Dogs and Demons

The inability to slow down or turn back from disastrous policies has been Japan s core problem in the twentieth century, so it is natural to wonder why This brings us to education, which shapes the way people ask questions of themselves and their environment. Neither Japan's system nor the lengths to which it goes once it is set on autopilot are conceivable in a society in which people ask many questions. Plutarch tells us, «King Theopompus, when one said that Sparta held up so long because their kings could command so well, replied, 'Nay, rather because the people know so well how to obey' »

The fear of speaking one's mind in Japan dates to feudal days. Closed to the outside world and ruled by a military class for 350 years, Japan developed far-reaching techniques of social control. Sumptuary laws prescribed which woods the four classes of society could use in their houses, the shapes of their gates and doorways, and the materials of the clothes they wore. Temples and shrines had to join sects registered with the shogunate, and nonorthodox faiths were outlawed. The feudal virtues of loyalty and self-sacrifice became popular and abiding themes in Kabuki and puppet theater: parents killed their own children to protect those of the lord; joint suicide was a favorite ending of love stories.

No country in the world could have been more fertile ground for totalitarianism. But control of the human mind is more difficult than it appears. The provinces boasted dialects and character of their own, to the extent that outlying fiefs were almost independent states. (The government did not succeed in bringing Shikoku's Iya Valley under control until 1920, when workers carved the first road through its canyons by hand.) In the cities, class divisions created the stuff of variety: pompous samurai, meditative monks, soft-mannered craftsmen, and unruly, sensuous townspeople. Nothing could be more colorful and chaotic than the «floating world» of old Edo.

With the opening of Japan in 1868, Wakon Yosai (Japanese spirit, Western technology) became the rallying cry of the Meiji Restoration, and in the case of education Wakon Yosai involved a marriage between the old feudal desire for total control (Wakon) and compulsory education, introduced from the West (Yosai). Standardized textbooks, uniforms, school rules, marching in lockstep around the school grounds, bowing in unison – these regimens were able to achieve what 350 years of isolation could not: a triumph over regionalism and individuality. It was probably Japan's single most serious modern maladaptation.

Yet the opening up of Japan initially sparked a great outpouring of creative energy, culminating in the so-called Taisho Renaissance. Taisho, strictly speaking, refers to Emperor Taisho's reign (1912-1926), but as a cultural term people use it to describe the years from about 1910 until 1930. This was the era when Okakura Kakuzo was writing The Book of Tea; when Kabuki, traditional dance, and martial arts were taking the shape we see now; and when rich industrialists built the art collections that today form the core of Japan's museums. Great writers such as Akutagawa Ryunosuke and Izumi Kyoka wrote some of the most fascinating and inventive literature in Japanese history. Kimono design, architecture, and music flourished, and a young democratic movement began to stir.

However, only a thin stratum of society breathed the liberating air of the Taisho Renaissance. The great mass of the people were studying in militarist fashion in the schools, with children lining up in rows in the schoolyard and shouting «Banzai!» By the 1930s, this generation came into power, sweeping away the fragile Taisho freedoms and instituting the kenpeitai (secret police), censorship, and the fanaticism that drove Japan to war.

With the loss of the war and removal of military control and censorship, it was commonly assumed that Japanese education had entered a glorious new era. And, indeed, much of the credit for Japan's remarkable rebirth after the war can be laid to its well-organized educational system. This system is second only to the nation's elite bureaucracy in its appeal to foreign experts, who have devoted many books and articles to the skills that Japanese children master-so many more, it seems, than Americans or Europeans. There is no doubt that Japan's educational system produces a dedicated workforce, and that these «corporate warriors» are the engine behind Japan's tremendous industrial strength. Obedience to authority, instilled in people from the time they are small children, makes Japanese society work very smoothly, with far less of the social turmoil and violent crime that have plagued other countries. All this is on the plus side of the balance. But there is a minus side, which, like so many other modern Japanese problems, has to do with once-good ideas carried too far.

Luckily for us, the psychiatrist Dr. Miyamoto Masao, formerly of the Ministry of Health and Welfare, has put Japan on the couch, and here he can function as our guide into modern Japanese education. According to Dr. Miyamoto, foreign experts have gone wrong when they accept the tatemae (officially stated position) fed to them by the authorities rather than the honne (real intent) of education as practiced in the schools. Facts memorized for exams are only a by-product, for the real purpose of education in Japan is not education but the habit of obedience to a group, or, as Dr. Miyamoto puts it more strongly, «castration»:

Driving through the English countryside, you see many sheep grazing on the hillside, which brings a feeling of peacefulness. This peacefulness is exactly what the bureaucrats want to obtain in Japanese society. But I want to emphasize that they want this peacefulness because their ideal image of the public is one where people are submissive and subservient. With such a group people are easy to control, and the system does not have to change. How do the bureaucrats manage to castrate the Japanese so effectively? The school system is the place where they conduct this process.

