Community spirit shines through in Japan's dark times

By Roland BuerkBBC Japan correspondent

Neighbours in Ofunato are working together

to provide food, shelter and support for each other
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Japan quake

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How plant was stabilised

What went wrong?

The village of Odachi, just outside Ofunato in Iwate prefecture, is like so

many others along Japan's coast.
Homes splintered, lives destroyed.
When the tsunami thundered in, it swept right up the little valley the community
nestles in, between the cedar-fringed hills.
Buildings were flung about, and came to rest at the high-water mark.
Shuichi Shida was luckier than most. His family survived and he even
remembered the dog when he ran to safety.
His house stood while those around it were destroyed.

But the wave smashed right through, even upstairs. His home will probably have
to be knocked down.
"It's been nearly two weeks since the tsunami," he says. "I still have no idea what
to do."
Japan's government has marshalled its military in a massive aid operation, but
the people are also trying to help themselves.
'Close relationships'
Every mealtime in Odachi, the survivors head up to the three houses belonging
to the extended Kino family, at the top of the hill.
Much of the village is living there now.
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We've worked together, to make a bath, put up tents, chop wood

for fuel. We co-operate and we even manage to laugh
Shuichi Shida

They have set up a communal kitchen in the garden, using blue tarpaulins to
screen off an area.
The cooking is done on open fires, which have big pots of water boiling on them
all day.
The men, filthy from scavenging for belongings in the ruins, sit for a smoke and a
chat, while the women prepare miso soup with vegetables, hard-boiled eggs and
seaweed for dinner.
The children play football.
Adversity has brought people together.

Inside the Kinos' homes, futons have been laid out on the floor, so everyone has
somewhere to sleep.
The only lighting is from candles because there is no electricity. A wind-up radio
is on to hear the latest news.
There is no privacy, but no-one is complaining.

Wreckage cleared
"My family and I don't have any problem with this," says Makiko Kino, mother to
three small boys. "It's the opposite in fact and I am rather enjoying this. There are
so many children around it's a lot of fun.
"It's the countryside here. We have a close relationship with our neighbours. We
have known each other for so long it is not an issue."

The village has been given tents by a British charity, Shelterbox.

The idea is that everyone will have more space.
The villagers cleared the wreckage from a field to pitch them side by side.
"If I'd been alone it would have been very difficult to stand," says Shuichi Shida.
"But all of the neighbours have combined our resources.
"We've worked together, to make a bath, put up tents, chop wood for fuel. We cooperate and we even manage to laugh."
There is no hurry to move out of the Kinos' houses where everyone has been
sleeping.

Japan has never lost its sense of community and in dark times it is shining
through.
This nation's great disaster has brought out the best in its people.

Kids can benefit from a little community spirit

BY DANIELLE DEMETRIOU

JAN 9, 2015
ARTICLE HISTORY
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Frowning with concentration at a low table, a clutch of overall-clad

toddlers set about their task: stamping potatoes into paints to create
rainbow-bright artworks.
As is to be expected, among them are several grown-ups, their job
being to keep the peace and generally make sure that the paint ends up
on the paper (as opposed to their faces).
Despite appearances, these adults are not qualified child-care staff
but parents who are involved in one of Tokyos first cooperative
English-Japanese preschools: Honey Tree Tots.
For many parents, dealing with their own offspring is more than
enough work. So the thought of paying to be in charge of a room full of
other peoples babies and toddlers is perhaps not the most appealing
of ideas.
But Honey Tree Tots has a refreshingly positive approach. The school,
which opened in Nakameguro last February, aims to tap into what the
founders describe as the increasingly lost spirit of community life in
cities.

The way it works is simple: For every five days that a child attends the
school, the parent is on duty for two of those days, with a ratio of one
adult to every two to three pupils at any time. Such parent
participation is something that the school takes very seriously, and
every new parent is asked to attend a training session led by a
licensed hoikushi (daycare worker), covering issues ranging from
safety to discipline.
The curriculum, based on a Montessori school program, is colorfully
varied with indoor and outdoor activities including classes ranging
from Dance in French to Fun with Food, which involves a licensed
nutritionist teaching children about food and preparing healthy dishes
for lunch.
Anna-Marie Farrier, the schools founder and also a food columnist at
The Japan Times, explains that the project was inspired by the
premise that it takes a village to raise a child.
We are a parent-run, parent-taught, and parent-staffed preschool,
explains Farrier. We are trying to create a village, or a supportive
community of parents and children in Tokyo.
Even when I was a child, there used to be more neighborhood
interaction with children, and there would be adults in the community
in addition to the parents who would look out for the child.
In Tokyo, this is starting to be less common and I felt that it was
important for children to have that neighborhood environment where
they can feel accepted, comfortable and feel free to be children.

