These Were My Japanese Students

JOHN ASHMEAD, JR.

IN THE Middle Ages, and especially in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, a curious unofficial order of wandering monks and scholars came into existence. They roamed about the known world, “testing men’s peculiar ways,” as they sang in their Song of the Vagrant Order.

Now, on Smith-Mundt grants, on Fulbright grants, and on numerous unofficial engagements, American scholars are wandering over the world. Each year, mainly by foreign currency sales of its surplus farm products abroad, the United States manages to provide as much as $800,000 for lecturers in my own field of American civilization alone. The private expenditure may be as large. I wonder how many of us realize the full potential of this new order, for peace and for man’s progress.

In Japan I was Fulbright lecturer at Osaka University of Foreign Studies, teaching and doing research in the field of American literature and civilization. At most Japanese universities the college calendar is composed from week to week, not a year in advance as in America, and at times this happy-go-lucky procedure results in a baffling succession of holidays. I arrived in such a holiday season, and after a magnificent welcome I had almost no classes at all for three weeks. I was asked by my new students to use this opportunity to coach them in an English-language play they were rehearsing. They already spoke their lines well and had learned their stage directions. I could not understand why my services were needed. Then we came to the climactic scene. The script called for a passionate embrace. The students halted and looked toward me.

“We don’t know how to kiss,” they explained. “Lovers don’t kiss in Japan.” They pointed to the class beauty, who was playing the lead. Show us,” they respectfully asked me.

In all my researches in American civilization it had never occurred to me that, in some parts of the world at least, Americans, even American professors, are regarded as Great Lovers. Somehow I found a middle way between the Fulbright Code and the Stanislavsky Method, and my students won first prize in the intercollegiate dramatic competition.

I learned that the wandering scholar had best have a dancing as well as a roving foot. Again and again at academic parties in Japan I was called on to give my native Indian dance of the Thunderbird, supposed to bring on rain. When I left Japan and the new Fulbright lecturer came to replace me, the president of the university, the vice president, the dean, and the chairman of the English department had a hail and farewell party for the two of us in Kyoto, in the famous old geisha district by the banks of the Kamo River, well known in Japanese song and story. As a special honor, a maiko, or debutante geisha, was present. She was a charming creature, and each of us in turn, the president, vice president, dean, and the chairman of the English department, followed by the two Fulbright lecturers, danced with her the fashionable game-dance of baseball. I struck out.

I LECTURED in a World War II Japanese army barracks, with gunracks around the walls, collapsible chairs and lecture platforms, and full draft ventilation from the broken windows. I taught in my overcoat and learned how to express noble thoughts about American literature when my feet were freezing. At such moments only the best of one’s scholarship seems worth preserving.

Japanese constitutional reform was a popular subject of debate the year I was in Japan. As we discussed in my classes what the Japanese could learn from America’s struggle to write its own Constitution, the coldness of the classroom became irrelevant, and the American Constitution came to life for me in a way it had never done before.

When I arrived in Osaka, the university library contained only twenty-three books in American literature. In fact, my guess would be that in this influential city, the public libraries (aside from the valiant efforts of the American Cultural Center) contained but a hundred books in American literature.

When I left Japan, the university library had more than a thousand dollars’ worth of new books in American civilization and literature and many used volumes provided through the generosity of the Asia Foundation. I often wonder what would happen to American prestige if we were to ship abroad more books and fewer bombers.

The books were not an unmixed blessing. First I had to persuade the librarian to allow the students to take books out of the library. Then I had to make the students promise that when they needed money for food they would borrow it from me rather than sell the precious books. And finally I had to spend two days at the Osaka customs house drinking tea and swearing that I was not myself an importer and seller of books.

Now that I am back in America, it seems miraculous to be able to teach and study in heated rooms and to have books. One American college student told me that he and his fellow students did not appreciate heated rooms or library books because they had done nothing to earn them. I was reminded of a poem I learned in Japan, a senryū: chōai ga sugite ningyō no kubi ga nuke — “From too much love the doll’s head came off.” Are we spoiling our American students, like a child with a disastrously beloved doll?

I was amazed to discover how much time I had in Japan, and was expected to have, for my own research. Then I realized that I was not constantly being consulted by students on study habits, automobile accidents, love affairs, how to take notes on lectures, how to write a paper, and the subject to choose for a paper.

Though I met students socially, I was not expected to hold evening office hours or to supply motivation for studying. I was not supposed to interest students in their subject. I was not in the position of having somehow to arouse them or stimulate them into intellectual activity. For teachers in Japan believe that boys and girls of college age are adults. All that is taken for granted. What would happen in our American colleges if we suddenly stopped counseling and advising and quizzing students and treated them as adults?

It was most startling, also, to observe the respect for the sensei, or teacher, in Japan. Part of this respect may have its origins in a very different system of university government. To my chagrin I discovered that my foreign colleagues regard American university government as undemocratic. At several of the Japanese universities with which I had dealings, a genuine, tender concern was expressed for the various administrative difficulties which the president faced. Again and again the professors said that they must help their poor president as much as they could. When I pursued this subject more closely, my Japanese friends explained to me, “Of course we’re sorry for him. We elected him.” When pressed, I could not name a single American college or university faculty which had the right, taken for granted in Japan, to govern itself.

In Japan, a poor country, professors can publish anything they want to write. In America a professor may have to pay for publication of his books or articles, even if the subject is science.

