friends pantomime kick-boxing moves they saw in a recent martial arts picture.
At 8:30 Toru's class, 2-7, has its morning homeroom meeting. "2-7" stands for the seventh class in the second year of junior high school, and the class motto, which hangs above the chalkboard written in English, is "Independent Spirit." The homeroom teacher, Mrs. Ibuchi, enters and the students bow and listen to the announcements from the teacher and the students whose turn it is that week to make announcements.
After a five-minute break, the math teacher, Mr. Nomura enters, and the class again bows and gives a formal greeting. Mr. Nomura goes right to work and writes down an equation that the class had been working on the previous day. Immediately he asks for answers. Jokingly, Mr. Nomura says that a good night's sleep should have stimulated their brains. Students begin to raise their hands and make suggestions. Mr. Nomura responds to each answer, relating it back to some of the material covered the previous day.
Second period is English with Mrs. Hamagawa. Although Toru's sister loves English, Toru finds it frustrating. Today the students spend most of the day reading out loud in sequence to correct their pronunciation. Mrs. Hamagawa reminds them at the end of class to turn in a draft of their self-introduction as the foreign English teacher, a young American, will visit the class in two weeks. Although Toru dislikes English, he is very excited about talking with a Westerner and wonders what he should say in his introduction.
By 11:30 Toru's stomach is grumbling, and he is beginning to have trouble concentrating. At 12:10 the students who are on duty in the kitchen bring lunch to the classroom. Mrs. Ibuchi brings her lunch into the room and eats while chatting with some students and grading papers for her afternoon class.
The afternoon classes seem to drag by, but at 3:10, after sweeping the classroom, Toru heads to basketball club. Four nights a week Toru stays to practice with his team until 5:30. The students, directed by the captain, practice their drills over and over. Toward the end of the period they have a short match. On Wednesday night he leaves early to go to his English lessons.
Toru gets home before 6:00, watches a little TV and eats some snacks his mother has prepared. He then leaves for his review cram school (juku), which meets three nights a week. Next year he will transfer to an exam prep juku like the one his sister goes to. This juku is across town, nearly an hour by bus and subway, so Toru will have to quit basketball.
Toru gets home shortly after 8:30. His father is home and they chat briefly about school and the exhibition soccer games that will be on TV that weekend. Toru eats dinner his mother has prepared and takes his turn in the bath. Sitting in front of the TV with his parents, he watches TV and scribbles a bit of his self-introduction. Around 11:00 Toru goes to his room, and does a few math problems. By 11:30 he has picked up a comic book and then lays on his bed where he falls asleep.
During the early part of 1995 I spent three and a half months interviewing students, teachers, and parents in Japan's public junior high and high schools. During this time I interviewed 20 students, 14 parents (only 2 fathers) and 25 teachers. I conducted 24 observations of student events and daily school activities (e.g. cleaning period, club practice time, teacher's meetings, and graduation ceremonies). The interviews were all conducted at the schools and ranged in length from 30 minutes to 90 minutes. The duration of the observations ranged from 20 minutes to over 120 minutes.
Most of the students interviewed were in the 7th, 8th, 10th or 11th grades. Because junior high school and high school student must pass entrance exams to move on to the next level of education, 9th- and 12th- graders follow a very tight schedule of study, and the school administrators were reluctant to allow them to be interviewed. I was able to speak to some students in their final years of schooling during informal discussions, which usually occurred while I observed club practice after school.
The staff at each school selected the students and parents that I interviewed. The students (generally equal numbers of boys and girls) represented those whose academic and extra-curricular performance was average or above. The parents I interviewed were usually PTA members and often held an office in the PTA. The teachers ranged from one young woman in her first year of teaching to veterans with nearly 30 years of experience. Because of my interest in adolescent lives, I requested, and was usually granted, interviews with teachers who came into close contact with students outside of the classroom: for example, coaches, school counselors, heads of student guidance departments and the school nurse.