The result is an environment that strives to be fully bilingual in

English and Japanese (with extra languages such as French also
thrown in from time to time, depending on the nationality of
participating parents).
The school is open to children aged from 2 to 5, with younger children
allowed to accompany their parents before joining the cooperative
after their second birthday.
Although some parents may be daunted at the prospect of having to
take on the role of teacher, Farrier is adamant that everyone has
something to offer the children.
Since we are a cooperative preschool, we really benefit from the many
skills and talents of our parents, she says. Every parent has
something to offer, whether it be language skills, craft skills,
photography, creative skills or even just playing soccer with the
children.
Describing how the end result is as varied as it is often fun, she adds:
On days that parents are on duty, they are often asked to be in charge
of leading an activity like crafts or story time, or teaching the
children how to waltz whatever is your forte.
The school is housed in a cosy first-floor space on a quiet backstreet
not far from Meguro canal, with a facade of glass, boxes of toys and a
colorful tree mural covering the back wall.
On the day I visit, the toddlers are seated at a small table and are
enjoying some potato-print painting, an activity that is being
undertaken with surprising patience.

Among the parents supervising is Sandy Nishimura, a lab technician

from Yokohama who is on duty with her 2-year-old daughter Airi.
I enjoy spending time here with other moms and kids, she says. Its
a unique idea being a cooperative and its also very interactive. It suits
us well.
Anna Dirksen, a Canadian mother, first attended the school in March
and is with her 2-year-old Neala and 4-month-old baby Willa.
I admit I found the idea of teaching very intimidating at first, says
Dirksen, who works in communications for a United Nations think
tank. But the training day was very useful and its giving me useful
skills for parenting at home, too.
According to Dirksen, the unusual cooperative concept of the school is
appealing to both parents and children.
It is a really good education for both of them. My elder daughter has
the opportunity to be in a bilingual environment and we both have the
opportunity to communicate and try out new ideas, she says. I
normally come here three times a week and its great for me as its
superflexible and so it goes well with me working from home.
She adds with a smile: Although I have noticed that your own
children tend to be better behaved when youre not on duty and theyre
with other parents.

The han at work: community spirit

begins in elementary school
Where Children Rule
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
A bell rings, and the students at Takihara Elementary School gallop off the grass
playing field from their lunch break and head for class armed with brooms and
mops and rags. The hallways resound with squeals and shouts as the boys and girls
empty the trash cans. In the bathrooms they scrub the white toilets and chase one
another with wet rags and generally rearrange the dirt.
Since Japanese schools have no janitors, it is up to the students to wash the
windows and scrub the floors themselves. So every day for 20 minutes, the kids get
out the washrags. Even the first graders join in.
Then another bell clangs, and it is time for the confession session. A string bean
of a sixth-grade boy, in command of one squad of cleaners, gathers his troops to
lead a discussion of the afternoons work.
Did we work together well? he asks, looking up from his checklist.
Yes, the others call out.
Did we use all our time well?
Yes!
Did we put all the tools away?
Yes.
But then the conscience of a shy 11-year-old girl named Seira intrudes on the selfcongratulatory atmosphere. We didnt really put the brooms away neatly, she