Lesson One is the importance of moving in unison. The British writer Peter Hadfield describes accompanying his daughter Joy on her first day to a Japanese kindergarten, which began, as many kindergartens do, with a roll call. After that came a class when all the students had to sit quietly while the teacher taught them how to fold pieces of paper. Only then did she allow the children to go outside:

They scattered outside in different directions, and Joy ran straight for the swings. But no sooner had the children started playing than a barrage of piano music came through a set of loudspeakers, and they all ran like soldiers on parade to the center of the playground. They then went through a series of aerobic exercises to the accompaniment of the music. In other words, they were getting all the exercise they had been getting on the swings and climbing frames, but together, and in response to a set of rules. Finally, the kids were allowed to run around – but not just anywhere. They ran around together, in a circle, in a counter-clockwise direction.

But not all of them. Consternation ensued when Joy started running in the clockwise direction:

The teachers gently encouraged her to run the «right» way, and silently appealed to me for help. I was proud of my daughter for taking a stand, and proud of her for not just following the crowd. But in the end she has to be part of the system or she will suffer for it. «Turn around, Joy,» I said in the end, coaxing her with my hand. «Go the same way as everyone else.»

Lesson Two is to learn that it is a crime to be different. Dr. Miyamoto reports that when one of his friends put her child in kindergarten, the teacher advised her to bring steamed rice for her child's lunch. «Why?» the mother asked. The teacher answered, «If children bring fried rice or sandwiches, some other child may want to have that, and it is not a good idea for children to feel they want something different. If everyone brings steamed rice, then nobody is going to wish for something they cannot have.»

The natural corollary of Lesson Two, unfortunately, is xenophobia. The idea that foreigners are aliens and should not be allowed to mix with the Japanese is an idea for which schools lay the groundwork very early. There are many examples of this, but I'll offer just one: In January 1996, the Iwakuni City Office banned children of U.S. military personnel from the city's nursery schools, because, it explained, the facilities were «getting full.» Yet at that time only three American infants could be found in Iwakuni's sixteen schools.

After kindergarten, students enter Japan's compulsory-education system proper, where schooling takes on the military cast it will have until the end of high school. «Attention!» was the first word that my cousin Edan, age nine, learned in primary school in 1993 in Kameoka. At the beginning of each class, all students must stand up, hands at their sides, «at attention.» Walking in unison, with announcements from loudspeakers, continues throughout the day, and as the children grow, new rules about dress and hair are added, and often uniforms are required.

Teachers assign children to a kumi, or "group," a unit the child will stay with until graduation. «Students of the same kumi usually play together during recess, study together during the long class time, and even eat together during lunchtime in their assigned seat, all within the four walls of the kumi for two years in a row,» writes Benjamin Duke, the author of The Japanese School: Lessons for Industrial America. He continues:

The kumi mentality obviously builds within its members a strong feeling of «we and them.» Them, the outsiders, are just that, those outside the group. Japanese children often use a special phrase during play, nakama hazure [cut off from the group], to distinguish between those outside the group and those inside. Nakama hazure has the special feeling of not being part of the intimate group and, therefore, of being rejected by it. It is often used in a taunting manner. Few children want to be rejected by their peers. Most make maximum efforts to be accepted by the group and remain securely within it.

The kumi system is certainly a lesson for future workers in industrial Japan, perhaps the biggest lesson they ever learn. As the noted scholar Edwin Reischauer has written:

Their emphasis is on the individuals' own groups – the «we» of the classroom, company, or nation as opposed to the «they» of all other groups. It is somewhat frightening to realize that in the uniformity of Japanese education all the children of a given age group are learning precisely the same lesson in much the same way on the same day throughout Japan, emerging with the same distinctive and often exclusive ideas about their own little groups or the large group of Japan. Broader world interests are given lip service, but in reality very little emphasis is given to the essential «we» group of humanity.

