Turning Japanese

Are Japanese institutions designed to squash curiosity and spawn model citizens?

By Tom Bradley

Jan 24, 2000 | Picture, if you will (as Rod Serling used to say), 75 to 100 narcoleptic zombies. Packed on plywood benches in a room big enough for half that many bodies, they congregate once a week, for 90 un-air-conditioned minutes, for an English conversation class. Maybe Jesus Christ could feed them all lunch with half a bag of potato chips and a can of Pepsi. But I don't know any mere mortal teacher -- regardless of how many master's degrees he has earned in TEFL and TOOFL and TAWFUL -- who could accomplish anything in that situation beyond simpering and adjusting his tie.

Even under optimum conditions these particular narcoleptic zombies would be ineducable. This is Japan, where university students' inner beings have been reamed out in junior high and high school. Haitian voodoo is no more effective than Japanese secondary education in producing the living dead. Needless to say, the joy of learning is nothing but a one-liner in the universities. And it gets worse.

With the graying of this society (potential baby makers would rather window-shop), there has been a lowering of college entrance standards, unbelievable as that may sound. I used to be the only blue-eyed redhead in the room. But far-Eastern motorcycle punks and their molls love to alter their appearance with bleach and henna and contact lenses of bizarre coloration. When the class bell rings, it looks like the St. Patrick's Day parade. Or maybe the morning after.

These are kids so deep in the underclass that they have tuberculosis with symptoms. I'm living the national health crisis. I stay hunkered behind the teacher's desk, next to an open window. I don't circulate and I accept no papers. It's impossible to get homework out of them, anyway. You're not supposed to ask for homework, or any other kind of work, from these zombies. College is the only period of repose they get between the cradle and the crematorium. They're not expected to learn anything. It's considered inhumane to ask them to do more than sleep or chat on their walkie-talkies with coevals across the corridor.

The companies that will enslave them upon graduation pay attention only to the numerical standing of the universities that churn them out. The employers assume, correctly, that their new recruits know absolutely nothing, and simply train them from the ground up, starting with proper groveling techniques.

Here's an anecdote that shows how Japanese universities foster literary endeavor. This short parable will shed some light on perhaps the saddest country in the world, but a happy place for a confirmed scribbler like me, who craves time to write about other, less pointless places. You'll recall, a few years back, a pair of eggheads at the University of Utah announced that they'd effected cold fusion on a table top. For a couple of days, even respectable members of the scientific community were suspending disbelief. Cold fusion was touted globally during those two days. We were told that the energy needs of the human race had been permanently satisfied by the most important technological breakthrough since Prometheus showed us how to harness fire. The Kingdom of Heaven had finally been established on Earth. It was to be fueled by cold fusion, and it was centered at the University of Utah.

Now, as it happened, on the very days when those tidings of comfort and joy were being trumpeted, I was preparing a group of college students here in Japan to go to a study-abroad program at -- you guessed it -- the University of Utah. My pupils were to stay at a dormitory located coincidentally within spitting distance of the laboratory where the miracle was bubbling and simmering away on its famous table top. I had only just arrived from teaching in the People's Republic of China, where students consider education the most fabulous privilege of their lives, and are fond of reminding themselves and each other that it takes the sweat of four peasant families to support one college kid. My Chinese charges were real, honest-to-God university scholars, the type who can be engaged on a roughly equal footing as fellow adults, who give as much as they take from their professors. In the land of Mao Zedong, I had an actual subject matter (literature, not EFL), and I came to know what real teaching is; how walking into class is a pleasure you anticipate all week, and walking out you feel shot full of methedrine.

Naive as I was, coming straight from the genuine higher education system of the Asian mainland, I assumed that my new Japanese students would have similar attitudes and capabilities, and that cold fusion in particular was something that would excite them. Unlike my beloved disciples whom I left behind to die on Tiananmen Square, these Japanese kids had cars and motorcycles, which they cherished and polished. And I figured the radical transformation of the world's energy supply would be of personal interest to them.

So I mounted the professorial podium with a big grin on my face and began to talk about all the important and exciting things that lay in store on the other side of the Pacific Ocean. I was as brief as possible, because I fully expected to be mobbed at any moment by grateful and thrilled and adoring little people. But I couldn't seem to get a rise out of them. They only sat there, passive. I was puzzled. Were Japanese as inscrutable as the old stereotype claimed?

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