pipes up. The other children nod guiltily, and then all reflect somberly for a moment
on this shortcoming.
This is the side of primary education in East Asia that is often missed. Elementary
schools in Japan, Singapore and South Korea are renowned as the best in the world
because of their brilliant academic performance. Yet, particularly in Japan, the
important thing is not so much to produce smart children as to produce good
children, responsible children, disciplined children. The entire program aims to
teach children to work together and to cooperate in solving problems. And by and
large it works. As a Tokyo resident for the last two and a half years, I dont always
find it a very attractive or interesting place to live. Its too crowded and too boring.
But Im convinced that Japanese people today are, by and large, the nicest and
most responsible people in the world. Not the friendliest, not the happiest, certainly
not the funniest, but the nicest. And at least in part, that is because of the school
system.
If we had custodians, I suppose this school would gleam, mused Mizue Hanzawa,
a nurse at a school in Yokohama, looking around a teachers room whose patina
could not be described as a gleam. But its very important to build responsibility
and teach children to clean up the space they use. Thats a purpose of education.
And I think that this way the kids learn to take care of things.
The socialization process that begins in the schools profoundly shapes Japanese
society, firmly embedding each person in a community and therefore creating an
industrial society that lacks industrial crime rates, fostering a youth culture that
tolerates a sexual revolution without an explosion in drugs or in teen-age
pregnancy.
Indeed, most people who look at the Japanese education system are very
enthusiastic about it except the Japanese, and that is an important caveat. Just
at a time when the United States seems to be moving toward more disciplined,
back-to-basics education, symbolized by the school uniforms that President Clinton
has endorsed, Japan is moving away from that model. Japanese complain that their
school system is too regimented, too harmful to creativity. The Japanese press is
full of stories of bullying and of students who refuse to go to school, and a Japanese
critic has dismissed the excellent test scores of Japanese students as resulting from
endless drills by trained seals.
It is indeed pretty clear that Japans education system falters beginning in junior
high and on through the university years. The secondary schools are often unhappy
pressure cookers where kids memorize plenty of facts but never really learn how to
think. (On the other hand, my mother teaches art history at an American university

and says she faces many students who have learned neither basic facts nor how to
think.)
Japanese elementary schools build an enormous sense of community, in part by
usually keeping the same class together for two years, with the same students and
often with the same teacher as well. And they do it by putting students in charge.
Teachers are not the bosses in Japanese classrooms, at least not in the way they
are in the United States. When students make mistakes, the teachers do not correct
the error; they leave that to other students. The teachers do not punish students
who misbehave; rather they manipulate other students to scold the culprit into
feeling guilty. It is this manipulation that is a key to primary and preschool
education in Japan, and the teachers are the most masterful manipulators
imaginable.
Beginning in the earliest grades, children also take on responsibilities. Starting in
the first grade, the students bring lunch from the school kitchen to the classroom,
serving it to everyone and then cleaning up afterward. The children also rotate
among themselves the job of class monitor, responsible for calling the class to
order, calling the roll and discussing any class matters. The idea is that this teaches
leadership and perhaps just as important, followship, for it inevitably creates
some empathy for the plight of a person trying to calm an excited class.
In the sixth-grade class at Aso Elementary School in the town of Omiya, for
example, a boy and a girl are struggling to control the class. Isato Takeuchi, the
teacher, has his desk at the back of the classroom, and he watches as the two
students call the roll and run through a list of daily questions: Was anybody late to
school today? Does anybody have a runny nose? Did everybody bring a
handkerchief? Only when all the preliminaries are over does Takeuchi come
forward, and at the direction of the monitors, he and the students bow to each
other and say, Good morning!
The emphasis on teaching responsibility sometimes shocks Americans. Nursery
schools and kindergartens often have sharp scissors and even razor-blade knives
lying around. And the students are given a range of tasks, like setting goals that
are plastered around the school. We let the kids set the goals themselves,
although the teachers may help with suggestions, said Tamotsu Wakimoto,
principal of Aso Elementary. Every two weeks we have a school meeting and
discuss goals and pick one and then have a confession session about things that
havent gone well. For example, recently the water taps had been left dripping a lot,
and so the kids decided to set a goal of closing the
taps tightly whenever they used the faucets.

Within each class, students are assigned other small jobs. The students in the Play
Group, for example, decide what games to play and who will be on each team, and
the Study Group leads the class when the teacher is absent. Yes, there are no
substitute teachers in Japan; the students look after themselves.
If a teacher is away, then the children work on handouts and homework, said
Wakimoto. With the first and second graders, we would be a bit concerned, so
wed have a teacher look
in on them. But with the older kids, they study quietly.
Of course, he added, if a teacher is gone for a month or more, we would want to
get a substitute.
The students are given responsibility not just in extracurricular areas but in lessons
as well. When a teacher asks a question, hands shoot up, and the teacher calls on a
student. If the student makes a mistake, another pupil will bellow out, Chigau!
(Wrong!), and then the teacher will invite the students to debate the issue. When
the students overlook a mistake or seem headed in the wrong direction, the teacher
will use questions to redirect them.
The other day Shinji Nishi posted a problem on the blackboard for his fifth-grade
class at Aso Elementary: Each one-meter segment of a tree weighs 1.2 kilograms.
So how heavy is 3.3 meters of the tree? Round the second decimal place and give
your answer to one decimal place, and show how you reached the result.
Nishi then roamed the room as small groups of about four students each worked
out the answer and then copied the results on the blackboard. These small groups,
called han, are the essential unit of instruction in almost every classroom in Japan.
Most of the groups in Nishis classroom worked well, but one had a conflict. A pretty
beanstalk of a little girl named Chinami-chan, the brightest and bossiest student in
her han, quickly solved the problem and tried to show the others.
I worked it out, she said. Lets go to the front.
Hmmm, growled a boy across the table, clearly irritated by her bossiness. Im
thinking about solving it in another way. So not yet. He had been only a step
behind Chinami-chan, but now he erased all his work and tried to figure out another
way of solving the problem so that he would not lose face by being slower than her.
He struggled mightily to write equations that looked as different as possible from
Chinami-chans, and in the process he developed an excellent grasp of the problem.