In grade school, subtle distrust of foreign people and things becomes a part of the curriculum. It's not intentional; the schools do not consciously set out to teach xenophobia. But so innocent are Japan's educationalists of the real issues of racism or ethnic bias that they end up teaching a condescending, if not fearful, attitude toward foreigners anyway. Textbooks depict foreign products as dangerous and Japan as the victim of international pressures. A typical lesson reads, «Chemicals prohibited in our country have been used on some of the food imported from foreign countries. It would be terrible if chemicals that harm humans would remain on the food.» Many textbooks feature photos of angry American autoworkers bashing Japanese cars, to impress upon children that the Japanese suffer from irrational foreign hatreds.

Nevertheless, in view of their power in the international economy, the Japanese learn that they must get along with these difficult foreigners. «At first, because of differences in language and culture, work didn't go well,» a character in a textbook states, referring to a Japanese factory abroad. «When we tried to have morning assembly before work, or radio calisthenics [exercising in unison to recorded music], they said, 'Why do all of us have to do this?' When we tried to cut tardiness and waste, they said, 'You're too strict.' » One little girl in a textbook cartoon series concludes, «Working with foreign people is awfully difficult.» The undercurrent: foreigners are lazy and unable to understand our advanced Japanese ways – dealing with them is a painful trial. Perhaps this is not the message that was originally intended, but it is the message that comes across, not only in this example but consistently in Japanese classrooms.

There is one more important lesson to be learned: schooling in Japan involves a surprising amount of pain and suffering, which teaches students to gambare, a word that means «to persevere» or «endure.» On this subject Duke writes: «To survive, the Japanese people have always had to gambare – persevere, endure – because life has never been, and is certainly not now, easy nor comfortable for most Japanese.» Definitely not. Even when suffering is not naturally present, schools add it artificially. Elementary-school students must adapt their bodily functions to the rules – or suffer. The city of Kyoto, for instance, did not provide toilet paper to elementary and junior-high schools during most of the 1990s. Morihara Yoshihiro, a member of the Kyoto Municipal Board of Education, said, «Students should carry tissues with them, and if they use the toilet in the morning at home, they won't have to do so at school.» Students may not change out of their winter uniforms even if the weather is hot – everyone must sweat until the appointed day comes for the change into spring clothes.

Life in grade school is wild, heedless abandon compared with what follows in junior high and high school. Hair codes and uniforms become nearly universal, with everything prescribed, right down to the socks. Boys wear military-style uniforms with brass buttons, and girls wear a sort of sailor suit. In 1996, Habikino City, near Osaka, introduced uniforms for teachers as well.

The uniforms and dress codes are intended to enforce harmony. «In my mind,» Dr. Miyamoto writes, «the concept of harmony means an acceptance of differences, but when the Japanese talk about harmony it means a denial of differences and an embrace of sameness. Sameness in interpersonal relationships means a reflection of the other, the basic concept of which derives from narcissism.»

Punishment for dress- and hair-code infringements can be severe. In one case, teachers stopped a student in Fukuoka Prefecture at the school gate and ordered him to go home after he refused to get the regulation buzz haircut. Later, they allowed him back, but he was separated from other students and made to study by himself in an empty room – in solitary confinement. «Psychologically speaking hair symbolizes power,» says Dr. Miyamoto, «and at the same time it is an expression of one's thoughts, emotions and conflicts... As you may recognize, through hair, the educational system demands that students share the illusion that all Japanese are the same.»

From hair and dress, the rules extend in the hundreds to issues that go beyond the schoolyard. Many schools require children to wear uniforms on weekends; others decree that students may not buy drinks from vending machines on their way home from school. And often violence enforces these rules.

Corporal punishment is illegal, but this is often a case of tatemae rather than honne. For one thing, teacher violence carries no legal penalty. So widespread is teacher violence that at the trial of Miyamoto Akira, a teacher in Fukuoka who killed a girl by striking her on the head and shoulders, the line of defense was that the court should not single Miyamoto out because teachers everywhere commonly strike pupils. Pupils in the regular educational system fare better than those who are sent to special schools and seminars (boot camps, basically) whose purpose is to toughen them up. These schools are known for their shoutings, beatings, and physical privations; indeed, parents send their children to them expressly so that they will undergo such privations. The severe discipline at these schools often leads to injury, and sometimes to death.

While teachers sometimes resort to physical punishment, most of the violence in the schools is among the students themselves. The acceptance of violence against those who are weaker than you is a part of Japan's educational process, as it enforces group unity. Given the intense pressure to conform from kindergarten onward, Japanese students frequently turn to bullying, known as ijime. Ijime is a national problem, and it results in several much publicized suicides of schoolchildren every year. With a girl, it starts with being called kusai (smelly) or baikin (bacteria), and eventually takes the psychologically crushing form of not being talked to, or being shunned when she approaches. One girl interviewed by a reporter said that she thought what she had done wrong was to be outspoken – or perhaps she was too tall.

