I'm not actually his greatest fan, as he tends to exoticize and idealize Japan and Japanese people (for example, he once observed a class of Japanese and English children learning to write calligraphy for the first time, and decided that because the Japanese children could do it better, it means there is some innate physical quality that embodies their culture in them. Um, how about the simple fact that Japanese children have been surrounded by Japanese written characters all their lives, and are extremely familiar with them, and English children have not? It has nothing to do with genetics!! Human beings are human beings! Anyone, regardless of race, raised in a culture can do anything the other people of that culture can). Also, I don't know why he insisted on romanizing か as kwa when the sound made is ka! Unnecessarily exoticizing! Drives me crazy, especially when you still hear today about "kwanzen cherry trees" when the kwa sound does not exist in Japanese! It's kanzen cherries!!
However, despite his faults, reading his works is a great way to learn more about my city, and I've found out some very interesting things I wouldn't know otherwise. Plus, it's amazing that I can read an account of a place in Japan I'm familiar with about how it was in 1890, and compare.
Mostly he wrote about visiting shrines and temples in Japan, but a few essays center on his life in my city and his experiences teaching English (he came to Japan as a journalist, but liked it so much he moved to my city to teach English in order to stay here, where he met his wife--a Japanese woman--and had a family with her, becoming a naturalized Japanese citizen and adopting her last name. Their descendents live in this city today). The English teacher essay in particular is interesting to me... so many things still ring true today, but so many things are very very different!
This all took place in 1890.
It is my first day at the schools. Nishida Sentaro, the Japanese teacher of English, has taken me through the buildings, introduced me to the Directors, and to all my future colleagues, given me all necessary instructions about hours and about textbooks, and furnished my desk with all things necessary. Before teaching begins, however, I must be introduced to the Governor of the Province, Koteda Yasusada, with whom my contract has been made, through the medium of his secretary.Ha! That's still the same! Working with your JTE (Japanese teacher of English), meeting the bigwigs at the board of education before beginning teaching...
Teaching Japanese boys turns out to be a much more agreeable task than I had imagined. Each class has been so well prepared for me beforehand by Nishida that my utter ignorance of Japanese makes no difficulty in regard to teaching: moreover, although the lads cannot understand my words always when I speak, they can understand whatever I write upon the blackboard with chalk. Most of them have already been studying English from childhood, with Japanese teachers. All are wonderfully docile and patient. According to old custom, when the teacher enters, the whole class rises and bows to him. He returns the bow, and calls the roll.
[...] As I take my place at the desk, a voice rings out in English: 'Stand up!' And all rise with a springy movement as if moved by machinery. 'Bow down!' the same voice again commands—the voice of a young student wearing a captain's stripes upon his sleeve; and all salute me. I bow in return; we take our seats; and the lesson begins.
All teachers at the Normal School are saluted in the same military fashion before each class-hour—only the command is given in Japanese. For my sake only, it is given in English.
It's true that they can understand what's written better than what's spoken, and the stand-and-bow that begins (and ends) every class is still exactly the same today. But... docile? Patient? Springy machine-like movement? Um... no. Not so much. Most of the time, the students reluctantly stand up, with many stragglers, many still chatting and moving about the room, and sometimes it takes three tries before everyone will bow properly. And it's never conducted in English, even during English class.
I was especially fascinated to learn that the Japanese tradition of sports day (my school calls it 体育会 taiiku-kai, but it's also known as 運動会 undou-kai, among other names) was in existence then, and at that time all the schools held one event, on the castle grounds! (Nowadays each school has its own, on its own school grounds.) And the three-legged race and the tug of war were still held, same as they are today. Simply astonishing to realize how long some traditions go back!
I was especially fascinated to learn that the Japanese tradition of sports day (my school calls it 体育会 taiiku-kai, but it's also known as 運動会 undou-kai, among other names) was in existence then, and at that time all the schools held one event, on the castle grounds! (Nowadays each school has its own, on its own school grounds.) And the three-legged race and the tug of war were still held, same as they are today. Simply astonishing to realize how long some traditions go back!
