A More Pluralistic Japan Requires a Less Top-Down, Conformity-Driving Way to Socialize Youths

As someone who attended a regular elementary school in Japan, I have always found it questionable when mainstream media extol how it is a microcosm of Japan as an unusual safe and ordered society. A recent feature from the Economist took the same approach. The article spoke of how students are shaped to be responsible and independent from a young age through collaborations to clean their classrooms, commuting by themselves on public transport, and discussions in ethics class. The article argues that this education creates adults who adhere to laws out of social responsibility rather than fear of persecution.

While there is no denying that Japan remains one of the least crime-ridden countries in the world, it is difficult to immediately point to the correlation between that social reality and the academic environment furnished to most of the country's youngsters. Particularly, growing up as one of the few foreign students in my elementary school, I was made deeply aware of just how the same practices of cleaning up the classroom, learning ethics, and independent commutes can be used to instill a unified identity to quash any other values and lifestyles students and their parents may aspire to.

The resulting conformity leads to positive outcomes of unified expected behaviors that underpin the predictable social order youngsters rely on to safely get to and from school. However, by extolling one behavioral and ethical code for everyone, the school system inadvertently justifies punishment and marginalization of those unwilling to or simply cannot adhere to those norms. As the same Economist article so subtly pointed out, at some point beyond the elementary school, the same admirable independence the school system instills simply degenerates into a byword for lacking creativity.

While not being able to foster an innovative mind among students is certainly a negative outcome, there is a much more serious downside to this uniformity-driven teaching style. Students exact vigilante justice upon those who stick out from the group. The prevalence of physical and verbal harassment and outright bullying of those who are different, first and foremost those of "non-mainstream" cultural and ethnic backgrounds, goes largely underreported. Too many school officials turn a blind eye, feigning harmony within their school and quietly encouraging such behavior to deter further deviation from norms.

Such bullying may seem purposeful or noble, but it is no longer limited to elementary schools or cases related to noncompliance with school ethics. As physical punishment of those who are different becomes prevalent, it becomes almost a norm in itself, permeating the adult world for entirely different purposes. In a society often characterized by deference to hierarchy, acts of physical violence have become nearly an accepted communication method for those of higher social status to remind those below them how they are supposed to behave "properly."

When Japanese educators decided to create a nation of independent, norm-abiding youngsters, few likely thought about how such a positive thought could be abused by bosses to beat their underlings and customers to scold service personnel in the ugliest terms. And they certainly will not be able to imagine how the same obsession of submitting everyone to the same norms will generate plenty of resentment as the country imports millions of foreign workers to plug gaps in its labor force. The self-entitled bullies will now have to contend with a cohort of people with no experience in Japanese classroom ethics.

This changing reality begs the question of whether the supposed cultural wisdom of Japanese education admired by non-Japanese media outlets like the Economist is now fast becoming obsolete. A standardized set of social norms can only hold a society together if the population receives a standardized education that enforces a standardized belief in the benefit of those norms. A few outliers could have been bullied into submission in such a homogenous society, but try bullying millions raised on different norms, and social order will break down instead of being enhanced.

To remain relevant in the global economy and international relations, 21st-century Japan needs to become more pluralistic than its late 90s counterpart in which I was educated. While the goal of collaboration, self-reliance, and responsibility to social order remain ideals worth striving for, a pluralistic society needs each individual to think about achieving those ideals based on their own sociocultural contexts. The top-down, one-size-fits-all method of the elementary school will only drive a false sense of superiority that breeds self-righteous conflicts.