Japan's New Middle Class: The Salary Man and His Family in a Tokyo Suburb (8 page)

Mothers accompany children to all but the college examinations to give them moral support. If the father can take off from work or if the examination is early enough in the day, he may accompany the child in place of the mother. There is a waiting room close to the examination room where parents can sit while the children are taking the examination. A number of mothers reported that they were unable to sleep on the night before the examination. By the end of a series of two or three examinations over a period of eight to ten days, mothers as well as children are so exhausted that they often have to go to bed for a few days.

There is a hiatus of several days before the results of the examinations are announced. If a child takes examinations for two or three different schools, he may hear the results of the first examination before he takes the last. Since the report of the first examination is the first real indication for the family of the child's standing, the results have an exaggerated importance. The mother whose child has passed the first examination generally is jubilant. Conversely families with a failure are extremely gloomy and pessimistic. Tensions increase as families await the results. Most people will not telephone or communicate with examination families until after the results have been announced. A few mothers and children cannot resist talking about the examinations, and worries are at least shared and discussed within the family and among some friends and relatives. Some mothers have said that there is such an ominous weighty feeling during this time that they would almost prefer to hear negative results rather than continue the uncertainty.

The dramatic climax comes with the announcement of the results. Usually grades are not mailed, but the names or code names of successful candidates are posted at the school. Sometimes the names of successful candidates for well-known schools and universities are announced on the radio. Even if a family has heard the results on the radio they also check the posted list to assure themselves that there has not been an error.

The date the list is posted usually is known long in advance, but the time of day often is indefinite. Crowds gather as much as twenty-four hours before the auspicious hour. Frequently parents will go because children might have difficulty controlling their emotions in public. Even the father may take off a day or two from work at this time to check the examination results or to be of moral support to the mother and children. People concerned about controlling their emotions go to see the bulletin board during the night. Some, attempting to be casual, wait several hours after posting to check the results.

If a child has succeeded, he and his parents are only too glad to tell the results, although they will attempt to show the proper reserve. They may whisper the result saying "please don't tell anybody else," but their smiles are irrepressible and there can be no doubt about their satisfaction. If a mother looks troubled, friends do not ask the results. Indeed, the mother of an unsuccessful candidate may cry and sleep for several days before going out to face friends. Although to my knowledge there has been no suicide in Mamachi in recent years as a result of examinations, stories of juvenile suicide as a result of examination failure are widely publicized in the mass media and well known by all those taking examinations.

Because there are so many schools in the Tokyo area and because suburban children attend so many different schools, it is rare for more than two or three students from the same grade school to continue to pass examinations for the same junior high school, high school, and college. Even if two friends should intend to take examinations for the same school in order to continue together in junior high school or high school, if one passes and the other fails, the one who succeeds will not let friendship stand in the way of attending the better school. While at first they may attempt to keep up the friendships while attending different schools, the difference in status leads to embarrassment, and the ties generally become less meaningful.

Since a large portion of Japanese universities is in Tokyo, many ambitious children from all over the country come to stay with relatives in Tokyo and Mamachi or other suburbs while taking the examinations. Although it may take forty-five minutes or an hour to commute from Mamachi to Tokyo for the examinations, inn

houses are expensive and relatives in Mamachi can take the responsibility for comforting the child and seeing that he gets sufficient food and rest. The niece, nephew, or cousin probably will come to Mamachi a few days before the examination to get accustomed to the new environment and to have a good rest for a night or two before taking the examination. He may also stay on a few days after until he learns the result, but he usually is encouraged to return to his parents immediately after the examination to comfort him in case of failure. Some of the universities, at the request and expense of the student, are willing to send a telegram, indicating whether he has passed or failed. This telegram usually does not state the examination result directly, but in code. For example, a telegram indicating failure might read something like "The cherry blossoms are falling." Despite the attempt to state the result in as nice a way as possible, failure is none the less hard to bear. In other cases, the suburban family will find out the result and then telephone the rural relatives. Several families have indicated the sorrow they felt when they telephoned to pass on the news of failure, and found the phone answered by the applicant who had been waiting beside the phone.

Even families whose children are not taking the examinations cannot avoid the excitement of examination season. Notices of examinations appear everywhere in the newspapers and the weekly magazines. News reels show pictures of applicants waiting in line or taking examinations. Experts appear on television to give advice to parents or to evaluate the implications of the examination system for Japanese society. Desks, study supplies, and guides to examination success are widely advertised. Statistical reports in newspapers and in magazines indicate precisely how many students from which high schools enter which colleges. Any middle-class parent can rank the first few high schools by the number of their graduates admitted to Tokyo University, and also the leading junior high schools by the number of graduates who enter the best senior high schools. Advice columns for mothers of younger children give hints ranging from ideas for room arrangements to suggestions for motivating the child to study and for dealing with the accompanying tensions. Some people cut out these articles and save them.

