Cameraderie and Self-Governance in Japanese "Educational Dormitories"

I am working with some students (Casey Walker and Guillaume Albert) on a collaborative ethnographic study of Japanese camaraderie and self-governance practices in college dormitories, taking ICU as a case study. Check out our presentation at CIES Annual Conference in Montreal (May 5, 2011).  

https://docs.google.com/present/edit?id=0AUj1G5vbTAJFZGd2eGM4dDVfM2NucDI2cWdi&hl=en&authkey=CO-eweoK

Here is the Abstract:

Camaraderie and self-governance in Japanese “educational dormitories”: an ethnographic case study of a university dorm reconstruction project

Japanese educators make great use of self-directed student activities (Shimahara, 1986). While this aspect of Japanese teaching styles has been examined (e.g., Stevenson & Stigler, 1992), few have bothered to examine the educational value placed on school life outside the classroom despite the stable position occupied within the Japanese Course of Study by “special activities” and “non-academic activities”.

Researchers such as Thomas Rohlen (1996) have shown how traditional Japanese modes of seishin kyoiku (spiritual training) incorporate elaborate forms of initiation for entrants into an organization, facilitating a strong sense of camaraderie and group loyalty. This pervades throughout the school experience, particularly in the sempai-kohai (senior-junior) relationships that develop as strong bonds within extracurricular activities (e.g. Fukusawa & LeTendre, 2001). The inescapable nature of these bonds has been criticized, conversely, for encouraging conformism (Yoneyama, 1999).

However, the relationships among residents in a university dormitory, together with its self-governance practices, have not been widely and systematically studied or discussed as part of the educational experience. This is particularly a concern inasmuch as Japanese universities, under the influence of global trends toward consumerist models of facilities provision, are undergoing a period of potentially dramatic change (Freeman & Thomas, 2005; Varghese, 2009).

This paper presents initial findings from a yearlong ethnographic project examining the communal experience of dormitory life on the campus of International Christian University, which holds educational goals for the dormitories and is currently undergoing a large-scale dormitory construction and reconstruction project. The study documents aspects of camaraderie and self-governance that have long been in place and residents’ struggle to come to terms with new facilities arrangements as well as the meaning of “educational dormitories.”

物作り精神で国は立ち上がる

日本の良いところばかりについて語るのをそろそろやめないと「日本びいき」の評判が出来てしまう危険性がある事を知っていますが、良いところが非常に多いのでなかなかやめられないのです。なるべく客観的に物事を見るようには努力しますが。例えば、先日成田空港のデルタのスカイ・ラウンゲでブログを書いている時、パソコンのプラグを差し込むコンセントを探していたら、隣のアメリカ人航空客は場所を教えてくれてから付加えた言葉は、「When the Japanese make it, you know they aren’t going to put the outlet where it’s going to make you tip over your drinks.」つまり、コンセントを取り付けるだけでなく、使用するお客に取って心地よく使えるように作るのは「日本製」だというと信頼があるという事です。設計のときも製造のときも月曜日でも金曜日の夕方（花金）でも大体日本でやった事は当てに出来るというイメージが未だに強い。「個人のレベルでの自主性が無い」との批判もたまに耳に入るのですが、正確性に関しては日本人の仕事は優れているという意識が海外の社会（少なくともアメリカ）に強いようです。

かといって日本人はしばしばロボットのように、やる事を素直にやって、いつも次の指示を待つ「指示待ち人間」というイメージも無くはないでしょう。でも、そのような批判は簡単には受け入れがたいと思います。同じ空港のラウンジの中で英語と日本語のテレビが２台隣同士で並んでいたのですが、英語のBBC/CNNではかなりワンパターンのいつものニュース・トピックのメニューが使われた印象があったものの、NHKニュースの報道では、いろんな社会現象を満遍なく取り上げながら、もちろん東北の復旧を中心に、取材していました。

日本社会における製造、仕事に対する考え方は、いろんな意味で徹底的です。それは、「正確性」という特徴を持つだけではなく、信念のある労働観だと思います。プラスになる事を強調する営業精神だけでなく、巧みな労働者のアイデンティティーを全うするような信念が広く普及しているようです。もちろん、日本の総合人口の誰もが深く持つ信念ではないのでしょうが、日本製なら海外の人間もまだ比較的当てに出来るぐらいの割合らしいです。やはり、 「物づくりが国を支える」というのは日本人の信念なのですね。

On Stealing, Empathy, and Returning Rituals

Walking down the stairway in the main lecture hall on my campus the other day, I noticed a small, pink cloth zipper-bag perched neatly atop a crook in the marble banister. Instinctively I knew that someone had found it in that general vicinity and placed it in its perch. The finder could have taken it, together with his or her contact information, to the “otoshimono” (lost and found) area of some nearby office, where the owner might eventually drift in, claim it, and contact the finder to thank him or her (as is a custom with Japanese lost-and-founds), but this would be more trouble for everyone. Conversely, the pouch looked chock full and somewhat valuable (although I didn’t open it to see what was inside), and it could have easily been stolen from its perch in the lonely stairwell. Yet, knowing that the owner had already lost it, no clearly marked ‘lost and found’ was located in any obvious location, and the owner would be most likely to notice it in such a place where one passes by every day, this solution actually seemed the most reasonable. But the rationale for it clearly depends on a belief that passers-by would not steal it.