As the writer Sakamaki Sachiko has said, «An odd nuance of speech or appearance is enough to invite ostracism, and in a society where conformity is everything, no stigma weighs heavier than the curse of being different. Too fat or too short, too smart or too slow – all make inviting targets. Many Japanese children who have lived abroad deliberately perform poorly in, say, English classes so as not to stand out.» With boys, ijime can result in severe hazing. In the case of Ito Hisashi, a thirteen-year-old in Joetsu, a city north of Tokyo, ijime began when his friends ignored him; later they stripped him naked in the school bathroom, doused him with water, and extorted money from him. His father found him swinging by the neck from a basketball hoop.

There is very little recourse against this kind of bullying, since in Japanese schools it is the one who is bullied who is considered to be at fault. While teachers take an official stand against ijime, they tend to encourage it indirectly, through their own emphasis on obedience to the group. In a nationwide conference of the Japan Teachers' Union in 1996, most teachers agreed: «It can't be helped that in severe cases of bullying the bullied student skips school for a while.» But only 11 percent thought it was appropriate to suspend the bullies. KoderaYasuko, the author of the best-selling book How to Fight Against Bullying, found that when she complained about her daughter's having been bullied, school authorities and the other parents dismissed the problem as hers, not theirs. Dr. Miyamoto says, «Bullying the weak is considered psychologically abnormal and a sign of immaturity in the West. But in Japan it's accepted.»

Students who have studied abroad are obvious targets; so alien is their upbringing to that of their classmates that educationalists have created a new word for them: kikokushijo, «returnees.» Kikokushijo attend special schools to reindoctrinate them into Japanese society. Foreigners are another matter. For decades, the Ministry of Education refused to accredit the special schools attended by many of the children of Japan's 680,000 resident Koreans; these schools teach the same subjects that are taught in other high schools, in the Japanese language, yet until 1999 the ministry pressured high schools and universities not to admit students who had graduated from them.

Far more effective than violence or overt Ministry of Education pressure in enforcing obedience and group identity are behavioral patterns of walking, talking, sitting, and standing in unity, which are instilled through drills and ceremonies, typically to the sound of broadcast music and announcements. These begin in kindergarten and continue in ever more elaborate form right through to graduation from high school. Many of the drills involve the repetition of stock phrases known as aisatsu, usually translated in English as «greetings,» a ritualistic round of hellos, thank-yous, and apologies. These make up an important part of Japanese etiquette, and are one of Japan's attractive features in truth, smoothing the flow of social life and contrasting sharply with curt New York and rude Shanghai. At the same time, aisatsu are the ultimate tool in teaching conformity, for their reflexive use makes it unnecessary for students to think up original responses by themselves.

The effect of the violence administered by their peers and of the broadcast round of drills and rituals is to make Japanese students very good boys and girls indeed. Dr. Miyamoto compares Japanese schools with the chateau in the famous sadomasochistic novel Story of O. In the chateau, where О is locked up, she learns to become a good sex slave by following every little rule to avoid being whipped – and she learns to cherish the reward for good behavior, which is also a whipping. «O became a prisoner of the pleasure of masochism... Now let's replace the chateau with Japan's conformist society, O, with a salaryman, and masochistic sex with work.»

So far, I have dwelled on the ways in which schools teach children to behave and conform, not on the curriculum, and that is because obedience is largely what Japanese education is about. «In some sense it appears that Japanese schools are training students instead of teaching them,» Ray and Cindelyn Eberts wrote. (Dr. Miyamoto goes so far as to call the Ministry of Education the «Ministry of Training.») Nevertheless, what of the curriculum that teaches so much mathematics and science- the envy of foreign educational experts?

It is true that Japanese children score consistently higher on mathematics tests than students in most other countries. However, they have only a middling rank in science, and even in math their scores drop as soon as tests diverge from application of cookie-cutter techniques and focus on questions that involve analysis or creative thought.

Literacy itself is a famed accomplishment of the Japanese educational system, and Japan's high percent of literacy is often compared with low numbers in Europe and the United States. But, according to recent studies, absolute illiteracy-the inability to read and write-accounts for 0.1 to 1.9 percent of the American population, and it is very nearly the same percentage in Japan. Experts have never properly defined «functional illiteracy,» and researchers take it to mean all sorts of things, from the ability to read and write well enough to do a job to the ability to fill out an application form or understand a bus schedule. (If the test is how well a person understands forms and bus schedules, then I, for one, would definitely rank as a functional illiterate.) Based on such criteria, people have come up with figures for functional illiteracy in the United States that range from 23,000,000 to 60,000,000, or 40 percent of the population.

