Fourth in the eight-part documentary series, “Nippon: Japan Since 1945.” Produced by the BBC in 1990. Released and broadcast in US as “A&E Premiers” with Jack Perkins as host and narrator. 45 minutes.
For reasons you can now appreciate, this documentary posits education as the principal key to Japanese growth since 1960s. It has excellent illustrative footage from Osaka classrooms. Gojo Elementary School, in south Osaka, is one of 129 such elementary schools in metropolitan Osaka, and its 35 teachers handle 630 students. The documentary gives you briefly a sense of the pedagogical difficulties and curricular commitment to language learning. Math instruction, lunch duties, and school cleaning are also shown.
Then the film turns its attention to Kozu Junior High School, one of Osaka City’s 39 such public junior highs. It is close to average size, with 630 students and 35 teachers. We are taken through a day at Kozu Junior High, primarily through the schedule of Keiko Takumi, a 15-year-old third-year student (our equivalent of ninth-grade). Note that the day (at least this day) here at Kozu begins with inspections of student appearance by teachers and a student Lifestyle Committee. The film is a useful complement to the cases that Tom Rohlen describes in “Five High Schools,” the reading I have assigned from his book, Japan’s High Schools (though not assigned in spring 2013). Rohlen shows the important variations within five high schools (located within Osaka’s neighboring city of Kobe). This documentary shows how different are the several levels of Japanese education, from elementary school through high school. As I will discuss in lecture, the issue is really, what are both the striking contrasts and the effective reinforcements across the levels?
Keiko is in her final year of junior high school and thus is facing entrance exams into an Osaka high school. This somewhat distorts the depiction of Kozu, because we know from other sources that seventh and eight-graders are apt to feel such pressures much less and to have somewhat different classroom experiences.
After school, Keiko, like most of her classmates, is attending an academic cram academy (shingaku juku), both in the evenings and on weekends. The documentary gives a brief glimpse of the juku atmosphere, including the teacher who likes to keep his students alert by taking attendance while he administers speeded-up practice math tests. The hachimaki headband that you see in the video is printed with the juku motto on the front, and students have theirs signed by their teachers before going off to take their entrance exams. One of our other documentaries profiles a different type of cram academy, the full-year yobiko that high school graduates attend to prep for university entrance exams.
By coincidence, one of the students who took my course in 1994 had himself gone to the very cram school that Keiko attended, which was then the Nishinomiya headquarters of Hama Gakuen, then the leading cram school chain in the Kansai region. The teacher who appears in the video is Maeda Tetsuro who was also the cram school principal (gakuen-cho). Maeda was the most popular teacher in the school and designed many of the curricular materials and tactics, such as the tracking of juku students into many clearly marked ability levels. (Actually, result levels would be more precise, because the tracking was based on practice test performance, not on an estimate of innate ability, which did not interest the teachers.) Another of his favorite tactics, common to juku pedagogy, was to rearrange the students’ class seating after every test to reflect and make perfectly clear their relative ranking (much as the Oki Electric Company president liked to seat his section chiefs according to the volume of suggestions from their subordinates). “Harmony” is obviously only one of several intra-group dynamics in Japan!
Hama Gakuen boasted that it prepared 50% of entering class of Nada High School (the elite private school described in Rohlen’s “Five High Schools”) and 33% of the entering class of Kansei Gakuin University, a noted private university in the region. In an interesting postscript, Maeda broke with the management in 1990, and formed a rival cram academy he called Nozomi Gakuen. He raided Hama Gakuen for the best teachers and students. In retaliation, the Hama Gakuen company sued Maeda for using their textbooks and class materials; I don’t know the resolution of that suit, but I suspect it dragged on inconclusively. Mr. Maeta created further controversy when he was quoted in a newspaper advising elementary school children to stop going to school and come to juku full time in the months before taking junior high school entrance exams.
Finally, notice the interview comments of the Kozu principal, Mr. Katsumi Yamazoe, Keiko’s mother, Tomoko Takumi, and another parent. All three express a deep-seated ambivalence about pressures on academically-inclined junior high students, and bemoan the constraints that exam study places on Keiko and her classmates. The key word here, however, is ambivalence, because despite Mrs. Takumi’s misgivings, she does seem to support and push Keiko along this path–or rather, up that particular ladder.