Learning to Go to School in Japan: The Transition from Home to Preschool Life

LEARNING TO GO TO SCHOOL

IN JAPAN

This volume is sponsored by the Center for Japanese Studies University of California, Berkeley

Lois Peak is an employee of the

U.S. Department of Education; however, this book was written in her private capacity. No official support by the U.S. Department of Education is intended or should be inferred.

LEARNING TO GO

TO SCHOOL

IN JAPAN

THE TRANSITION FROM

HOME TO PRESCHOOL LIFE

LOIS PEAK

University of California Press

Berkeley • Los Angeles • London

The costs of publishing this book have been defrayed in part by an award from the Books on Japan Fund in respect of Carl Bielefeldt, Dogen’s Manuals of Zen Meditation, and Edward Fowler, The Rhetoric of Confession: Shishõsetsu in Early Twentieth-Century Japanese Fiction, published by the University of California Press. The Fund is financed by The Japan Foundation from donations contributed generously by Japanese companies.

University of California Press

Berkeley and Los Angeles, California

University of California Press, Ltd.

Oxford, England

©1991 by

The Regents of the University of California

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Peak, Lois.

Learning to go to school in Japan: the transition from home to preschool life / Lois Peak.

c. cm.

Includes bibliographical references (p.) and index.

ISBN 0-520-07151-4 (alk. paper)

ISBN 0-520-08387-3 (paperback)

1. Education, Preschool—Japan. 2. Nursery schools—Japan. 3. Child rearing—Japan. 4. Home and school—Japan. I. Title.

LB1140.25.J3P43 1990

372.21'0952—dc20 91-13628

CIP

Printed in the United States of America 987654321

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Material, ANSI Z39.48-1984. @

For Mother and Dad

Contents

Contents

Tables and Figures

Preface

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1 The Different Worlds of Home and School

2 Preparing the Child for Preschool

3 Behavior Expectations in the Family and in the Preschool

4 The Physical Setting of the Preschool

5 The Roles of Teachers, Parents, and Students

6 The Goals of Preschool Education

7 Daily Activities and Routines

8 Pre-Entrance Events and Ceremonies

9 Opening Ceremony

10 The First Weeks of School

11 Problems at Home

12 Problems in Adjusting to Classroom Life

Conclusions

Appendix: Background on Preschools as Institutions

References

Index

Tables and Figures

FIGURE

Figure 1. Floor Plan of a Typical Preschool Classroom 47

TABLES

Preface

In 1983 I went to Japan to study contemporary childrearing. I was particularly interested in three- and four-year-olds—a period in Japanese children’s life that presented a puzzling anomaly to Western students of child development. At that time it was the consensus of scholars that at home young Japanese children were indulged, highly dependent on their mothers, and unaccustomed to strict enforcement of rules for proper behavior (e.g. Lebra 1976; Vogel 1963; Norbeck and Norbeck 1956). However, in preschools and elementary schools the same children were consistently described as obedient, mature, self-reliant, and cooperative (e.g. Bedford 1979; Bingham 1978-79; Lewis 1984; Shigaki 1983). The obvious question was, How do Japanese children learn to make this transition?

This question was the subject of numerous discussions between Catherine Lewis, then a postdoctoral fellow at the Laboratory of Human Development at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, and myself, then a beginning doctoral student just returned to the United States after six years in Japan. She was the one who originally posed the question, and we used to discuss it for hours together. We speculated that the answer must lie in the Japanese home, in something that Japanese mothers did to their children at about the time they entered preschool.

I continued to wonder precisely what this magical childrearing technique might be that could smoothly transform indulged, loosely disciplined children into obedient, cooperative students. The best hypothesis at the time was that Japanese mothers provided their children with a strong dose of achievement motivation. A Japanese mother, the theory held, communicated to her children how important it was to her personally that they do well at school, and so the children tried to do their best away from home to remain in their mother’s good graces (Taniuchi 1982).

In January 1983 I went to Japan to do eighteen months of intensive fieldwork in Japanese families and to observe the inculcation of achievement motivation in three- and four-year-olds. It quickly became clear that I was looking in the wrong place. My observations of families with children who were about to enter preschool netted few spontaneous remarks or replies to interview questions significant enough to account for the difference in children’s behavior once they entered preschool.