In Japan, on the other hand, functional illiteracy is not a concept. There is no way to know what the results would be if it were measured in ways similar to those used in the United States. One can only hazard a guess. For example, what is one to make of the fact that the favorite reading material of wage earners coming home on evening trains is not books or newspapers but manga comics? Manga now account for a huge share of Japanese publishing-as much as half of the magazine market. The point is not that Japanese schools fail to make their students literate – clearly, they do – but that they are not necessarily doing it better than schools in other countries.

To pass examinations in Japan, students must learn facts, facts that are not necessarily relevant to each other or useful in life. The emphasis is on rote memorization. The Ministry of Education reviews all textbooks and standardizes their contents so that pupils across the country, both in public and private schools, read the same books. Unfortunately, the «facts» are not necessarily the facts as the world sees them-especially the history of World War II. The 1970s and 1980s saw frequent protests from China and Korea, for example, when the ministry tried to insist that all textbooks describe Japan's «invasion of the continent» as an «advance into the continent.» Officially approved texts teach that the facts of the Nanking Massacre are «under dispute»; recently, they finally mentioned «comfort women» (women who were forced to serve the Japanese army as prostitutes) but did not say what they did. There is no information about the infamous kenpeitai (secret police), who administered a reign of terror before the war, no description of Japan's colonial rule in Korea, and so forth. The authorities have effectively removed from students' education the period 1895-1945, a crucial half century in world history. Courts have ruled that the purpose of the ministry's textbook review is strictly to check facts, but it has become another unstoppable process that officials hold dear. In recent years, textbook review has gone beyond war issues to other matters: the ministry scratched a sixth-grade textbook because the onomatopoeic sounds that a poet used to describe a rushing river differed from the officially recognized sounds. Textbooks may not mention divorce, single-parent families, or late marriage. Or pizza. The ministry commented, «Pizza is not a set menu for a family.»

It is bad enough when bureaucrats in Tokyo start telling families what they may think about eating for dinner, but there is another, more serious problem: the facts taught in school are not the ones that university entrance exams test for! Students must therefore attend cram schools (juku) after school – two-thirds of all students aged twelve to fifteen attend juku, which accounts for between two and four hours each day. In addition, extracurricular activities like sports or music clubs function along the lines of paramilitary organizations, with a host of extra duties that exhaust both students and teachers.

This brings us to another vital and distinctive rule of Japanese education, which sets Japan apart from every other nation in the world (with the possible exception of North Korea). It is the principle of keeping a student busy every second. This successfully eliminates any time for independent interests and results in constant fatigue. «Children often tell me, 'I'm tired,' » says Kanno Jun of Waseda University. «They are busy with school, cram-school, and other activities-way beyond their natural limits.» Sleep deprivation is a classic tool of military training, its use well documented in the prewar Japanese army. Being constantly exhausted and yet exerting oneself to gambare is one of the best lessons in masochism. One private poll of sixth-graders in Tokyo found that one in three students went to bed at midnight, at the earliest, because they were studying for juku.

One paradox of Japan's educational system is that juku is considered necessary: if the school system is as advanced and efficient as its proponents claim, this would not be the case. What are the real purposes of these institutions? One is obvious: to fill students' heads with more facts. A similar scenario in the United States would have the majority of American high-school students studying for SAT tests and nothing besides this: they would go to cram school in the afternoon, memorize every word and fact ever asked on an SAT, and strictly avoid everything else. They would stay up until 1:00 a.m. every night memorizing these words and facts.

In the juku, students are learning another important lesson: the hard work, the sacrifice, the exhaustion, the resigning of one's interests and personality to the demands of impersonal rules – this is what juku really teach. The American Ray Eberts relates the following exchange with his friend Mr. Uchimura:

«If Japan's schools are so very good, why do you have to spend so much money for extra education?»

«The children do not learn what they need to know to pass the exams for university in public schools.»

«Well, what are they doing in school, then?»

«They are learning to be Japanese.»