All teaching in the modern Japanese system of education is conducted with the utmost kindness and gentleness. The teacher is a teacher only: he is not, in the English sense of mastery, a master. He stands to his pupils in the relation of an elder brother. He never tries to impose his will upon them: he never scolds, he seldom criticizes, he scarcely ever punishes. No Japanese teacher ever strikes a pupil: such an act would cost him his post at once. He never loses his temper: to do so would disgrace him in the eyes of his boys and in the judgment of his colleagues. Practically speaking, there is no punishment in Japanese schools. Sometimes very mischievous lads are kept in the schoolhouse during recreation time; yet even this light penalty is not inflicted directly by the teacher, but by the director of the school on complaint of the teacher. The purpose in such cases is not to inflict pain by deprivation of enjoyment, but to give public illustration of a fault; and in the great majority of instances, consciousness of the fault thus brought home to a lad before his comrades is quite enough to prevent its repetition. No such cruel punition as that of forcing a dull pupil to learn an additional task, or of sentencing him to strain his eyes copying four or five hundred lines, is ever dreamed of. Nor would such forms of punishment, in the present state of things, be long tolerated by the pupils themselves. The general policy of the educational authorities everywhere throughout the empire is to get rid of students who cannot be perfectly well managed without punishment; and expulsions, nevertheless, are rare.[...] I have said that severity on the part of teachers would scarcely be tolerated by the students themselves—a fact which may sound strange to English or American ears. Tom Brown's school does not exist in Japan; the ordinary public school much more resembles the ideal Italian institution so charmingly painted for us in the Cuore of De Amicis. Japanese students furthermore claim and enjoy an independence contrary to all Occidental ideas of disciplinary necessity. In the Occident the master expels the pupil. In Japan it happens quite as often that the pupil expels the master. Each public school is an earnest, spirited little republic, to which director and teachers stand only in the relation of president and cabinet. They are indeed appointed by the prefectural government upon recommendation by the Educational Bureau at the capital; but in actual practice they maintain their positions by virtue of their capacity and personal character as estimated by their students, and are likely to be deposed by a revolutionary movement whenever found wanting. It has been alleged that the students frequently abuse their power. But this allegation has been made by European residents, strongly prejudiced in favour of masterful English ways of discipline. (I recollect that an English Yokohama paper, in this connection, advocated the introduction of the birch.) My own observations have convinced me, as larger experience has convinced some others, that in most instances of pupils rebelling against a teacher, reason is upon their side. They will rarely insult a teacher whom they dislike, or cause any disturbance in his class: they will simply refuse to attend school until he be removed. Personal feeling may often be a secondary, but it is seldom, so far as I have been able to learn, the primary cause for such a demand. A teacher whose manners are unsympathetic, or even positively disagreeable, will be nevertheless obeyed and revered while his students remain persuaded of his capacity as a teacher, and his sense of justice; and they are as keen to discern ability as they are to detect partiality. And, on the other hand, an amiable disposition alone will never atone with them either for want of knowledge or for want of skill to impart it. I knew one case, in a neighbouring public school, of a demand by the students for the removal of their professor of chemistry. In making their complaint, they frankly declared: 'We like him. He is kind to all of us; he does the best he can. But he does not know enough to teach us as we wish to be taught. He cannot answer our questions. He cannot explain the experiments which he shows us. Our former teacher could do all these things. We must have another teacher.' Investigation proved that the lads were quite right. The young teacher had graduated at the university; he had come well recommended: but he had no thorough knowledge of the science which he undertook to impart, and no experience as a teacher. The instructor's success in Japan is not guaranteed by a degree, but by his practical knowledge and his capacity to communicate it simply and thoroughly.
Well. Let's just say this explains A LOT, and that students by no means behave this well today, and yet the (lack of) discipline on the part of the teachers hasn't changed. This is one of the most frustrating thing about teaching in Japanese schools today: everyone expects that the students will want to learn, and thus won't misbehave, but this is no longer the case. Many students want to misbehave, but there are no real procedures in place to deal with those students, no real punishments that would deter them, such as the threat of having to repeat the same year of school, or get expelled, or so on. None of those possibilities even exist; the students know that whatever they do in class, whatever their grade is--even if it's failing--they will graduate to the next year. So, if it's all the same no matter what you do, why not goof off? And there's close to nothing we can do about it. Japanese culture is supposed to step in here and compel them to behave, but that doesn't happen all the time, and it's not reliable at all. What a mess.
(You'll note that the author is in awe of it and thinks it's great--an example of how he idealized Japanese people and culture.)
Seven years of study are required to give the Japanese youth merely the necessary knowledge of his own triple system of ideographs—or, in less accurate but plainer speech, the enormous alphabet of his native literature. That literature, also, he must study, and the art of two forms of his language—the written and the spoken: likewise, of course, he must learn native history and native morals. Besides these Oriental studies, his course includes foreign history, geography, arithmetic, astronomy, physics, geometry, natural history, agriculture, chemistry, drawing, and mathematics. Worst of all, he must learn English—a language of which the difficulty to the Japanese cannot be even faintly imagined by anyone unfamiliar with the construction of the native tongue—a language so different from his own that the very simplest Japanese phrase cannot be intelligibly rendered into English by a literal translation of the words or even the form of the thought.
Yes... so true. English is very difficult for them because it has so many things utterly foreign to them. I honestly don't know what it's like to have so much difficulty with a foreign language, so I have a hard time relating to my students about this.
Indeed, the compositions of any number of middle-school students upon the same subject are certain to be very much alike in idea and sentiment—though they are none the less charming for that. As a rule the Japanese student shows little originality in the line of imagination. His imagination was made for him long centuries ago—partly in China, partly in his native land. From his childhood he is trained to see and to feel Nature exactly in the manner of those wondrous artists who, with a few swift brushstrokes, fling down upon a sheet of paper the colour-sensation of a chilly dawn, a fervid noon, an autumn evening.
Ha ha ha ha ha. Sometimes, how everyone seems to think the same and say the same things to you on the same subjects can get pretty grating. Especially when you get the same questions, and same remarks, with the same words, over and over.
All that aside, life in my city is pretty good for now (eventually, everyone goes a bit stir-crazy being so isolated up here among the mountains that make it so difficult to get away). As it's a lakeside city (with a river from the lake running through it), the sunsets over the lake are especially gorgeous.
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