Furthermore, both Japanese child development specialists and the mothers I studied told me in different ways that this new behavior was the result of the preschool experience, not prior preparation in the home. Although I was skeptical of the implication that the role of Japanese teachers in inculcating proper social behavior was more important than that of Japanese mothers, by April 1983 I had decided to listen to their advice. I arranged to observe the beginning of the year at Tokyo Preschool, a private preschool in a middle-class area of Tokyo.

I was amazed at what I saw. I had imagined that the children’s transition to the preschool routine would be a relatively smooth one and that given the overwhelming influence of the home on children’s habits and attitudes, there was little for the teachers to contribute to social training. Instead, I realized that the transition was difficult for many of the children and that the Japanese teachers were carefully and effectively training the children to exhibit the obedient, cooperative, self-reliant behavior they desired. I decided to reorient my method of collecting data to focus on the school’s role in training children in appropriate social behavior.

Between April 1983 and the end of my fieldwork in July 1984, I divided my time almost equally between studying the first year of preschool and the first grade of elementary school. Only the data collected from the preschool portion of the study are reported in this book.

In June 1983 I began research in Mountain City, a fictional name for a regional city of four hundred thousand people located in Nagano Prefecture, in the mountains of central Honshu. There I chose as my primary field site Mountain City Preschool, a small private preschool located in the historic section of the city. I spent two weeks at the beginning of the school year observing classes fulltime and about four more weeks doing so over the rest of the year.

Another six weeks were spent in interviewing Mountain City Preschool teachers and mothers.

To check the representativeness of Mountain City Preschool and Tokyo Preschool, I observed classes full-time for approximately two weeks at a preschool in a rural suburb of Mountain City. I also made observations for between two and five days in three other preschools in both Tokyo and Mountain City. Most of the data presented in this book are drawn from Mountain City Preschool, with examples from Tokyo and other preschools where appropriate.

I initially chose Tokyo and Mountain City as field sites on the assumption that childrearing patterns and preschool practices might be different in Tokyo than in a smaller city. Although some differences in philosophy, curriculum, and routines did exist in various schools, there was a remarkable degree of similarity between the two regions concerning the socialization of group behavior and the training in classroom discipline. Tobin (1989) and Hendry (1986a) also note that the preschools they observed sometimes differed in philosophy or curriculum but seemed largely similar in their actual practice of socializing children’s behavior.

Every possible attempt was made to maximize the representativeness of the preschools and families studied while working within Japanese cultural norms, which require that the researcher be introduced at potential field sites through a mutual acquaintance. I declined introductions at schools that employed experimental or atypical teaching methods or were regarded as particularly famous or of high quality, in favor of schools that were considered unremarkable or average by the local parents.

On the advice of preschool experts in the Japanese National Institute of Educational Research, I selected preschools affiliated with Buddhist temples as the main field sites, for they were reported to be more typical in their teaching practices and less concerned with trendy and out-of-the-ordinary approaches to instruction. Hence Tokyo Preschool and Mountain City Preschool were both temple preschools. The other four preschools observed were either public or nonreligious private schools.

The influence of temple affiliation on the socialization practices of the preschools appeared to be minimal. All of the teachers employed by the Buddhist preschools had been trained at regular teachers’ colleges and none of them reported regularly visiting a temple to worship. As I will describe in more detail later, no parents reported the Buddhist affiliation of the preschools as a major reason for choosing that preschool for their child.

Tokyo Preschool is a private preschool (yõchien) in a middle-class residential neighborhood in downtown Tokyo. In 1984 it enrolled 171 children in six classes—one class of 16 three-year-olds, two classes of four-year-olds with 34 students each, and three classes of five-year-olds with 29 students in each class. Tokyo Preschool was slightly larger than the 1984 national mean of 142 students in five classes per school.

The neighborhood surrounding Tokyo Preschool comprised modest condominiums, apartments, and older single-family homes. About one-third of the families had lived in that section of downtown Tokyo since before World War II. All children who attended the preschool were from local families and lived within walking distance. Most fathers worked as salary men in medium-sized companies or as local shopkeepers.

Mountain City Preschool, also a private preschool, was in 1984 considerably smaller than the average Japanese preschool, with a total enrollment of 60 children in three classes. There were 14 three-year-olds, 17 four-year-olds, and 29 five-year-olds. Because of the small enrollment the sex ratio at Mountain City Preschool was subject to considerable yearly fluctuation. Fourteen of the nineteen new students in 1984 were boys, although as recently as 1980 the entering class had been four-fifths female. Therefore it was not possible for me to speculate reliably in this study concerning sex differences in family and preschool socialization practices. Some caution should be used in generalizing the results of both the maternal interviews and Mountain City classroom observations to Japanese girls. In keeping with the largely male sample, the pronoun he will be used to refer to preschool children in general, whereas she will be used to refer to teachers, because virtually all Japanese preschool teachers are women.

