Good Morning!: Or, How I learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Japanese Social Structure and Gender Inequality

This is something I should have talked about earlier, but I’m not sure I would have been able to write about it with the clarity I have after being able to observe here for the last three months.

There is a very clear and easily delineated social power structure in Japan. This is evident the minute you walk you arrive in the country, but the longer I am here, the more it becomes evident in every aspect of life. School is no different. Just like in the United States, schools are a reflection of the society they’re created in. Of course you can’t walk into a school and immediately understand the entirety of a society, but I think it’s a great place to start.

The power differential shows itself not only across rank, but also gender. Japan is old school in nearly every facet of life, which can be at times equally fascinating, comforting, surprising, or infuriating. From my perspective, this aspect of Japanese is disappointing, but to many women, especially those coming from a feminist perspective, this ranks somewhere between infuriating and impossible.

I would be lying if I didn’t point out that as a male, this inequitable treatment is often advantageous to me. I don’t like it, but I take advantage of it. I’ll let you make your own decision about whether or not that makes me the bad guy or part of the problem, but traditions and cultural norms in Japan – good and bad – run deep. Things change here over the course of decades or centuries rather than weeks, month, or even years. As I see it, my purpose here is to observe and reflect rather than try and change the social and culture structures in place in this country. If I can take advantage of something without stepping on someone else’s toes, that’s what I’m going to do. Anyway, back to some examples of school reflective culture.

In Japanese schools, saying good morning to coworkers is less about actually wishing them a good morning than becoming involved in a cultural norm. When teachers see each other in the morning or walk into the teacher’s room for the first time, you will hear an echoing chorus of, “ohio gozaimasu,” or, “good morning.”

However, just like in the United States, this becomes a rote response rather than an actual spoken phrase. For example in America, “good morning” becomes, “morning,” becomes, “an unintelligible version of a word that may or may not start with an m, but is generally understood by everyone.”

It is the same in Japan. “Ohio gozaimasu” becomes “gozaimasu” or “zaimasu.”

What I think is most interesting is the way the phrase has developed along the lines of societal and gender norms. When I say good morning to almost every female teacher that works at my school, I hear at least a semblance of the original phrase. The first word is usually at least partially audible, and the “gozaimasu” is usually understandable even to my foreigner’s ears. If I don’t get a full, “ohio gozaimasu,” I at least get something like, “hio zaimas.”

However, I rarely hear the first word from the male teachers, and often only get a monosyllabic, garbled response. It also seems that the longer a male teacher has been tenured at the school, the shorter his response will be. These are the awesome cases where “ohio gozaimasu” becomes “zaimas,” “mas,” or even just “su.” It’s an easy thing to laugh at, but I think it reflects the social and gender hierarchies present in Japanese culture.

Another place the structure is immediately evident is in student responses. A few weeks ago I was grading 6^th grade paragraphs as we practiced framing debates in English. We were focusing on using “for or against” to make an argument. The paragraphs were looking at the statement, “High School Students Should Wear School Uniforms.”

My favorite response (and the one I see as “most Japanese”) is:

“I agree with this opinion. High school students should know social machinery, so we should put on uniform. Also, I think students who put on uniforms seem to be clean and decent.”

Soooooo Japanese J. Japan has a saying, “the nail that sticks out will be hammered down.” Understand the social machinery, and make sure to adapt to it. Also, it is good to look the same, because it makes students, “seem to be clean and decent.” They might be axe murderers, but they at least, “seem to be clean and decent,” which is what is really important.

Another good response about the importance of groupthink:

I think that wearing uniforms shows that those who wear uniforms belong in the same group, so they mustn’t do bad things. If they don’t wear uniforms, they may do something bad. Therefore, I think high school students should wear uniforms and behave as those who belong to one group.

Clearly those in a group are not allowed to do something bad. If a kid wasn't wearing a uniform, they might go crazy, or be different than the other kids. Madness!!! 

Funny enough, that is really true here. It’s one of the reasons why Japan has less discipline issue than in America, but also has such a problem with bullying in schools. Students police each other, and teachers allow them to do it. There are class leaders in each class, and if a kid is screwing up, the leader – and usually all of the other kids – will let them know it in no uncertain terms. In some cases this can be positive, like when I saw a kid constantly nudging a boy sitting next to him in efforts to keep him awake in class, but in other cases kids will really turn on the “weak link” in the class.

This has turned into a long post, but I’ll leave you with a response that made me sad, but didn’t surprise me in the least, and is a great example of how gender roles and stereotypes run deep here.

This sentence was written by a girl in grade four (the first year of high school) as an answer to the prompt, “are you for or against co-educational schools?”:

I am for co-educational schools because girls cannot lift heavy things.

And that’s Japan. See you next time!