Each han wrote the correct intermediate answer on the blackboard 3.96
kilograms but some then had trouble rounding it properly to reach the correct
final answer of 4 kilograms. Moreover, each han used different equations to reach
the result. Then each han explained its result, with each member of the han doing
part of the explanation, and asked for questions from the class which obliged by
peppering the speakers with questions.
Where did that 4 come from? quizzed one boy. When another boy criticized the
methods of one han, Nishi invited the boy up to the front and suggested he write
down the equations that he thought were proper. The boy marched up confidently,
began to write frantically and quickly got lost. Its very difficult, he said
thoughtfully, slinking back to his seat.
Japanese schools have another eccentricity, which is the pious, Sunday-school-like
enthusiasm of students and teachers alike for education about values. Teachers
sometimes sound so saccharine that they would make Mr. Rogers look like a cynic.
Classrooms are full of slogans Doing Our Best in Everything or Active and
Cheerful, Friendly and Helpful and each student normally posts goals for the
year.
The emphasis on slogans and goals reflects a basic difference between America and
Asia in perspectives about education: in opinion polls, Asians say that academic
distinction comes primarily from hard work, while Americans tend to credit innate
intelligence. As a result, Japanese parents push their children (and Japanese
children push themselves) because they think it will make a fundamental difference.
A growing body of research suggests that children in Asia do well in school in large
part because their parents set high benchmarks, which the children then absorb,
while American parents are reluctant to be seen as pushing their kids too much. So
Japanese parents set high standards and American parents set lower standards; in
both cases, the children oblige by doing what is demanded of them.
One of the essential tools in raising childrens standards in Japan, at home and
school, is hansei, which can variously mean reflection, apology or contrition.
When children do something wrong, they are supposed to express hansei, and in
some schools there are regular hansei meetings. The idea is that only when
students acknowledge their shortcomings can they overcome them. At Takihara
Elementary, each day ends with a class meeting and a dose of hansei.
In a third-grade classroom, the two girls who are the monitors for the day
announce that the farewell meeting has begun, but it is quite noisy and the teacher
sits back and refuses to rescue them. Please be quiet, one of the girls appeals to
her classmates. The noise subsides a bit and the other monitor continues: Lets

check whether we met our goals today. Did we come in promptly when the bell
rang?
All the children raise their hands.
Did we do the cleanup seriously?
All the children raise their hands and the monitors go on through their list. The only
one who seems to have missed his goals was Kazu-kun, who left a book at home.
So Kazu-kun stands up and expresses hansei to the class.
I will be very careful not to leave things at home from now on, he says, with a
hint of sheepishness.
Some of this Sunday-school earnestness is a charade, forgotten as soon as class
ends, and in any case it fades into cynicism in junior high. But then this
earnestness re-emerges in adulthood, and to some extent it pervades Japanese
society. That is why sarcasm often does not work in Japan, evoking not laughs but
puzzlement. The other day I was in a doctors waiting room with my younger son,
Geoffrey, age 3, and I was reading him a Japanese storybook about the good guys
and the monsters except that I was joking with him and telling it from the
monsters point of view. I had just recounted how the poor monster had been
attacked on the street by two superheroes when I felt peoples eyes on me. I looked
up and saw all the parents looking at me in undisguised horror.
Another way in which Japanese schools build a sense of community as well as
extraordinary academic skills is simply by keeping students in class longer.
Elementary-school students throughout East Asia go to school for longer hours than
Americans and have much shorter vacations, so that by the end of the sixth grade
the average Japanese or Chinese child has had more than an extra year of
instruction compared with an American. Takiharas summer vacation, for example,
lasts only six weeks, from mid-July to the end of August, and students are given
homework to complete during it.
Another strong point of Japanese schools is the caliber of teaching, which is
regularly praised in international studies. The Third International Mathematics and
Science Study, which since 1990 has been comparing student achievement among
45 countries and is one of the most comprehensive such research projects ever
conducted, asked math experts to study transcripts of fourth-grade arithmetic
classes in several countries and rate them. The experts said that 30 percent of
Japans lessons were of high quality, 57 percent medium and 13 percent low quality.

