Edwin Reischauer comments, «The squandering of four years at the college level on poor teaching and very little study seems an incredible waste of time for a nation so passionately devoted to efficiency.» What are we to make of this? The situation is doubly strange because the Japanese do not usually do things by half measures. The only possible answer is that Japanese society functions in such a way that the nation seems not to need universities. «By the time he reaches age 18, the Japanese child has become a perfect sheep,» Dr. Miyamoto writes. «As sheep on the meadow are not concerned with freedom, to most university students in Japan, freedom as a concept is not important.» In other words, by the time students arrive at college, the training process is already complete. Universities are superfluous.
Japanese universities are one giant tatemae erected to the idea of advanced education. In the bureaucratic state, where training as an adult begins in the company or ministry, there is no social need for them. The fact that serious learning takes place not in college but in industry goes far in explaining the lack of variety of new technologies developed in Japan. Without the wide-ranging and inventive research in universities that would lead to advanced knowledge of the environment and to new theoretical sciences, Japan's best minds devote themselves to one narrow band of human activity: skills in making, building, and marketing things.
Henry Adams once wrote, «Nothing in education is so astonishing as the amount of ignorance it accumulates in the form of inert facts.» Their heads filled to overflowing with facts fed them by the Ministry of Education, Japanese students are surprisingly lacking in common knowledge. In February 1996, Azby Brown, an American teaching at a Japanese architectural college, noted these results of a study he had done: When he tested his architectural-design graduate students, he found they could not read hundred-page Japanese tracts, or summarize longer books. No one recognized the Guggenheim Museum, or knew in what century the Phoenix Pavilion, the famous Heian temple featured on ¥10 coins, was built. Only one student knew when World War II had taken place. They didn't know what Islam was and had never heard of Muhammad. One student thought Christianity started in A.D. 600.
Professor Duke is right in arguing that the Japanese educational system succeeds in producing a «loyal, literate, competent, and diligent worker,» but he is wrong in believing that this success lies in how much Japanese students know. It is precisely the lack of independent knowledge that makes these workers so loyal, competent, and diligent. They have not been taught analytical thinking, the ability to ask unusual or creative questions, a sense of brotherhood with the rest of mankind, or curiosity about and love for the natural environment. The blame for modern Japan's environmental disaster falls squarely at the feet of the educational system, because it teaches people never to take personal responsibility for their surroundings. This leaves none but a few rebellious souls to notice or cry out when rivers and mountainsides are paved over.
Aware to some degree that the Japanese public suffers from this kind of ignorance, the Ministry of Education has dreamed up another «demon,» the concept of shogai gakushu, or Lifelong Learning. The idea is that as the number of older retired people increases, the nation should give them the chance to study in their old age: English classes, tea ceremony, or other hobbies. Lifelong Learning suits the Construction State well, for it justifies the building of countless multipurpose Lifelong Learning Halls, but there is one little problem that lies in the word «lifelong.» Take people who as children in school were discouraged from thinking for themselves. Deny them the time then and later, as working adults, to develop interests of their own: how can you expect them suddenly to acquire a taste for learning in their old age?
Nothing is more difficult to change than a policy that once worked and works no longer. Training people to be corporate drones succeeded in an era when manufacturing was the source of all wealth, and Japan could easily and cheaply import technology. But with a new age of services and information management dawning, and with software becoming a huge and costly industry, flexible and inventive minds are called for, yet flexible and inventive minds are exactly what the Japanese system tends to stamp out.
Mired in bureaucratic inertia, Japanese schools have been very slow to update the curriculum: in 1994, a Ministry of Education survey found that two-thirds of Japan's public-school teachers could not operate computers, and matters had improved only very slowly by the end of the decade. In late 1998, Japan ranked fifteenth in the world for Internet users per capita, falling far below the United States and some European nations, and lagging behind Hong Kong, Korea, and Singapore. It is one of the curious and unexpected twists of modern times that Japan, thought to be enamored of advanced science, has been so slow to embrace the new world of information technology – for most of the 1990s, it positively spurned it.
The reasons for this curious twist are many, including overpricing (Internet fees far higher than those in the United States or Hong Kong), overregulation, and fear on the part of conservative-minded leaders who foresee that the individualistic Internet threatens Japan's social cohesiveness. «It is true that multimedia will offer surprising advantages in some fields,» an editorial in Asahi Shimbun said in October 1994. But it warned, «It is, however, still a wild card to our society as a whole. We should not be in a hurry.»
And, indeed, Japan has not been in a hurry. The sluggish growth of its economy in the 1990s is ample proof of this. American entrepreneurs built huge businesses centered on information technology over recent decades: an Apple, a Microsoft, a Netscape, an Oracle, an Amazon.com – nothing like these developed in Japan. The two leading Japanese software developers, Ascii and Justsystem, are tiny in comparison with their American competitors, and both of them are bleeding red ink as Microsoft gobbles up the Japanese market. Justsystem's main product, a word-processing software called Ichitaro, maintained 80 percent of the domestic market until 1996, but by 1998 that percentage had fallen to 40 percent and was dropping rapidly.
Japan, however, must do what the rest of the world does, especially if it involves industry-and this means that sooner or later the Internet is coming to Japan. As the millennium turned, there were signs that Internet-based businesses had at last begun to prosper in Japan, with Yahoo! Japan stock rising to stratospheric heights and numerous government programs aiming to encourage entrepreneurs. But, for Japanese industry in general, change will not come easily, for workers fear to suggest new ideas lest the group ostracize them. The patterns of ijime extend deeply into corporate life. When Dr. Miyamoto angered his superiors at the Ministry of Health and Welfare, his boss ordered other employees not to speak to him, and even the tea girls not to deliver tea to his desk. Childish though these techniques may seem, for the average employee, taught from childhood never to offend the group, there is no psychological protection against them. How do you train people to become adventurous entrepreneurs when their education has taught them that this is precisely what they should not be?