Novelist as a Vocation(38)

This goes beyond English, or the study of foreign languages. I can’t help thinking that in almost every subject, Japan’s educational system fundamentally fails to consider how to motivate each individual to improve their potential. Even now the system seems intent on going by the book to cram in facts and teach test-taking techniques. And teachers and parents live and die by how many of their students and children get into various universities. It’s all kind of sad.

When I was in school my parents and teachers always warned me, “You’ve got to study as hard as you can while you’re in school. Otherwise when you grow up you’ll regret not having studied more when you were young.” But after I left school I never thought that, not even once. For me it was more regret that I hadn’t done more things I enjoyed doing. Being forced to do that kind of rote memorization, I felt, wasted my life. But maybe I’m an extreme case.



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I’m the type of person who whenever I like something and am interested in it, puts everything I have into it and goes all in. I never stop halfway, thinking, “That’s good enough.” I do it until I’m convinced I’ve got it. But unless something really grabs me, I can’t put my heart into it. Or, more precisely, I just can’t work up the desire to do so. I’ve always been that way, clearly washing my hands of things that didn’t hold my interest. If somebody orders me to do something (especially somebody above me), I’ll do a perfunctory job at best.

It’s the same with sports. From elementary school all the way to college I couldn’t stand PE class. Having to put on a gym uniform, march out to the school grounds, and run through exercises was a royal pain. So for a long time I thought I wasn’t very athletic. But once I got out into the world and started doing sports that I wanted to do, I loved it. Finding that sports could be so much fun was a great discovery, a real eye opener. Then what was up with the sports I was forced to do at school? The whole thing left me stupefied. No two people are alike, of course, and you can’t easily generalize, but to exaggerate at bit, I get the feeling that PE classes exist precisely in order to make people hate sports.

If you divide people into dog types and cat types, I am most definitely the latter. Order me to go right and you can count on me going left. Sometimes I’ll feel bad about it, but that’s just the way I am. And it’s good to have all kinds of personalities in the world. But in my view, the goal of the Japanese educational system appears to be to create doglike people who will be of use to the community…and even sometimes to create sheeplike people they can lead as a group to a common destination.

This tendency doesn’t just stop with education, but extends to companies and the bureaucracy-centered Japanese social system. That inflexible emphasis on numerical values and the orientation toward the immediate efficacy of rote memorization and the utilitarian produces some terribly harmful effects in all sorts of fields. During a certain period of time, it’s true that that utilitarian system functioned well. In the earlier postwar full-steam-ahead period, when the aims and goals of the whole society were generally clear, that approach may have been appropriate. But once postwar reconstruction was over and the period of high economic growth was a thing of the past, after the bubble economy burst, that kind of “Draw up the fleet and let’s all speed toward our destination” type of social system no longer had a role to play. Our destination from here on is no longer something you can perceive from one set point of view.

Naturally, if the world were only full of selfish people like me we’d be in a bit of trouble. But to return to the earlier example I gave, we need to be able to skillfully use both the small and the large kettles in the kitchen. Human intelligence, or perhaps common sense, necessitates different approaches for different purposes. Society runs smoothly and, in a good sense, efficiently only when diverse systems of thought and world views unite. In a word, the system becomes more refined and sophisticated.

Of course in every society you need consensus. Without that a society can’t exist. At the same time, though, we need to value the relatively small number of exceptions that lie outside the general consensus, and make sure we take those into consideration. In a mature society that kind of balance is an essential element. And within that balance, society will give birth to a new kind of depth and self-reflection. But looking at present-day Japan, it doesn’t appear that we’ve turned the rudder much in that direction.



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Take, for instance, the Fukushima nuclear-power-plant accident of March 2011. As I followed the reports about it, I was led to the depressing conclusion that this was, fundamentally, an inevitable manmade disaster caused by the Japanese social system. And I imagine many of you, too, came to the same conclusion.

The nuclear-power-plant accident drove tens of thousands of people out of their hometowns, with no hope in sight of ever returning. It’s such a sad situation. The direct cause of this was a natural catastrophe that exceeded anything people could imagine, and a series of unfortunate coincidences. But what really pushed this to the level of a fatal tragedy was, in my view, structural flaws inherent in the existing system, and the distortions these created. The lack of responsibility within the larger system, and the failure of the ability to make decisions. An evil efficiency that had lost any sense of vision and that could not imagine other people’s pain.