Libertarian musings from just inside the M25.

Today was the final day of Alice’s visit – she has 5 lessons on Monday to prepare for, and going straight from night bus to the classroom wouldn’t exactly be the best idea, so she’s taking a late one tonight so she’s not pressed for time tomorrow. I had a lazy morning while she was off in Akihabara helping out with the free food distribution of some Japanese harvest festival, ostensibly aimed at the homeless of Tokyo but in reality based (from her description) more on the motto of ‘meet, do admin, and network’ with the JET organisers. We met up in Ueno at 12:30 and (after briefly contemplating getting a bento for lunch) defaulted to the appeals of the burgers in the Hard Rock Café. Our conversation drifted languidly from David Mitchell to Summer Heights High (an Australian comedy show to which she introduced me yesterday), dwelt understandably for a long time on reminiscences of university, and ended up contemplating the attitudes that Japanese children have to learning, and learning foreign languages in particular. This proved mildly ironic and deeply coincidental, as after we’d walked from Ueno to Asakusa so that I could show her the Senso-ji temple complex and (importantly) the key shops on Nakamise-dori, we were ambushed no less than four times by groups of English students who wanted to use our gaijin-ness to practise their language skills. If you remember the schoolgirls who did the same to me the first time I as in Asakusa, who prefaced the conversation with a hesitant “do you supeaku Engrishi?” [sic], these students kind of had that question answered for them – unlike my usual solitary tourism, during which I observe strict stony silence, when Alice and I walked into the Kaminarimon plaza, we were chortling away in the unmistakeable middle-class Oxonian blend of London and Midlands accents. Well, OK, Alice was – my accent has become noticeably posher during my time in Japan, and I don’t really understand why. If I’m not careful, I’ll start sounding like the guy from Gap Yah – and since we spent most of our time in the complex commenting repeatedly on how “awaaah” we were of the “spiritual-cultural-political” nature of our visit there, I suspect the transformation may be partway complete…

At any rate, the students wanted much the same as the schoolgirls had wanted all those weeks ago – to ask questions. Or at least the first lot did – 2 boys (Keisuke and Jun) and a girl (didn’t catch the name) – who went through the usual rigmarole of asking where we came from, what we were doing in Tokyo, how long we’d been there, which place we liked the most, where in England we would recommend to go, all the usual. The second group didn’t bother introducing themselves, and merely presented us with 2 sheets of photos, asking which out of a line-up of 10 boys Alice thought was the most attractive, and the same for me out of a group of 10 girls. This was after we’d managed to make it through Nakamise-dori up to the pagoda and main temple, had gazed in awe upon the paintings on the ceiling inside, and had commented on the relatively relaxed approach that Buddhism has to religious worship compared with the rigours of dogmatic Christianity, Islam or Judaism. The third group decided that I needed to learn a tongue-twister about Tokyo, which went something like “Tokyo, Tokkyo, kyoka kyoku kucho”, and which they filmed me making a complete hash of. Or at least, that’s as far as I got with it – the actual phrase appears to be Tokyo tokkyo kyoka-kyoku kyou kyuukyo kyoka kyakka, which makes my head nearly explode just reading it. The final group was in fact the first group with some further friends attached, who asked Alice and me to help them spell out the letters “ESS” (for “English Students’ Society”) using our bodies.

To be honest, though we obliged graciously every time we were asked for our time, we were getting pretty bored of the increasingly bizarre requests the students came up with – but it highlighted the stark divergence between the relatively rural context in which Alice is teaching English and the ambitious drive of the urban Japanese. As I’ve mentioned before, the current urban Japanese youth as a whole are perceived as being insular, conceited, vacuous and decidedly disinterested in the world outside of their network of friends – so it was gratifying to see some who bucked the trend. More rurally, pupils have no reason to learn foreign languages – they are destined for farming or manufacturing jobs as it is, so even being at school starts to have questionable value for them. I guess this is what comes of trying to browbeat young people into becoming multicultural against their will – without any internal desire to spread their linguistic wings, no amount of commanding at the point of a board-marker will make them better world citizens artificially. This is, I guess, the main downside of the ‘sit down and shut up’ style of teaching Japan (and many other countries) still broadly adhere to – in the absence of either pupils’ realisation of why particular subjects are useful and of any sort of justification for the make-up of the strict one-size-fits-all school syllabus, forcing pupils to learn will make them do it, but they will not enjoy it, will not do it well, and will only be further from understanding the personal benefits of education than they were when they started. The only tangible result is a rising antipathy towards schools, education and teachers – which makes the social conditions for the next generation of pupils all the harder. It’s a self-reinforcing perpetuum mobile of anti-erudition bias. And sadly Japan is starting to succumb to it as well.