In the United States, none of the lessons were judged of high quality, 13 percent
were medium and 87 percent were of low quality.
Of course, there are some elementary schools in the United States with the same
kind of excellent teachers and commitment to moral education as in Japan, but they
are often private and exclusive institutions. In contrast, Japanese elementary
schools provide a remarkably uniform level of opportunity, for 99 percent of
children attend public elementary schools in Japan and there is far less difference
than in America between schools in rich areas and those in poor areas.
One reason for the good teaching in Japan is that the profession attracts excellent
people. The respect for teachers in Japan emerges in opinion polls, where teachers
are awarded higher prestige than engineers or officials in city hall. Teachers are also
paid very well, earning salaries that are generally higher than those of pharmacists
or engineers, and so in a typical year there are five applicants for every teaching
job.
As I read about these aspects of Japanese education and visited the classrooms, I
was almost universally impressed. But as I talked to friends about whether to send
Gregory to a Japanese school, one thing bothered me: Americans tended to think it
was a great idea; Japanese friends mostly thought I was crazy. I told them that
Western scholars thought that Japans elementary schools were perhaps the best in
the world, and they looked at me as if I were a lunatic.
Japanese parents complained that the schools were too rigid, that they discouraged
creativity and independent thinking. I retorted that some scholars who have studied
creativity think Japanese elementary schools do a great job in nurturing it and that
in any case, Japanese schools teach far more music one useful mode of selfexpression than American schools.
Some of the Japanese parents I talked to also said, probably correctly, that all the
slogans and hansei in elementary schools become a formality, so they have little
impact on the behavior of the kids themselves. The parents complain that the
students may clean the classrooms but they never clean their bedrooms. They also
warned that Gregory might be a likely target for bullying because he would be
different from other pupils. And when Gregory was accepted to Nishimachi, an
international school that stresses Japanese language and culture alongside English,
they said we would be fools to say no.
In the end, the deciding factors were personal ones, very much linked to our own
status as temporary American residents in Japan. After two and a half years of
Japanese preschool, Gregory has become pretty much a Japanese boy, mumbling

Japanese songs under his breath, shouting in Japanese as he wrestles with his
brother and even speaking in Japanese during his sleep. The last straw came when
we were watching a baseball game in Tokyo and he asked me, Daddy, do they play
baseball in America?
So were sending him to the international school. Yet by and large it would be
difficult to find more impressive institutions than Japanese primary schools even
if their promise is not sustained in secondary and college-level education, even if
Japanese parents have their own reasons to grumble, even if the outspoken
bundles of energy in a third-grade classroom have often become diffident wimps by
the time they graduate from high school.
What impresses me the most about the Japanese schools is not their academic
merits; rather it is the same thing I find unnerving about them: their earnestness.
Some other schools around the world perhaps can match Japanese elementary
schools academically, and some may have the same sense of community among the
students. But it would be difficult to find a school with as much soul as the one in
Yokohama where someone spray-painted some graffiti on a wall near the school.
This was a big embarrassment, because graffiti is rare in Japan, and it was
presumed that a student was responsible. I suppose an American school would
have either ignored the graffiti or sent a custodian to deal with it, but in Yokohama
the teachers tried a different approach that speaks volumes about the goals of
Japanese primary education.
First, we tried to find who had done it, but we never found out, said Kenichi
Nakamura, who was the principal of the school. So rather than continuing the
investigation indefinitely, we thought we would have the teachers clean the wall,
and maybe the students would learn something as well. So we teachers chose a
time when the kids would be going home and would pass by the wall and see us,
and we all went out and scrubbed the paint off. It was hard work, but together with
a bunch of students who joined us, we eventually got the paint off. And I think that
whoever painted the graffiti felt hansei, because there was no more graffiti after
that.
Published: August 17, 1997
Nicholas D. Kristof is chief of the Tokyo bureau of The New York Times. New York
Times Magazine