Comments on: Why Japanese Education Succeeds: Amae, Stress, And Perseverance

By: Risa

Risa — Fri, 14 Mar 2014 17:32:00 +0000

You do have to consider, however, that gender roles are deeply rooted in Japan and that Japanese feminism is VERY different from American feminism. One of the biggest differences is that while feminists in America push for independence, Japanese feminists have much more of the group mentality because it is something so integral to their culture (as mentioned in the article above). To me, it seems that the feminist movement there is less about getting girls out of the mother/wife role and more about getting everyone to depend on each other, male or female, and the power that a woman can have as a wife or mother (which, in some ways, has been historically better than how mothers were viewed in the west). The gender roles are slowly changing, but amae continues to be important all-around.

(And think of all the times you’ve read/watched a story about a Japanese man telling the woman he loves that he wishes she’d depend on him more! That’s amae right there, and in the other direction.)

By: Japanese

Japanese — Wed, 12 Mar 2014 03:01:00 +0000

Most of the people reading this blog are coming from outside Japan, right? I don’t really agree with what is written here. In classic Japan, a lot of the families were based on 3 generations living under one roof, in villages where everyone knew everyone else. The eldest son would normally inherit everything (“the house”), whereas the younger siblings were ideally expected to strike it out on their own. Things moved at a leisurely pace, nothing changed much. There was not so much emphasis on school work, since your position in life was determined to great extent by your family. They chose who you should marry. The child had an amae relationship with a large number of people within the community, already at a very young age.

“Ganbare” is a slang word that became mainstream only after the 1936 Olympics in Berlin. During WWII there was a totalitarian education, and afterwards the young people streamed into the cities to rebuild and start “nuclear families”. This generation was essentially uprooted immigrants coming to a big city. The corporation they worked for was the only thing that took care of them. There was stress and competition; those with “high education” would climb higher up the corporate ladder, so these parents became obsessed with pushing their children into the best schools. The children born around 1960 were the first generation that was subjected to so much competition and stress in school.

The current Japanese system is not the product of some deep deliberate thinking, it has its roots in the turmoils of our history. The obsession with pressuring small children comes from the excessive concentration of the population in a few cities. This will change in a few decades, when most of the population get over 60. If there are so few children, there cannot be so much competition anymore. If you compare 1870, 1900, 1930, 1960, 1990, you will find that the social attitudes and education systems were completely different.

By: Craiggles

Craiggles — Tue, 11 Mar 2014 05:18:00 +0000

I think it’s important to note most people viewing this are American, and why compare say Russia and Japan? I don’t know enough about Russia’s education system to make a rational decision and no matter how many “facts” an internet website throws at me I can’t even truly believe empirical evidence if I don’t have preconceptions (maybe intuition) and/or experiences to form a proper foundation to those claims.

I just believe they are appealing to their audience since 317,493,212 people currently live in America and, “According to a survey published in 2006, 13% of EU citizens speak English as their native language.”

SOOOOOO, yeah. Probably over 90% of people reading this website are Americans… when writing an article and using another country to show compare/contrast for a better idea of the situation, than I think they aren’t making any mistakes here.

tl;dr:
I’m not saying your argument is entirely invalid, but I think the point wasn’t about contrasting other nations but shedding as much light as possible in a blog styled post on the Japanese and the US seemed a viable option to show contrast to paint a better picture since most people reading this are in fact Americans.

By: Gizmotech

Gizmotech — Mon, 10 Mar 2014 13:26:00 +0000

As someone who teaches at a couple of schools in Japan which both segregates kids based on learning disabilities and general performance levels, as well as teaching at a tokubetsushiengakou for the hearing and mentally impaired, I suggest you revisit your section on learning disabilities after performing more research. While a large part of Japan might subscribe to the group advancement theory, there are certainly parts of it which do segregate things. On top of that, the ENTIRE senior high school system is designed around the idea that you apply to the school for the “smart”, “Business”, “low performers”, “private” which entirely segregates kids based on any number of factors from economic standing to academic performance.

I’m in no way saying that the US or Japan is better, but your claims about Japan are incomplete.

By: Ariana Bliss

Ariana Bliss — Fri, 07 Mar 2014 15:11:00 +0000

Continuing, by avoiding fights with their children (one way of thinking of amae), aren’t these mothers disassociating themselves from stress? The same applies to forking over cash every month for cram schools – they don’t have to deal with the stress of forcing their children to put in 16 hour days of studying. And they’ll have more of a chance of avoiding the stress from a dreaded failure of an entrance exam. As long as failure is dreaded, its possibility avoided, creativity is on it’s death-bed.

PISA scores, university rankings, GRE results, Fortune 500 listings, and even Nobel Prizes are only measures (perhaps not even very accurate ones) of certain types of success. Measures are useful, they can give us confidence or take it away, they can show us areas of possible improvement, or train us to stand up and try again. But one inch is not the same as one centimeter, just as success in one arena is not success in another. And balance is important. Too much weight on one side, and the whole scale will tip.

By: Ariana Bliss

Ariana Bliss — Fri, 07 Mar 2014 14:52:00 +0000

Hinoema’s comment mentions the important idea of disassociation from stress. (Decisions take forever, nobody wants to take responsibility, hard yes/no answers are avoided, or only implied, strong emotional states like anger, fear or sadness or even passion are not supposed to be shown…). When I imagine many of the Japanese mothers I know, I can honestly say that rather than being the nurturing, attention-lavishing amae type, they fall more under the definition of amae with connotations of spoiling. “Hai hai hai hai, ja katteageru yo.” They constantly let their limits slide. They don’t want to bothered with having to deal with an emotional public meltdown, so they buy yet another Tomica car or Pokemon figure. While this (along with all of their contributions to cram schools) is a wonderful way to support the sluggish economy, I wouldn’t put it under the heading of “nurturing and loving.” And often they will do this because they know they have to save their battle lines for making their tiny children spend many hours a day in front of piles of worksheets. You could say this is balancing the stress with love, or you could call it bribery. Whichever way you see it, I think this may point us to one reason the Japanese schools are seen as so “successful” – endless hours of studying. This brings us to gaman, which is wonderful, and available in any culture, I believe. Why is gaman at not getting a toy or a chemically processed snack of less value than sitting for hours at the local Kumon and ploughing through worksheets, endless worksheets? So many ways to define “success.” But no way to get it without gaman, endurance, perseverance and trying hard again and again and again. Any successful person anywhere in the world knows that.