Novelist as a Vocation(39)

Based almost entirely on the argument that nuclear power is economical, the nation pushed through a policy of reliance on nuclear energy—but the potential risk (and the actual risks that did surface off and on) were intentionally concealed. And now we’re the ones who have to pay the price. If we don’t shine a light on this full-steam-ahead attitude that permeates our social system, and reveal all the problems and make some fundamental corrections, I’m afraid that the same kind of tragedy will occur all over again somewhere.

There is a point, perhaps, to the argument that for Japan, a country with limited resources, nuclear power is necessary. I am, in principle, opposed to nuclear power, but if it could be scrupulously managed by trustworthy supervisors, and the operation could be strictly overseen by a competent third-party organization, and all information accurately disseminated to the public, then perhaps there would be room for discussion. But when nuclear-power facilities that have the capacity to produce lethal damage, when a dangerous system that could destroy a country (and it’s true that the Chernobyl accident was one factor in the fall of the Soviet Union) is managed by commercial corporations that prioritize numbers and efficiency over everything else, and when this is all led and supervised by a bureaucracy built on rote memorization and top-down decision making, one that lacks any sympathy toward humanity, then you can be sure that very serious risks will arise. And the consequences may pollute the land, destroy nature, damage people’s health, forfeit the nation’s trust, and destroy the environment people live in. And it’s not just “may,” since these very things have all actually happened in Fukushima.



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I’ve gone on a bit of a tangent here, but the point is that the contradictions inherent in the Japanese education system are directly linked to the contradictions in Japanese society. Or perhaps it’s the opposite. At any rate, we’ve gotten to the point where we no longer have the luxury to simply turn a blind eye to these contradictions.

Let me return to the topic of schools.

When I was going to school, from the late 1950s through the 1960s, school bullying and children refusing to attend school were not such major problems. This isn’t to say that there weren’t any problems in schools then or in the education system (I think there were lots of problems), but at least I myself hardly saw any cases around me of bullying or school truancy. Not that there weren’t any, but it wasn’t that huge a problem then.

I think this was because in this period not long after the war, the country was relatively poor, and people had clear-cut goals to work for—namely, recovery and development. Even if there were contradictions in the system, the overall mood was upbeat. That sort of trend had an unseen effect on the children. On an everyday level, negative psychological moments didn’t have such a huge influence on children’s lives. There was a kind of basically optimistic feeling that as long as we stuck with it, any problems and contradictions would gradually disappear. So for me, too, even though I didn’t like school so much, I took going to school for granted, and did my best to attend every day without really questioning it.

Nowadays, though, bullying and truancy have become major social issues, and rarely a day goes by without a report on them in the media. And quite a few children who are bullied end up taking their own lives. It’s nothing less than tragic. Lots of people give lots of opinions about these problems, and there have been all sorts of policies developed to deal with them, but it doesn’t look like this trend is going to improve anytime soon.

And it’s not just bullying among students. There are some major issues with teachers as well. This happened quite a while ago, but there was an incident at a school in Kobe where a teacher shut the heavy front gate to the school right when the bell rang for classes to start, and a female student got caught in the gate and died. “Tardiness has become rampant these days at our school, so we were compelled to do this,” the teacher explained in his defense. Nobody applauds tardiness, of course, but clearly there is a major difference between being on time to school and a person’s life.

In this teacher’s mind, the narrow sense of purpose he took from zero tolerance for lateness became an obsession to the point where he lost a balanced view of the world. And a sense of balance is an important quality for educators. In newspapers there were comments from parents to the effect that “he was a good teacher, very devoted to education.” There has to be something wrong with anyone uttering—or even being able to utter—a statement like that. What about the pain of the person who was crushed to death?

I can imagine schools metaphorically crushing down students, but schools physically crushing students to death boggles my mind.

Needless to say, this pathological situation (I think it’s okay to call it that) at schools is nothing less than a projection of the pathology of the social system. If society as a whole has a natural vitality, with clear-cut goals, then even if there are some problems in the educational system, they can somehow be overcome by the power inherent there. However, if society loses its energy, and there’s a widespread sense of hopelessness, this will show up most prominently, and have the greatest effect, in the educational arena. In schools, in classrooms. Like canaries in coal mines, children are the ones who are most sensitive to, and first to detect, the corrupt air.

As I mentioned earlier, when I was a child, society itself had room for growth, so that there was room for conflicts between the individual and the system, and as a result they did not turn into major social problems. Because of this societal flexibility, there was a space for all kinds of contradictions and frustrations. Or to put it another way, there was room to retreat when you were troubled. But now, after the period of rapid growth and the bubble economy is over, it’s difficult to find a place of refuge like that. Thinking that everything will work out if you just go with the flow no longer exists as a solution.