Dogs and Demons

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