山の日 Yama no Hi. Though Japan has had mountains for as long as anybody living can recall, they didn't have a public holiday to celebrate them until 2016. This new public holiday is intended to coincide with the vacation time usually given during the Bon Festival held in mid-August. To celebrate, let's read a nonfiction book about Japan.
Learning to Bow: An American Teacher in a Japanese School - Bruce Feiler
In the late 1980s, the Japanese government made efforts toward what it termed kokusaika (internationalization), the encouragement of Japanese people to become less insular and more open-minded about intercultural give-and-take. In 1987 the Ministry of Education started the JET program. The Japan Exchange and Teaching program brought in hundreds of native speakers of English and assigned them to team-teach in public schools all over the country. The goals were to motivate Japanese English teachers to modernize old teaching methods and provide concrete evidence to kids that foreigners were actual living and breathing human beings.
Feiler was in one of the first JET cohorts so he was working in Japan at the same I was. Masters degree in ESL/EFL in hand, I was employed at a national university and even in our 2024, I was ready to be smug and snooty reading his JET memoir of his time in-country. I assumed he was a fresh college graduate that would make up in energy, smiles and height for what he didn’t know about articulatory phonetics (I staunchly taught pronunciation, the jester in the English court of Reading, Grammar, Writing, and Speaking & Listening). But Feiler graduated from Yale and seems to be widely read, with a keen sense of humor. I got no sense of superiority or condescension in his views of the Japanese in the late Eighties. I was wrong and petty to assume he was but a walking tape recorder.
I spent a little time doing team-teaching in a junior high school and didn’t much like the loss of autonomy so I had to take my hat off to his good-natured response to such teaching in a junior high in Tochigi, a country prefecture forty miles outside Tokyo. Classes have 45 kiddoes in a room so getting everybody in synch so teaching and learning can occur is the first order of business. Command and control is the long and short of junior high school in Japan, so it’s not a comfortable place for people who think school ought to be a place where gentle educators help students find themselves. Japanese middle school principals have little truck with the notion that the system prepares students to live as productive members of society by creating a non-judgmental inclusive environment where children are free to identify their own joy, value, and self-worth.
Feiler covers all important topics from the roles of teachers to the informal leaders among the students who enforce conformity. Feiler does not turn away from hard topics such a bullying and buraku discrimination. He has chapters on the lives of single people in the country and in Tokyo. He messed up an ankle and had to spend days in the hospital, an experience that showed him all about the authority of doctors and group cohesion in concern for a member. He uses his lengthy stay there to remind us of the importance of the change of seasons in Japan and the sense of transition (transience) the Japanese have.
As usual, the question is, now that we are 30 some years down the pike, is this memoir still worth reading? I think so, for two reasons. The first is nostalgia. I can’t be the only English teacher who was there during the Bubble Economy to get a kick out of being reminded of, say, the Recruit Scandal or Hikaru Genji, both reminding us that every culture comes up with its own unique mediocrity. Anybody who has been to a wedding in a hotel will smile knowingly, in wonder too, when Feiler describes the big show. The second is that Feiler’s Japanese language ability seems to have been at least at the intermediate level. So although he does not tell us why he went to Japan and was committed enough to learn the language, he could talk to ordinary people directly and get their unvarnished views. This is always a plus in my book. His story of coming to grips with a different culture makes for a classic expatriate memoir.
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