The effect of rules, discomfort, violence both by teachers and by bullies, boring standardized textbooks, juku, paramilitary sports and music clubs, and sleep deprivation is just what one would expect: Japanese children hate school. They hate it so much that tens of thousands of students stay away from school for at least a month each year in a phenomenon known as toko kyohi, «refusal to attend school.» A poll of fifth-graders showed that, out of six countries, children in Japan were the most dissatisfied with their homeroom teachers and the least likely to find school fun – and by a wide margin. Another poll found that only 21 percent of Japanese students said they were interested in their classes, versus 78.2 percent worldwide.

These numbers point to the fact that, under the surface, profound trouble is brewing in Japan's educational system. School in Japan is monochromatic: there's no room, or time, for a student to pour him- or herself into a personal hobby (as opposed to paramilitary club activities), or to read literature, do volunteer work, go to the zoo, get in touch with nature, or learn about other countries. The whole regimen makes sense only if one is determined to battle through «exam hell,» go to college, and become an obedient blue-suited salaryman or even more obedient salaryman's wife. If not, there is no place for you. For the good boys and girls, all goes well. But what of the «bad» ones? In an era of relative wealth and leisure, when children do not feel threatened by poverty as their parents did, students who opt out of the salaryman route tend to opt out of education altogether. They reach a point where they simply snap under the pressure – the Japanese word is kireru – and from then on, the only thing that matters to them is the color of their hair or the speed of their motorbikes. The result is schoolrooms filled with rebellious, rude, even dangerous kids-the exact opposite of what the repressive educational program set out to create!

Karl Taro Greenfield, author of Speed Tribes: Days and Nights with Japan's Next Generation, describes his experience as an English teacher in a high school south of Tokyo, a low-level school whose students were not going to college or aiming at white-collar jobs. «These kids were friendly, jovial, and totally uninterested in learning English,» Greenfield writes. «Most of them slept during class, others kept up a steady stream of jabber, and when I tried to quiet them, they simply walked out. This was the vaunted Japanese educational system? The condition I had stumbled upon, a sort of kireru – the nihilism that animates many left-behind Japanese kids – was broader than I realized.»

If tattoos and pierced tongues meant a liberation of the spirit, then all this might bode well for Japan. But what we are seeing is not necessarily a flowering of individualism. The tattoos, the dyed hair, and the pierced tongues all follow more or less the same pattern; even the rebels remain very true to their group dynamics. These youth are unlikely to be the ones who rise above the Construction State and give thought to the environment, or decide to have an impact on local politics, become entrepreneurs and set up Internet companies, or break free of inhibitions and befriend foreigners. Rather, we are seeing an unpredictable nihilism, the birth of a new and truly dispossessed class. What effects this will have in the future on society can only be guessed.

One might think that the grueling training children undergo in their teens would continue at an even more strenuous level in college. But in fact the opposite happens. Once a student enters university, the pressure suddenly lets up. There is no need to study, because grading is lenient, and companies that hire college graduates pay little attention to grades. When a student starts his first job, no matter what he has learned at college he will have to begin training all over again in corporate orientation seminars. Since a university education matters so little for his future, the next four years spent on it are sheer play.

For those who go to college, that is, which is relatively few. The Japanese educational system does not entice students to aim for higher education, and less than a third do (versus almost two-thirds in the United States, a proportion that includes technical schools, however, while the Japanese figure does not). Gary DeCoker, a professor of education at Ohio Wesleyan, points out, «The big difference is that U.S. junior colleges lead to four-year colleges or to jobs, but in Japan they are mostly finishing schools for women.»

And there is a wide disparity between education for men and women: the percentage of men going to college is 40.7 percent, versus 22.9 percent for women. This is a prime example of the ways in which the Japanese educational system perpetuates social backwardness. When the university in my town of Kameoka, Kyoto Gakuen Daigaku, tried to open a women's college in the 1980s, the Ministry of Education refused to allow it, since it considered that more women attending four-year colleges would create social disharmony because the women would seek jobs that major companies reserve for men. Through «administrative guidance,» the ministry forced Kyoto Gakuen Daigaku to make the women's division a two-year vocational school.

The odd thing about Japanese higher education is that it seems so removed from the priorities of Japanese society. Graduate schools are poorly funded and organized and accomplish almost none of the important research and development work found in European and American universities. Only 6 percent of college graduates in Japan go on to graduate school (versus 15 percent in the United States) and, again, men outnumber women by two to one. Even the best colleges are run-down and dilapidated, with shabby, half-deserted laboratories, trash-littered grounds with uncut weeds, and poorly stocked and managed libraries. Mori Kenji, a professor at Tokyo Science University, observes, «Industries were in trouble [in the 1990s] and realized they needed basic science if they hoped to develop their own original technologies.» So industry leaders paid a visit to Tokyo University, Japan's most elite institution. «They came to see what was going on and were shocked to discover that there had been few improvements since their student days.»