In the past, I have found items and money on the ground and been encouraged to take these to the police office. Having done so at Narita Airport once with a 1000-yen bill (a little under US$10 at the time), its owner drifted inside the police office, but it was too late; I had already submitted the bill to the police, who were then loathe to simply hand it back to its owner without confirming the owner’s identifying information as well as mine. Even with mutually hectic travel schedules, it took a little bit of convincing to get the police officers to abbreviate the lost-and-found procedures they hold with deep conviction.

Once when at the American Embassy, I had an encounter that punctuated this cultural difference to me when an American coming for some paperwork happened to find a 1000-yen bill on the floor. He looked around and, seeing no takers, slipped the bill into his pocket. Almost as if it were a comedy skit, the bill’s Japanese owner stumbled past me into the office only 5 or 10 minutes later and, glancing around, began to ask if anyone had seen a 1000-yen bill. When the American fellow produced it and tried to hand it to her, she began to refuse it, saying she did not want to ask him to replace her bill for her (not fathoming that it was her bill in his pocket). This American fellow’s Japanese wife was becoming visibly embarrassed, as she found herself sandwiched between two value systems and collective moral responsibility for her husband’s reprehensible handling of his discovery, within the Japanese cosmology. After considerable negotiation efforts he finally convinced the owner to take it back from him with no official mediation by the office staff.

Contrast that to the larger bills (perhaps Canadian $100, if I recall correctly) that were stolen out of a traveler’s wallet at a youth hostel where I stayed in Montreal this past March. The owner of the money brought this theft to the attention of the front desk, where employees helplessly told him they had not received any money identified as lost, and the traveler apologetically disclaimed the fact that he had not been careful enough in his placement of his wallet. This turning of moral tables irked me deeply, because, even though I realize theft is not unheard of in Japan, it is sufficiently rare that the locus of responsibility was much closer to the thief than the victim in my Japan-conditioned mind.

Why do Japanese people return things so dependably? I would like to think of it as a superior moral code, and that would not be all wrong. But clearly there is some training involved here, and it entails a number of specific protocols about bringing found items to socially agreed upon officials and undergoing an information relay procedure to facilitate the expression of gratitude, and even a 10% reward, to be paid without coercion by the owner to the finder. Material honesty is one behavior that is extremely difficult to enforce with external rewards and punishments. The high level of moral honesty one encounters in Japan, therefore, serves as a critical piece of evidence demonstrating the role of empathic training of young people.

Neural science tells us, according to an episode of the BBC’s The Forum I listened to this morning, that there are certain parts of the brain that “light up” when an individual exercises empathy, and some people light up those neural pathways in more consistent patterns than others. In fact the Japanese word omoiyari, or ‘empathy’, is used frequently in Japanese educational discourse, as researchers like Joseph Tobin et al, Merry White, Lois Peak, Catherine Lewis, and others have long pointed out. That is, Japanese educators avoid punishment like the plague, as a means of managing young people, preferring to appeal to young people’s sense of empathy. How many times have I heard the expression “aite no kimochi ni naru,” or “feel what the other person feels,” by adults dealing with children with absolutely no means of enforcing their will other than coaxing! This can be annoying when students in public schools don’t feel like feeling other people’s feelings. But the empathic training Japanese people receive so often throughout their school days must certainly have its effect in everyday life within Japanese society.

Are Japanese Collectivist? And Why Should We Care?

I think collectivist societies such as Japan (and of course East Asia in general) have a lot to teach the rest of the advanced and advancing world. We typically think of collectivism as a characteristic of developing societies, but Japan is arguably one of the best advanced-nation examples of a collectivist society. Of course I say this with a full realization that there are many people who would challenge the characterization of Japan as “collectivist” relative, say, to China or Korea. Certainly Japanese children grow up with a strong sense of individual responsibility and individual rights, but these tend to be rights and responsibilities relative to some imagined, collective group.