Even when no child in a family is taking examinations, the par-

ents may be called upon by relatives, friends, and even acquaintances for assistance in getting a child admitted to a good school. Because of their influence, friends of school-board members, principals, prominent school teachers, PTA officers, and alumni of a particular school, employers or superiors at work are particularly likely to receive such requests. Usually they try to be helpful to close friends and to others for whom they feel some fondness or obligation, and even if they refuse a request, they usually make at least a token effort to help. Knowing the difficult problem of gaining admission, they generally want to be as helpful as possible although they resent requests from some people who never feel the obligation to return favors.

Families with means may employ students from the most famous universities to tutor their children for examinations. Tutoring younger children provides college students with their best and most common opportunities for
arubaito
(part-time work, from the German word "Arbeit"). Students at lesser universities are less in demand and may have to be content with smaller fees. Wealthy families may use several students as tutors, each in his special field, while the ordinary salary-man family at best is able to afford a tutor only one or two nights a week. Nevertheless, even the middle-class family tries to find a tutor specializing in the subject in which their child plans to major. The tutor is generally of the same sex as the student and often provides a kind of role model, but the focus of their discussion is on preparation for examinations. Families which cannot afford a private tutor for a year or two before examinations will try to hire a tutor just before examinations or at least to join with other families in hiring a tutor for a small group of children preparing for the same examination. College students in need of money are pleased to find work as tutors since it is related to their field of study, and they generally have more free time once they themselves have been admitted to college.

When confronted with the question of why examination pressure is so intense, many Japanese respondents answered that it is because Japan is a small crowded country with few opportunities for success. This answer unquestionably highlights a factor of crucial importance, but it does not explain everything. There are many universities in Japan which are not difficult to enter, and there are op-

portunities for success aside from examinations. There are other crowded countries where opportunity is limited but examination pressure much less severe. Implicit in this response is the feeling that one's opportunity to achieve security and social mobility is highly compressed into one brief period of life, and many explicitly recognize that the best way for a commoner to rise on the social ladder is to enter a famous university. At least two other social systems, the family and the school, seem important for understanding the full force of this pressure. The importance of these two systems, like the life-time commitment to a firm, are further manifestations of a striking characteristic pervading Japanese social structure: the high degree of integration and solidarity within a given group.

Success or failure on examinations is not only the success or failure of an individual but of his family. The self-sacrifice, anxiety, excitement, and happiness or sorrow that attend examinations are fully shared by the parents and siblings. It is assumed that a child is successful in large part because of his parents' help, and community recognition for success or failure is accorded to the parents as much as to the child himself. But beside the applicant himself, the most involved person is the mother. In listening to a mother describe examinations, one almost has the feeling that it is she rather than the child who is being tested.

Beginning in first grade a child brings a book bag home every day so that he can get his mother's help with the daily homework assignments. Even if a tutor is hired for brief periods, the ultimate responsibility for helping with (or, from the child's view, hounding about) the homework is the mother's. The work usually is sufficiently difficult so that the child cannot do it without his mother's assistance, and the typical mother cannot do the work without some preparation on her own. Because most Mamachi mothers have completed only elementary school, or at most the prewar "girls' school" (equivalent to eleven grades under the new system), and because postwar educational reforms brought great changes in course content and methods, it is not easy for mothers to help children with homework,

even in elementary school. Many mothers read their children's books and study other books while the children are in school, and others consult with tutors or school teachers to keep up with their children's work. It is a challenge for the mother to keep one step ahead of the child—a challenge these mothers take seriously.

The mother wants the child to succeed not only for his sake, but for her own sake. At school meetings, in front of an entire group of mothers, a teacher often will praise or criticize a mother for her child's performance. On certain occasions a mother is expected to stand behind the child while her child performs and other children and mothers look on, and the comments about performance are as likely to be directed to the mother as to the child since it is expected that the mother will see that the child follows the teacher's instruction when practicing at home.

In formal and informal gatherings of mothers, children's performance often becomes the focus of attention. Most children wear uniforms of their school, which signify status as clearly as military uniforms. Some schools post on a bulletin board the class position of all students or seat students according to rank. But even if schools make no such announcement, most parents have a good idea of the relative standing of their children. When mothers of classmates get together, they generally know roughly the academic standing of each other's children, and mothers whose children are doing poorly are likely to listen carefully to mothers whose children are doing well. Mothers of successful children, even when discreet, indirect, and modest, have difficulty refraining from bragging about their children's successes. They may, for example, mention casually that their child is planning to specialize in a certain field since his teacher has praised him; or they may describe some technique in dealing with the child which seems to have worked since the child is doing so well; or they may encourage another mother, describing how their child once reacted negatively to mother's pressure but then suddenly began performing well.

The importance of the child's performance for determining the mother's status is reflected, for example, in the problems that schools have faced in trying to introduce special classes for retarded children. The parents have been resistant to sending their children to special classes because of the stigma attached. They have made

special appeals for permission to allow their children to attend regular classes, because it would be so embarrassing to them to have their children attend special classes.

Even the families of high social standing are not immune from competition between mothers over children's success. In some ways it is even more difficult for upper-class mothers since they expect their children to do better than other children. Some have withdrawn their children from music lessons rather than face the wound to their pride when their children were not doing as well as some lower-status children.