Tokyo University (Todai), the very pinnacle of the elite, is an academic shambles by European or American standards. Todai graduates make few important contributions to world scholarship or technology; they go straight into government ministries, where they proceed to collect bribes, lend money to gangsters, falsify medical records, and cook up schemes to destroy rivers and seacoasts – with hardly a dissenting voice from their colleagues or professors. Few important schools in advanced countries can be said to have contributed so little of social value. As Nihon Keizai Shimbun puts it, the work of the elite schools is «to take the finished products of high schools and industry, pack labels on them and ship them out. They are like 'canning factories.'At the 'factories,' they are labeled 'XX Bank,' 'YY University,' but they only ship the same standardized product.» Karel van Wolferen points out that Todai graduates have become the elite because of a selection process that rewards those with stamina in examinations, not necessarily those with superior talents. He writes: «There is no doubt that Todai graduates tend to be 'bright,' but many Japanese with capable minds of a different cast are discarded and doomed permanently to operate on the fringes. Much capacity for original thinking is wasted. The Japanese ruling class is far more thoroughly schooled than it is educated.»

Edwin Reischauer comments, «The squandering of four years at the college level on poor teaching and very little study seems an incredible waste of time for a nation so passionately devoted to efficiency.» What are we to make of this? The situation is doubly strange because the Japanese do not usually do things by half measures. The only possible answer is that Japanese society functions in such a way that the nation seems not to need universities. «By the time he reaches age 18, the Japanese child has become a perfect sheep,» Dr. Miyamoto writes. «As sheep on the meadow are not concerned with freedom, to most university students in Japan, freedom as a concept is not important.» In other words, by the time students arrive at college, the training process is already complete. Universities are superfluous.

Japanese universities are one giant tatemae erected to the idea of advanced education. In the bureaucratic state, where training as an adult begins in the company or ministry, there is no social need for them. The fact that serious learning takes place not in college but in industry goes far in explaining the lack of variety of new technologies developed in Japan. Without the wide-ranging and inventive research in universities that would lead to advanced knowledge of the environment and to new theoretical sciences, Japan's best minds devote themselves to one narrow band of human activity: skills in making, building, and marketing things.

Henry Adams once wrote, «Nothing in education is so astonishing as the amount of ignorance it accumulates in the form of inert facts.» Their heads filled to overflowing with facts fed them by the Ministry of Education, Japanese students are surprisingly lacking in common knowledge. In February 1996, Azby Brown, an American teaching at a Japanese architectural college, noted these results of a study he had done: When he tested his architectural-design graduate students, he found they could not read hundred-page Japanese tracts, or summarize longer books. No one recognized the Guggenheim Museum, or knew in what century the Phoenix Pavilion, the famous Heian temple featured on ¥10 coins, was built. Only one student knew when World War II had taken place. They didn't know what Islam was and had never heard of Muhammad. One student thought Christianity started in A.D. 600.

Professor Duke is right in arguing that the Japanese educational system succeeds in producing a «loyal, literate, competent, and diligent worker,» but he is wrong in believing that this success lies in how much Japanese students know. It is precisely the lack of independent knowledge that makes these workers so loyal, competent, and diligent. They have not been taught analytical thinking, the ability to ask unusual or creative questions, a sense of brotherhood with the rest of mankind, or curiosity about and love for the natural environment. The blame for modern Japan's environmental disaster falls squarely at the feet of the educational system, because it teaches people never to take personal responsibility for their surroundings. This leaves none but a few rebellious souls to notice or cry out when rivers and mountainsides are paved over.

Aware to some degree that the Japanese public suffers from this kind of ignorance, the Ministry of Education has dreamed up another «demon,» the concept of shogai gakushu, or Lifelong Learning. The idea is that as the number of older retired people increases, the nation should give them the chance to study in their old age: English classes, tea ceremony, or other hobbies. Lifelong Learning suits the Construction State well, for it justifies the building of countless multipurpose Lifelong Learning Halls, but there is one little problem that lies in the word «lifelong.» Take people who as children in school were discouraged from thinking for themselves. Deny them the time then and later, as working adults, to develop interests of their own: how can you expect them suddenly to acquire a taste for learning in their old age?