Before stating my opinion about what Japan has to teach us about collective living, let me clarify my understanding of some differences between Japanese and Chinese collectivism. In the Japanese case, society at large looms significant as one of the collective groups to which individuals are responsible and with which they affiliate. This can be seen readily in the overwhelming in the “social capital” we have seen since the Great East Japan Earthquake in March of this year. Most people have shown themselves remarkably willing to do with less electricity, for instance. I just received an email announcement that we will have the power shut off on campus to save energy (because of Tepco’s problems) for: “3 to 20 seconds at 6 a.m.”! Are you kidding? That is so short! These planned power outages have ended up being short because so many people have cooperated with energy conservation. And although the Asahi Shinbun reported over the weekend that numbers of volunteers to affected regions have recently dropped, there nevertheless have been a lot of people grabbing for the opportunity to help, just because they care…for ‘people’. We have not seen this sort of thing occur across China yet.

On the other hand, Chinese folks show their collectivism in their tendency to cluster more tightly when living overseas. Look at how Chinese foreign students defended their country’s honor during the period leading up to the Beijing Olympics, when human rights claims against China threatened the participation of numerous actors. I find it hard to imagine Japanese foreign students doing the same thing around the world. This seems to me to be part of a family-loyal aspect of the Chinese psyche, in which one unapologetically defends the interests of one’s family (contrasting to the Japanese tendency to apologize not only for oneself but for one’s family or inner circle members—think also about how mainland Koreans speak honorifically to others about their own fathers and mothers, but Japanese, sharing a similar linguistic set of mechanisms in their language, speak with humble forms about their own parents). Likewise, when large numbers of Chinese live in any given overseas city, such as Brisbane, Australia, they establish stores on separate corners of the same intersection. You generally don’t find Japanese doing that, preferring as they do to mix in with local populations. Part of that could be historically motivated by the dishonor of coming out on the wrong side of World War II, but it would be difficult to argue that China has never had its historic episodes (as has any other country, Australia included).

Yet there are ways in which Chinese seem less collectivist than Japanese. Some Japanese anthropologists have referred to Chinese as having a “broad face” (kao ga hiroi), meaning Chinese individuals maintain many relationships, relative to Japanese individuals who prefer to deepen loyalty with fewer ‘others’. Japan Close Up has argued (in some issue a while back) that this development arose from China’s history as a continental entity in which people come and go—far away, compared to Japan’s island history, where everyone knows that the distance they may yet traverse is limited, and they must therefore maintain closer relationships and reputations with those they know. The example was given that a Chinese storeowner might criticize a customer for coming in and buying nothing, while a Japanese storeowner would never think of doing that (although I have encountered such treatment before in Japan on a rare occasion, and never in the US).

But living in Japanese society presents social difficulties for a Westerner like myself. Having been acculturated to expect public space is a domain where I relate first with those closest to me, I have often been surprised at how those closer to me turn their psychic ‘face’ away from me when others are present. My father-in-law, for instance, never hugged his daughter and me or our son when we arrived in Japan after three years away. Rather he immediately devoted his attention to the family friend who was kind enough to drive us to his home from the airport. Only after she had left did he start talking with us. My wife, when her finger was in pain because of an accident during a skiing trip with in-laws turned not to me, but to the whole group with her pain.

As an American, these episodes need to be interpreted culturally in order not to take offense. This is sometimes difficult to do, but in the long run it might be the sort of cultural learning that modern societies should strive for. In Triumph of the City, Edward Glaeser writes about the ecological advantages of urbanization. Regardless of whether we agree with Glaeser, the reality of urbanization cannot be denied. According to the BBC’s One Planet, most of the earth’s population now lives in cities, and by 2050, that number should grow to 60% of humanity. If the world is to urbanize and families are to shrink, there would seem to be no choice but to collectivize our cultures, and among the advanced and advancing societies, East Asian cultures like Japan might have a way to show us how.

There are many aspects of the Japanese ‘nanny-ocracy’ that Western civilization may not be prepared to adopt (beeps and buzzes and bells that notify the public what time it is and what sorts of items are located where; tight transportation schedules; garbage separation expectations; enforced participation in neighborhood cleaning activities), as well as the networking conventions of group decision-making (nemawashi). But there might be Western ways of doing similar things, and as the world urbanizes, and as families shrink, we will no doubt need to look more to Japanese social models for how to turn our attention from our smaller and shrinking in-groups to larger social groups, because Japan already has viable ways of doing just that.

Japanese Culture’s Organic Bent Contrasts with Irresponsible Policy

I started washing dishes ‘the Japanese way’ when I was 22 years old as a homestay visitor in Morioka in 1984-1985. I learned from my homestay hosts, the Moritas, that one need not use hot water, but lots of cold water is used. Instead of using a cloth inside a sink full of warm, soapy water, as I had grown up doing in a Norwegian-American nurse’s family, I now converted to using a sponge and running cold water over each dish for washing and rinsing.