The neighborhood surrounding Mountain City Preschool was in the process of transition from modest prewar-era single-family homes to office and commercial buildings. It bordered a small night district of bars, pachinko parlors, and taxi stands, and approximately one-third of the children in the preschool came from families who owned these establishments or worked in them. The other two-thirds of the children were fairly evenly divided between local families in which fathers had a high-school education and worked at local white-collar jobs, and families from other parts of Japan in which the fathers were university-educated bankers temporarily assigned to Mountain City. The banking families all lived in a large company housing complex not far from the preschool.

Although class background is not a popular variable in social analysis in contemporary Japan, there appeared to be some variation in childrearing behavior and attitudes between the families in the night district and the families of bankers. Tobin (1989) has also noted class-related differences in style and curriculum between Japanese preschools and Japanese day-care centers. Unfortunately, I recognized this possible influence of social class on family socialization only late in my investigation, and it was not possible, from the small sample of students in Mountain City preschool, to draw reliable conclusions. However, this issue is an important one for future research.

Because this study focused on children’s transition from home to preschool life, classroom observations were most intensive during the first weeks of the school year, with periodic follow-ups. I also attended and recorded scheduled events for incoming and graduating students wherever possible. This included application interviews in two different schools, school visitation day in one school, opening ceremonies in two schools, and graduation ceremonies in two schools. In the other four schools principals and teachers were asked to describe these events in detail to check the representativeness of the two main schools studied.

I recorded data from classroom observations on cassette tape and in handwritten field notes. These observations focused on training in classroom routines and on incidents of misbehavior and student discipline. I then reviewed the tape recordings of teachers and students and transcribed disciplinary incidents from the cassette tape, synchronizing them with field notes recording physical behavior and nonverbal activity.

In addition to observing classroom behavior, at the end of each school day I interviewed teachers concerning their teaching and behavior management objectives for the day. Incidents of discipline or behavior correction were reviewed, and teachers were asked to explain what had occurred and why they had dealt with the situa- tion as they did. This combination of observation and teacher explanation proved extremely revealing of how Japanese preschool teachers view the psychological dynamics of children’s behavior and how they control it.

To better understand the child’s transition from home to preschool, I conducted interviews of the mothers. Seventeen mothers whose three- or four-year-old children were newly enrolled in Mountain City Preschool were interviewed during the third month of the school year. The interviews were designed to determine the degree to which parental expectations and socialization were congruent with those of the preschool and the means by which each child had managed the transition to preschool life. Lasting from two to three hours each, the interviews took place in the woman’s home and were scheduled while the child was at preschool. I conducted them in a friendly and open-ended fashion. All interviews were tape-recorded and later transcribed verbatim in the original Japanese. (See Peak [1987] for a fuller discussion of interview methods and a translation of the protocols used.)

Acknowledgments

My interest in Japanese childhood socialization began when I was an undergraduate in Japan, doing informal studies of Japanese families and various types of early educational settings. During this period Dr. Shigefumi Nagano, of the Japanese National Institute of Educational Research, patiently and skillfully guided my studies and encouraged me to apply to graduate school. Later, when I returned to Japan on a dissertation fellowship, his guidance, introductions, insights, and friendship were instrumental in the success of my fieldwork.

During my doctoral studies at the Harvard Graduate School of Education the teaching and guidance of Professor Robert LeVine and the influence of postdoctoral fellow Catherine Lewis helped me come to regard Japanese early education as a fascinating and thought-provoking contrast to prevailing American theories of child development. Indeed the central research question of this book grew out of many discussions with Catherine Lewis and the excellent example of her own research.

I greatly appreciate the kindness of the many people who helped me in various ways in conducting this research and in coming to know Japan. Most important are the Japanese teachers, mothers, and preschool children in Tokyo and Mountain City, whose warmth and generous sharing of their lives made this study possible, as well as my ex-husband and his Japanese family.

I also appreciate the assistance of other teachers over the years, particularly the members of my dissertation committee—Ezra Vogel, Jerome Kagan, and Catherine Snow. I owe a special debt of gratitude to Thomas Rohlen for encouraging me to publish this book.

Special thanks go to my friends and colleagues, Catherine Lewis, Merry White, and Robert August, for sharing their insights during hours of discussion about Japanese education.

