Student Behaviour

(Big Danger in Little Osaka #16, 2009)

People have a certain idea of what Japanese students are like. Mention the words ‘Japanese high school’ and minds are filled with rows of identical students with their heads down, quietly and efficiently doing their work. Perhaps you’ve heard stories of students going to ‘cram schools’ in the evening to do extra study for their exams, or of children who can do vast sums in their head. Perhaps you’ve seen that YouTube video of the Japanese kid who solves a Rubik’s Cube in, like, five seconds or something. Japanese students have a reputation as being amazingly well-behaved and hard-working – a preconception that, like so many preconceptions about Japan, is hilariously wrong. 

At my school it is not uncommon to see students asleep at their desk, or girls painstakingly reapplying their makeup with the aid of a hand-held mirror during class. Often the back half of the class seems free to wander about and talk as they like while the teacher stands at the front, reading aloud from a textbook to no one in particular. Once I walked into class to find one of my students casually using an electric hair straightener at her desk, greeting me like it wasn’t a big deal. Between classes the hallways are chaos, with kids throwing food at each other and screams that can be heard from several floors away. The girls in particular are surprisingly loud, shouting at each other from opposite ends of the hallway with gruff voices that should not logically be coming out of a small Japanese girl. And while my school is on the rougher end of the scale, it’s far from the worst. I’ve heard several stories of students tearing up worksheets as soon as they’re given out, or punching through windows after being reprimanded. One teacher told me that his staffroom had been invaded by students who attempted to beat the teachers with brooms. Brooms! He said that his junior high school was the most dangerous place he’d ever been, and he’d lived in Johannesburg. Now this may have been an exaggeration, but still… Brooms!

Of course, there are good schools too, where things perhaps come closer to the classic image of Japanese high schools. As you may expect, many of these schools are expensive, while the lower-level schools are in poorer areas. Not too surprising, really. But this is starting to get beyond my area of expertise, so I’ll rein it in a bit. What I can tell you is that, at my school at least, it seems teenagers in Japan are the same as anywhere else in the world. You see the same classic, almost clichéd personality types: the shy, awkward kid, the good-looking, too-cool-for-everyone girl, the shaggy-haired guitar player. Some people come to Japan expecting hard-working angels, and when their preconceptions are rudely shattered they tell everyone about how terrible Japanese students are. Neither extreme is true: they’re just teenagers. Some of them want to learn, some of them just don’t give a shit. No surprises there.