In my first month in Japan I wrote a column for the leading Japanese newspaper on autumnal thoughts in Japan. During my last month I delivered a radio address over the major Japanese network on the subject of F. Scott Fitzgerald. And the network and the newspaper were eager to have me do these assignments. My English department colleagues in Japan were provided with funds so that each man could publish at least one article a year. I subsequently edited these articles to appear in a book. Can you name a small college in America which does anything comparable?

IN WINTERTIME in Japan, I could afford only enough heat in the evening to enable me to move my fingers as I typed. But I was lucky, for my students and the other teachers had no heat at all. They studied at night wrapped up in bedquilts. Their lack of energy was made worse by poor, almost starvation diets and by the necessity for commuting three, four, or five hours a day on crowded trains because of the housing shortage.

Recently an American student remarked that life at an American college is impossible without a car. The last time I checked statistics at a representative American college whose students are neither rich nor poor, I found that over half the students had cars registered at the college, several had two cars, and one had three. None of my students in Japan had cars. At each meal an American college student, often grumblingly, eats four or five times the food a Japanese student can afford to buy. In Japan a student’s lunch consists of noodles in soup, topped off with a raw egg.

Japanese professors spoke freely to me of the difficulties of higher education in their country. The standards of the elementary and high schools are admirably strict, but the standards of many Japanese universities, aside from their very tough entrance examinations, have had to be relaxed because of the turbulence of life created by the war.

An economics professor at one of Japan’s oldest and most famous universities went so far as to say that matriculation was equivalent to graduation and that little or no work was required of his students once they had met the entrance requirements. A professor from one of the post-war universities said to me bluntly: “I used to give low grades to students who did not work, but then I found it was hard for my students to get jobs, so I gave higher grades.” This statement must be judged in the light of the fact that a job in Japan is a matter of life or suicide not just for one person but for a whole family.

One student summed up the situation thus (I keep his exact words): “There are too many students, and they are only idler in the society, I know well; but on the other hand I had to plunge myself into useless effort to the entrance exam as almost all Japanese boys did or do, and since then I have been in this dilemma. Perhaps about three years later I shall graduate from the college, if particular accident never happens, and shall have no alternative but to be a member of ‘the white collars’ that is now overflowing in Japan.” Ironically enough, part of the trouble has been brought about by ill-advised American educationists of the teachers’ college variety, who urged the Japanese to add an unneeded fourth year to Japanese higher education. Japanese students can ill afford that year, unnecessary in any case in countries with a respectable high school system such as Japan has. By tacit consent, the student normally spends the second semester of his senior year away from the college, hunting for a job.

Whatever the cause, the result is a certain indefinable laxity in the character of Japanese higher education. From conferences with teachers, I know of the efforts being made, slowly and with much hard work, to improve these conditions.

What concerned me most as a teacher in Japan, however, was the underlying pessimism of the students. One of them said to me: “First, about religion. I am impious. In fact, I didn’t think about it so seriously either. Secondly, about society. I know saying ‘honesty is a best policy.’ I don’t always believe it — not to think seriously about anything is better.” And another student summed up the feelings of many of his generation when he said, “Sometimes pessimistic ideas possess me violently, and I want to do nothing.”A third young man told me, “Generally speaking, a college student should be hopeful, but I think the greater part of us is quite hopeless in heart.”

They all agreed that what makes people in America optimistic is their wealth, their natural resources. When the Japanese had the empire, they said, when they had the coal and iron of Manchuria and the oil of South Asia, they had the resources they needed to enable 90 million people to survive in a land the size of California.

From interviews with Japanese government officials about population problems, about prospects for future trade and industry, about the percentages of college graduates who were unemployed, I knew I could in honesty give no optimistic or easy answer. Finally, in quiet desperation I said all that, as a teacher, I could say: “Your real resources are in your heads.”

The only sad part of being a wandering scholar is the necessity for saying good-by to friends whom one knows one will rarely, if ever, meet again. My fellow American instructor refused to come to the farewell party given for me by my students because, he said, the students should not spend thirty cents each on the party — more than enough for a whole day’s food. But the chairman of the English department explained that although the students were poor, this would he an oasis for them, something to remember, and he urged me to go. It was an odd and embarrassing ceremony. Student after student arose, in neatly patched black uniform, and told me exactly what he had learned from me. Fortunately Japanese students are very polite. My best student rose to speak. I waited for some tribute to my skill in teaching English, or perhaps a compliment about my irony and humor. With an engaging smile he said that he had learned, from student festivities at my house, one very important thing, perhaps the most important thing in life: how vital it is to marry a beautiful wife.

During the course of the year one of the boys had written a very disquieting essay. Innocently enough, when my advanced class was reading Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, I had asked them to write on what they remembered of when they were about Huck Finn’s age. I had overlooked the fact that, for most of my students, when they were at Huck’s age Japan was in that final desperate year of atomic holocaust, surrender, and starvation. And this boy had written: “As a child I was taught both at school and at home to live for the sake of the living God, or Emperor Hirohito. I fancied that I was ready to dash into flames in His place, if need be. . . . But our surrender ten years ago put an end to our dream, since the one in whom we put most faith had proved to be a mere nothing. Now most of us haven’t been able to find anyone or anything to heartily believe in. One may say I live just because I dare not kill myself.”

He now said quietly only a few words: “We shall always remember that you once told us the real resources of Japan were in our minds.” I often think of that Japanese boy whose hero Emperor was defeated and who must now, as a young man, painfully find something to believe in.