Field research for this study was supported by a dissertation fellowship from the Japan Foundation and a Sinclair Kennedy Travelling Grant from Harvard University. Coding of some of the data reported herein was made possible by a Radcliffe Grant for Graduate Women. Time for writing and preparing this manuscript was made possible by a Spencer Fellowship from the National Academy of Education and a grant from the Joint Committee on Japanese Studies of the Social Science Research Council and the American Council of Learned Societies.

I offer this work to my spiritual teachers, in particular His Holiness the Sakya Trizin, His Eminence Luding Khen Rinpoche, His Eminence Dezhung Rinpoche, and the Venerable Lama Kalsang Gyaltsen. May this book in some way be of benefit to others.

Introduction

A new myth about Japan has entered contemporary American folklore. The harbinger of this new genre of tall tale of the East was a 1987 Smithsonian Magazine cover featuring an engaging picture of Japanese preschoolers captioned, Japanese Kindergartners: Facing a Future of ‘Exam Hell’ with Mama’s Help. Since that time other usually responsible popular media have followed suit with special reports on Japanese preschool education, characterizing it as obsessively examination-oriented, highly competitive, and Spartan in teaching style (e.g., Reader’s Digest, July 1987; Washington Post, August 8, 1987).

Two excerpts give the flavor of these articles:

Two-year-old Hiromasa Itoh doesn’t know it yet, but he’s preparing for one of the most important milestones of his life, the examination for entry into first grade. Already he has learned to march correctly around the classroom in time with the piano and follow the green tape stuck to the floor—ignoring the red, blue, and yellow tapes that lead in different directions. With the other 14 children in his class at a central Tokyo nursery school, he obeys the cleaning-up music and sings the good-bye song. His mother, observing through a oneway glass window, says that it’s all in preparation for an entrance examination in two or three years, when Hiromasa will try for admission to one of Tokyo’s prestigious private schools. (Simons 1987b, 44)

A front-page Washington Post article provocatively titled Summer Camp Readies Japan’s Kindergartners for ‘Exam Hell’ (Washington Post 1987) painted a similar picture:

Fidgeting at makeshift picnic tables in these wooded mountains, 160 five-year-olds, plastic spoons poised, stared hungrily at plates filled with curry and rice, cucumbers and salad. It was well past their usual lunch hour, but not one child made a move for the food that had been sitting in front of them for the last few minutes. Instead, they listened to a teacher extol the virtues of patience and forbear-ance , "If you can endure like this you should be able to wait and listen to what the teacher says, to what your mother says, to what your father says. It is important to learn to wait and listen to what people tell you, the teacher intoned. … The underlying purpose of this three-day excursion was serious: these kindergartners were being prepared by professionals for their first encounter with Japan’s legendary examination hell." In a few months they will take an elementary school examination that many parents believe may determine the future of their children’s entire lives.

The picture of Japanese early education in these reports neither accurately represents fact nor draws from the descriptions of Japanese preschools available in the scholarly press (Hendry 1986; Lewis 1984; Tobin, Wu, and Davidson 1987). Despite the inaccuracy of these reports, however, they apparently have gained credence in the popular media.

In fact, the vast majority of Japanese preschools are neither Spartan in atmosphere nor oriented toward examinations. They are cheerful, boisterous, play-centered environments even less academically oriented than American kindergartens. Such irresponsible descriptions encourage American readers to dismiss Japanese early education as a bleak and inhuman process. This is unfortunate, for there is much that American teachers and parents can learn from Japanese preschools. Because these and other myths and misconceptions about Japanese early education have begun to obscure American perceptions of Japanese preschools, the most pernicious misconceptions about Japanese early education must be refuted.

THREE MISCONCEPTIONS

Myth 1: Japanese Preschools Are Examination-Oriented

Although two-year-old Hiromasa Itoh, featured in the Smithsonian Magazine article, is reported to be already preparing hard for elementary-school entrance examinations, he is in that respect an atypical Japanese child. Less than 1 percent of Japanese children enter an elementary school that requires any kind of entrance examination (Monbushõ 1985). Even allowing for the facts that the ratio of applications to admissions in some of the most selective schools may be as high as ten to one and that parents who desire such elite education for their children usually have their child ap ply to more than one school, probably less than 5 percent of all children sit for these entrance examinations.

On graduating from elementary school, 94 percent of all students automatically matriculate at local public junior high schools, again without sitting for an entrance examination. Very few Japanese children experience entrance examinations