Nothing is more difficult to change than a policy that once worked and works no longer. Training people to be corporate drones succeeded in an era when manufacturing was the source of all wealth, and Japan could easily and cheaply import technology. But with a new age of services and information management dawning, and with software becoming a huge and costly industry, flexible and inventive minds are called for, yet flexible and inventive minds are exactly what the Japanese system tends to stamp out.

Mired in bureaucratic inertia, Japanese schools have been very slow to update the curriculum: in 1994, a Ministry of Education survey found that two-thirds of Japan's public-school teachers could not operate computers, and matters had improved only very slowly by the end of the decade. In late 1998, Japan ranked fifteenth in the world for Internet users per capita, falling far below the United States and some European nations, and lagging behind Hong Kong, Korea, and Singapore. It is one of the curious and unexpected twists of modern times that Japan, thought to be enamored of advanced science, has been so slow to embrace the new world of information technology – for most of the 1990s, it positively spurned it.

The reasons for this curious twist are many, including overpricing (Internet fees far higher than those in the United States or Hong Kong), overregulation, and fear on the part of conservative-minded leaders who foresee that the individualistic Internet threatens Japan's social cohesiveness. «It is true that multimedia will offer surprising advantages in some fields,» an editorial in Asahi Shimbun said in October 1994. But it warned, «It is, however, still a wild card to our society as a whole. We should not be in a hurry.»

And, indeed, Japan has not been in a hurry. The sluggish growth of its economy in the 1990s is ample proof of this. American entrepreneurs built huge businesses centered on information technology over recent decades: an Apple, a Microsoft, a Netscape, an Oracle, an Amazon.com – nothing like these developed in Japan. The two leading Japanese software developers, Ascii and Justsystem, are tiny in comparison with their American competitors, and both of them are bleeding red ink as Microsoft gobbles up the Japanese market. Justsystem's main product, a word-processing software called Ichitaro, maintained 80 percent of the domestic market until 1996, but by 1998 that percentage had fallen to 40 percent and was dropping rapidly.

Japan, however, must do what the rest of the world does, especially if it involves industry-and this means that sooner or later the Internet is coming to Japan. As the millennium turned, there were signs that Internet-based businesses had at last begun to prosper in Japan, with Yahoo! Japan stock rising to stratospheric heights and numerous government programs aiming to encourage entrepreneurs. But, for Japanese industry in general, change will not come easily, for workers fear to suggest new ideas lest the group ostracize them. The patterns of ijime extend deeply into corporate life. When Dr. Miyamoto angered his superiors at the Ministry of Health and Welfare, his boss ordered other employees not to speak to him, and even the tea girls not to deliver tea to his desk. Childish though these techniques may seem, for the average employee, taught from childhood never to offend the group, there is no psychological protection against them. How do you train people to become adventurous entrepreneurs when their education has taught them that this is precisely what they should not be?

This was brought home to me as I was editing this book in the spring of 2000, and found myself sitting in Tokyo's Keio Plaza Hotel coffee shop one day. Next to me was a young man interviewing another young man for a position in a start-up company, and I couldn't help eavesdropping. The earnest young interviewee, when asked to outline his strategy for a new startup business, replied, «Aisatsu. It's vital for company morale that everyone say 'Good morning,' 'Good afternoon,' and so forth regularly and respectfully.» It might seem charming that the young man thought this way, that there's a corner of the world where things like aisatsu still matter; on the other hand, while he's busy working on getting his aisatsu just right, the Internet whizzes of Hong Kong, Singapore, and Bangalore are going to leave him in the dust.

I saw the interviewer involuntarily move away, and I could see from his body language that this discussion was over. In spite of the pressures for conformity, there is a generation of adventurous young Japanese who are well aware of what will be needed to compete in the big wide world. The great question is whether there will be enough of them to make a difference.

As we have seen throughout this book, the Japanese people see the trouble their nation is in far better than foreign experts with emerald glasses firmly fixed on their noses. The public is disappointed with the educational system, and the press resounds with calls for reform. As Prime Minister Hashimoto said in his 1997 New Year's address, «The present education system just crams knowledge into children's heads. It values memorization too much. The system doesn't allow children to decide dreams, hopes and targets by themselves.» In a report delivered to Prime Minister Obuchi in January 2000, a blue-chip commission headed by Hayao Kawai, the director general of the National Research Center for Japanese Studies, concluded that Japan's society is «ossified,» and that adherence to rules and conformity have «leached Japan's vitality.» The commission called for individuality and more support for risk-takers. Unfortunately for Japan, at the very moment when change is necessary, education – and society as a whole – appear to be headed toward more regimentation, not less.