The Hardest Lesson
A one-time teacher reflects on the plight of the merely average
By KARL TARO GREENFELD
My first job in Japan was as an English teacher in a high school just south of Tokyo. This was a so-called low-level school, roughly equivalent in academic rigor to a vocational institution. In its 20-year history, the school had never sent one student directly to a four-year college. A few of the girls went on to tanki-daigaku, a kind of junior college for women, and the boys mostly ended up working for tiny family firms or doing odd jobs.
I was just a couple of years older than my students. The Japanese youth I had been exposed to previously--my cousins, friends and acquaintances--were exam-hell veterans, products of good high schools who had spent their adolescence in a state of chronic fatigue from staying up late cramming for admissions tests. My male cousins kept their hair trimmed in the crew cut expected of high school baseball players, and the girls set off to school every morning with black uniforms crisp and white shirts starched. The kids I encountered at my new job were different. The boys wore their hair long and sometimes dyed purple or blue. They turned their uniforms into statements of belligerent non-conformity: dirty jackets worn over bare chests, pants tightly pegged over pairs of leopard-skin creepers. The girls dyed their hair reddish-brown. Tattoos abounded. Yuke, a guitar player who had once asked about drug prices in Los Angeles, where he intended to go after high school, came into class one day and showed me his freshly pierced tongue.
The kids were friendly, jovial and totally uninterested in learning English. Most of them slept during class, others kept up a steady stream of jabber, and when I tried to quiet them they simply walked out. This was the vaunted Japanese educational system? The condition I had stumbled upon, a sort of kireru--the nihilism that animates many left-behind Japanese kids--was broader than I had realized.
When Japan was booming, there were opportunities even for those who fell off the academic wagon. My iconoclastic students could have looked forward to an array of unsatisfying but ultimately sustaining careers. The educational system seemed to operate on this premise: fail or succeed, society will find a place for you. But what happened to the marginal kids when the bubble burst? The generation that came of age in the '90s is the first in the postwar era to face a stagnating standard of living, a diminishing economic pie and fewer career options. Tough times have spawned a tough new breed of kids who take what they can when they can, since there may not be anything left to take tomorrow. The media love these stories: schoolgirls prostituting themselves for concert tickets, students who work three jobs to pay off their mobile phone bills, junior high school kids killing their teachers. Is the Japanese dream dying?
I doubt it. But there is among many young Japanese a sense of despair and hopelessness that portends a vastly different future, and national agenda, from the corporation-first, individual-second groupism that Westerners find so interesting. Where previous generations were too busy working hard, squirming home on crowded subways and making do with five hours of sleep in tiny apartments to wonder if they were happy or not, today's Japanese youth have the enforced leisure of unemployment to develop adult angst and advanced pathos. Those kids I struggled to teach on the outskirts of Tokyo are learning a lesson their parents never had to face: life is unfair.
Karl Taro Greenfeld, a writer-reporter for TIME in New York, is the author of Speed Tribes: Days and Nights with Japan's Next Generation
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Left-behind kids dress for excess. Tom Wagner--Saba for TIME
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