Job Discussion Forums

[G Cthulhu]

[cafebleu]

Interesting topic started by Dr J. l`ll add my two yen worth and say that the Japanese school system is not about producing `morality` but obediant, passive recipients of whatever knowledge or propaganda the Japanese Education Ministry wishes them to absorb without asking questions about exactly what it is they are absorbing.

One thing I find really retrograde (and no, I am not talking about the 100 years ago style censorship and lack of discussion about history in textbooks) is that in school English books as well as other texts there are so many bits and pieces of misinformation about foreigners that is really Japanese racist propaganda. One book I looked at talked about how `dirty` we foreigners are in our home countries.

This sweeping generalisation was based on the fact that most of us westerners wear shoes inside our houses in our own countries - although some of us do wear slippers for relaxing at home. I object to textbooks teaching Japanese students that we are dirty - just because we don`t have tatami matting inside our houses but hard floors, and just because the Japanese never wore leather shoes for a long, long time and even then only the affluent did for some time, that makes us dirty?

I could say a lot about filthy floors that kindergarten and elementary school students sit on, and filthy washiki with no toilet paper that are standard in too many JR stations, and mention that I see more people in Japan than in my home country leaving their toilet cubicle without washing their hands (in standard no frills toilets that don`t have washing water coming from the tank unlike the decent toilets here), but you get the idea ...................

If you look carefully at such school texts there is a lot of propaganda inserted in there, just as there is in television shows and popular reading. When I first came to Japan I was asked why foreigners have their kidneys taken out as a matter of course - I laughed and said I didn`t know anybody without their kidney. Yet that piece of stupidity presented as fact was in a popular book about foreigners. And, no, they were not mixing it up with the appendix.

One of my co workers who is Japanese said to me how terrible it is that 70 percent of American people are on anti depressant drugs. I asked her where she got that information from - it was a popular tv show. I told her that the figure seemed inflated and not to get her idea of foreigners from tv shows that focus on exaggerated claims.

For me, the Japanese schools foster so much subtle and not so subtle racial propaganda and that is their purpose. Teachers openly will tell you that the purpose of school is to teach the Japanese how to be Japanese. I don`t see why that should include always emphasising how different the Japanese are to everybody else but if you take that away, you take away a key feature of the culture.

If we accept that our own culture is not unique and elevated above all others, then we have to start accepting that things we have in common with other human beings are more important. The fact that the pronounced Japanese tendency is to always draw lines between themselves and foreigners, especially when the foreigner is adept at Japanese and understands how the culture functions, and sharply separate themselves from foreigners who understand them `too well` is deliberately fostered in school.

This is why in previous posts on this board I have made a point of saying not to take the Japanese at face value for that is to really misunderstand what the whole culture is driven by. The sensitive souls who get upset by such a view don`t really have an understanding of Japan yet and maybe never will.

[Gordon]

Cafebleu, you made some interesting points. To add, have you also noticed that many times Japanese people get uncomfortable around gaijins who have lived in Japan a long time and are fluent in Japanese? It's almost like the foreigners are not so different from the Japanese.
My employer prefers to hire people who haven't spent a lot of time in Japan and who don't want to stay with them long-term, despite the enormous cost of getting new teachers.

[nomadder]

What are they trying to hide?

[G Cthulhu]

[cafebleu]

I don`t think there was anything in my post that most foreigners who have lived for some time in Japan and have some decent knowledge of the education system here would disagree with. I come from the UK and in no way could the textbooks in my home country get away with making students learn stories about the `uniqueness of the English brain` or the kind of portrayal of other cultures that is always emphasising how strange they are and how `we English` are clean, do everything the correct way etc.

I have seen school textbooks from Australia, for example, which make a genuine effort to incorporate Aboriginal history and white colonialism. I know my own country has school textbooks commonly used that refute the notion of `British superiority` that was used against any number of countries last century and this century, and other textbooks that really emphasise the benefits of multiculturalism.

Sure, foreign countries are multicultural and Japan is not - that is the point of posters such as myself when we talk about the system and how the Japanese Ministry of Education really forces the point home of how `unique` the Japanese are. In a western country you could not include some of the tales that pass for `reality` about western foreigners in Japanese school textbooks without somemajor controversy.

I don`t think most other posters who have lived here for some time would dismiss as generalisation the fact that once you have become proficient in the language here, you tend to be viewed as somebody who understands too much. That is a common Japanese cultural response to the foreigner as if a foreigner understands what is going on they often will use the term `wakari sugiru`.

I have noticed (and so have my foreigner friends here) that when we stumbled out a few Japanese phrases when we first lived here, we would get gushing praise generally from the Japanese. Now that we are relatively fluent, we don`t find the responses from Japanese acquaintances, colleagues etc to be positive. It is an insular defence mechanism used by the Japanese in general and it is so ingrained that it is not thought of. This is the tip of the iceberg.

A lot of this starts in the Japanese school system and when you are continually fed the notion of non Japanese automatically being outsiders, naturally too many Japanese are going to accept this. You mentioned the term `government conspiracy ` - I didn`t. It`s an open process that takes place on different levels in Japanese society and starts at school. As for sensitive souls - I don`t take that back as there are a few posters on this board who feel threatened by alternative opinions that don`t tell foreigners everything is rosy and aren`t the Japanese lovely, and aren`t they unique etc. No need to apologise for something self-evident, and I actually was not referring to you when I made that statement.

[TokyoLiz]

cafebleu said