During the interviews and observations I focused on adolescents’ attitudes toward school and study. I collected information on how students spend time inside and outside school, as well as on the details of their social interactions. I recorded parent and teacher attitudes and theories about what motivates or hinders adolescent achievement. I asked how parents, friends, and other social contacts affect adolescent attitudes toward studying and motivation.
The emphasis in this chapter will be on understanding what role school in general, and math and science in particular, have in the lives of Japanese adolescents. How do students of different ages react to school, and what are their expectations of schooling? What role do tests play and what kind of pressure do these tests generate? How do students react to math and science? What are relationships like between parents and teachers? Because of the tremendous range and diversity of economic circumstance encountered during the study, it is impossible to isolate a "typical" Japanese adolescent experience, but certain major factors and patterns that affect all adolescents can be delineated. These factors and patterns form the broad outlines of the adolescent experience in Japan.
Japanese adolescents lead many and varied lives. Within this wide range of behaviors and lifestyles general trends can be discerned. In the public schools of Kita and Naka City there are affluent teens who shop every weekend at the most fashionable stores in Naka City. There are also working-class students who spend their nights employed as checkers and baggers in local supermarkets. Some students interviewed were excited about their classes and hoped to enter elite colleges. Others valued school because it was a place to meet friends and worried more about passing their driver's license exam than about their end-of-the term math exams.
In the broadest sense, the major factors that affect adolescent lives are gender, urban versus rural residence, social status or family wealth, minority status, and placement in the academic track.
Gender. I recorded references to distinct gender roles as well as different expectations for male and female adolescents from both teachers and students. In junior high school, both males and females follow a similar schedule: both participate in clubs, outside school activities, or attend juku. However, the teachers expect girls and boys to behave in distinct ways that emphasize the correct feminine or masculine behavior. In high school, gender becomes a salient factor in determining a student's course of study: more young women go into liberal arts and more young men into science. Males are also far more likely to attend non-academic (technical or industrial) courses. At Naka Vocational, fewer than 10 students were female. Parents also expressed different standards for behavior based on gender: females were expected help out around the house more and had somewhat stricter curfews.
Residence. The academic experience of adolescents also differs depending on the region of Japan where students live. However, most regional differences flow from differences in access to transportation and the availability of extra-school support. For example, in Kita City the public transportation is limited, and there are few large juku chains. This lack of access means that Kita students have a more limited range of high school options to choose from and have much less opportunity to attend exam preparation resources. Consequently, public junior high schools and high schools play a greater role in preparing and guiding students for the entrance exams in Kita than in Naka City.
Economic Status. Differences in the economic condition of families are also significant within a given region. In affluent neighborhoods, like the one around Chuo, students had access to independent sports clubs, trips abroad, and enjoyed very high levels of financial support from their parents. At Shimogawa, where there were many families in which both parents worked, students had fewer opportunities to engage in activities outside of school. This meant that many families at Shimogawa had to make extraordinary efforts to provide their children with access to juku or special athletic and cultural activities. Several Shimogawa mothers mentioned taking on part-time jobs just to pay for the cost of juku.
The effects of socio-economic background appear to persist through high school despite the fact that the parents interviewed uniformly expressed strong support for academic activities. There were marked differences in family backgrounds, aspirations, course of study, and attitudes toward school in the high school students I interviewed. For example, at Meiji High School, a highly ranked high school that routinely sends students on to Tokyo University, the vast majority of the students were from middle class and professional families. Student life at Meiji centered on classes, test preparation, and club activities. In contrast, Naka Vocational students came from mostly working class or lower-middle class families. All too often teachers reported that these students were unmotivated in the classroom and seemed to be biding their time until they could enter the work force.
Minority status. Finally, minority status has a significant effect on a student's academic experience in Japan, especially for students of Korean or burakumin descent. While there was no overt evidence of discrimination against students of burakumin or Korean descent in the schools we studied, Nabejima (1993) and others do indicate that there are systematic differences in the schooling experiences of students from these backgrounds. While there are indications in the scholarly literature that students from these groups fare worse in school than other Japanese, in our study we uncovered no incidents of discrimination.
[Chapter 4 - The Role of School in Japanese Adolescents' Lives (Part 2 of 6)]