This difference in method seems to reflect different beliefs about soap, detergent, and chemicals in general. In my American upbringing, we had a washing sink and a rinsing sink, and food scraps built up at the bottom of the former, while the latter was crystal clear, but nearly scalding, so as to kill as many germs as possible. Taking rinsed dishes out of the rinsing sink sometimes involved grabbing them quickly and setting them up on the rack next to the sink, sometimes still donning a small puff of suds until they dissipated during the drying process.

Of course, even in America we did not consider it a good job to leave suds on the dish for the next person to eat, but it was not so flagrant a crime. In Japan it is flagrant. Furthermore, even having a rinsing sink of still water is problematic, because the last water the dish touches before being set on the rack contains some residual detergent. The Japanese alternative is always to use running water, although it need not be hot.

Thus in my American home we were much more concerned about ridding ourselves of biological contamination, while in my Japanese home (and this is as true in my Japanese wife’s kitchen as it was in the Morita kitchen) it is chemical contamination one is to avoid. I should perhaps not have been surprised to discover, then, that Japan has a strong tradition of organic farming. In fact, places like Asian Rural Institute, a Japanese farming NGO where agricultural leaders from the developing world come for training (http://www.ari-edu.org/english/index.html), focus their development assistance efforts not so much on cleanliness or even productivity, but on farming naturally.

Certainly this is not to say that Japanese culture does not have strong traditions of hygiene. It does. But chemical contamination is more deeply distrusted, relative to my American experience. Apple peelings are shaved before serving, and this is typically justified by the possibility of chemicals used in their production. Vegetables are generally washed, but potato skins have never caught on, for the same reason. Recently dentists are recommending Listerine, but gargling with old tea (degarashi) is still a preferred method, and health rooms at middle schools I worked for sent out notices that green tea has the ability to envelop viruses, rendering them powerless to infect the gurgler. Health supplements are quite popular these days, but urban legends readily indict them for one malady or another. Meanwhile, wearing masks prevents colds. Japanese homeowners cannot be found walking around their yard with ‘round-up’ and lawn manicure (with gasoline-powered mowers, fertilizers, ammonia, and weed killers) has simply never become a national pastime, as it has in the US.

So while Japan is fully on board with most aspects of modernity, Japanese culture has never embraced chemo-modernity. Genetically modified foods are scorned and the spraying process makes imported rice suspect in the eye of the consumer.

Yet all this attention to preserving natural environments and consumption habits falls by the wayside in its significance when the government allows incinerators to distribute dioxin and power companies to litter radioactive particles. It seems profoundly ironic and tragic that all these careful daily efforts of the Japanese people are so utterly disregarded by those in power.

The Japanese Are Back

Today I am writing from Montreal, Canada. This is my second conference here in the past two months, the first one being right after the great Tohoku earthquake. The Hinomaru flag is still hung outside the falafel shop near the youth hostel where I am staying—waving beside a Canadian flag and two flags from a local hockey team. I was moved when I first saw two Japanese flags hanging in front of that shop when I was here two months ago, but now there is only one Japanese flag (I think the other one was replaced by a hockey flag).

At my conference I have run into many Japanese participants, unlike in March. In March I spoke to every Japanese participant I could find and ask them where they were from. With no exceptions, the answer was always “Kansai,” not Tokyo or anywhere north. Now Tokyo area participants seem the most numerous, as one would normally expect.

But Japan’s recovery is far from coherent. Tohoku is still not prepared to accept volunteers in full swing. Nevertheless, more people seem to be focusing on the tsunami recovery and fewer on radiation. I learned last night that over 100,000 civil defense troops are helping with the rubble and other recovery tasks, comprising nearly half of civil defense forces in Japan!

At the conference I am now attending, Comparative and International Education Society, a Tuesday panel session on “Education in Emergency Situations: The Case of Japan” was organized just in time for the conference, and a full and enthusiastic audience attended and has been talking about it ever since. Although I had to miss this session, I learned from those who attended that Ministry of Education in Japan (MEXT) is promoting efforts to arrange university credit for student volunteer activities in the recovery.

These all look to me like promising signs, although the challenge will be in logistically receiving all the volunteers headed for Tohoku from around Japan and from around the world, in the coming months. Especially after having volunteered in Kobe after the 1995 earthquake there, I feel the tasks of facilitation must be daunting. Nevertheless, the need for volunteer help is monumental, and volunteerism itself has developed considerably over the past 16 years. With any luck I will get a chance to bring students there myself. If I do, I will post pictures.