People arriving in Japan in their professional capacities frequently see little more of the country than the interiors of taxis, hotel rooms and sterile offices, with the occasional tourist sight in central Tokyo thrown in.

Susan Adler, president of the National Council for Social Studies, addresses delegates at the discussion session held at the Keidanren Kaikan on the challenges facing teaching professionals both in Japan and the West.

The Keizai Koho Center, however, wanted a group of foreign educators from Australia, Canada, Britain and the United States to get a different perspective of Japan, to see beyond the images and get a true understanding of the country in order to provide a more accurate picture of Japan to their students when they return to their home countries.

The program is run annually by the center, also known as the Japan Institute for Social and Economic Affairs, and is now in its 21st year.

Their 15-day "warts-and-all" trip included briefings and lectures by experts on the current state of Japan's economy and education, and visits to Japanese companies and schools to witness Japan's advanced technologies and see its traditional industries in operation in Tokyo, Nagoya, Kyoto, Hiroshima, and Kamakura, Kanagawa Prefecture.

In discussions with high school teachers, the 19 teaching professionals were given opportunities to see for themselves how the nations' school system operates, how new teaching guidelines and curricula are being implemented and the problems that teachers here experience.

But it wasn't all work: The group all spent two days living with families in Osaka, exposing themselves to the life of the average Japanese and experiencing everything from traditional Japanese meals and customs to lively conversations until late after dinner..

At a symposium at Keidanren Kaikan at the end of their first week here, the participants broadly agreed that teachers in Australia, Canada, Britain and the United Sates face many of the same problems that teachers in Japan encounter, but looking for solutions to those problems has been handled very differently.

While measures to deal with violence among youngsters, both in the classroom and outside school, to increase motivation to learn, cut the numbers of students skipping school and ensure young people extend basic courtesies to teachers and the wider public -- as well as a host of other issues -- have been slow to be implemented here, Japan may still be able to learn the lessons of a change in thinking among teachers in other nations.

The teachers, in an exchange of opinions with representatives of businesses on the future course of education and, consequently, Japanese society, broadly expressed admiration for many aspects of Japan's technologically advanced society, its culture and were impressed with the staff and students during a visit to Kamakura Junior High School, affiliated with Yokohama National University's Faculty of Education and Human Sciences, but also emphasized a number of fears.

Terry Burgess, a lecturer at Brighton College of Technology in southern England, questioned the responsibility of corporations for the society in which today's children are growing up, where the emphasis is on economic growth and more kids spend more time watching television or playing computer games and have less human interaction.

"It's not about cyber-buddies, it's about creating a society in which people can engage in face-to-face contact, where they can engage with people. That's what social skills are," Burgess said. "It's about bringing people closer together and I think the technology that has been created has as much potential to keep people apart."

Lee Morganett, a professor of social studies, education and educational psychology at Indiana University Southeast, underlined the point. "Crime, kids being disrespectful -- where does that come from? It comes from people not being a part of society, a part of the community," he said. "When you're not successful in society, you turn against it and you fight it. More technology is not going to solve the problem. The answer is in making the kids more a part of the society."

Morganett went on to praise the LIFE Program -- a course in "the Period for Integrated Study" encouraged by the Education Ministry -- they witnessed in operation at Kamakura Junior High School, as a way to give children a voice and the opportunity to discuss topics beyond the confines of academic study.

The moderator of the session, Tetsuro Kikuchi, deputy chief editorial writer of the Mainichi Newspapers, touched on the facts of working life for many Japanese fathers -- long working hours and short holidays that leave them with little time to be involved with their children as they are growing up -- and the pressures that children here face: cram schools and pressure to study that leaves them with little energy and precious few opportunities to play with friends, take part in sports, or, for example, take up a musical instrument.

Teachers from Australia, Canada, Britain and the United States spent two weeks in Japan sharing their education experiences, meeting students and teachers and witnessing Japan's technology and industry in action.

These pressures are producing a generation of disaffected and demoralized young people, he said, a minority of whom turn to violent crime.

Three recent incidents involving 17-year-old youths indicate the depth of the problem: the indiscriminate killing of an elderly woman in Nagoya by a boy who "just wanted to experience killing someone"; the hijacking of a bus in Saga Prefecture and the subsequent killing of one of its passengers; and the hammer attack on a man on a subway train in Yokohama.

"These were a big shock to the Japanese people," Kikuchi said. "These acts were committed by children who had no way to explore their emotions and wanted attention."

Similarly, the U.S. was stunned last year by the killings at Columbine High School in Colorado.

Isaac Larison, an elementary reading specialist at the Nannie Lee Frayser Elementary School in Kentucky, said much of the responsibility for discussing and hopefully averting more such violent, tragic events -- whether they occur in the U.S., Britain or Japan -- lies with the parents. "The responsibility comes back to the parents: where is the parent to discuss these events with kids?" he asked. "We need adults to direct children."

James Delia, a history and geography teacher at Romulus Central School in upstate New York, agreed that "quality time" is a concern, and that Japanese children do not have the chance simply to be children as they often have to attend cram school on top of six days at regular school.

"This is taking up a lot of time that parents could be using to communicate with their own children," he said. "In my school, we try very hard to develop a time-frame when the father and the mother can just be with the children; turn the TV off, turn the computer off, turn the games off and talk.

"You make time," he emphasized. "They are your children for life. We are responsible for them."

A Japanese participant described himself as a typical Japanese working father, although he did say, "I find myself speaking a different language to my kids."

"In Japan, we are told that to be different is bad, to be the same as everyone else is good," he said. "But being different is positive, and we have to tell our kids that."

An ingenious, but tongue-in-cheek, suggestion that he put forward to enable more fathers to spend more time with their families would involve firms accepting their corporate responsibility by making dads' tasks at work so dull that they would get out of the office at the first opportunity.

In other countries, the present Japanese attitude toward work and the family is incomprehensible.

Most Australians "do not want to be an economic superpower" and are not interested in having their children trained to pursue that goal, said Rosalie Triolo, a lecturer in education at Monash University in Australia.

Importance, she said, is instead placed on programs such as the Civics and Citizenship classes that are designed "to make students aware of their local community, their nation, their region and their world," at the same time taking into account different people's ways of learning.

Giving the American perspective on changes in teaching attitudes, Lara Armstrong, a social science instructor at Cypress High School in California, commented on the movement toward "active learning."

"It is designed to make the students more active in their learning, not teacher-centered but rather student centered and where the students do a lot of the work and methodology and the teacher is a guide or a coach leading them through the information," she said.

Susan Adler, president of the National Council for the Social Studies and a professor in the School of Education at the University of Missouri, pointed out that although technology is clearly visible on the streets of Japan, it had not been greatly in evidence in schools.

And that contradiction left her with more questions than answers: "What will technology mean in the future? What kind of teachers do we want? Do we want children to talk on cellphones in classrooms? How do we want people to really interact with people?"

"Schools can't solve those problems," she said, "those are social issues, but how are our schools to talk about those really serious issues?

"We live in a time of incredibly rapid change," she added. "It's very difficult being a teacher and a lot of people don't realize that. Teachers need support; they need support from companies and they need to realize that none of these changes happen quickly or easily."

Taneo Kato, of Asahi Breweries Inc., linked the recent upsurge in serious crimes committed by youngsters to their inability to influence or have an impact on events going on around them.

"They have no other way to express themselves other than through crime," he said. "They need to positively engage themselves in society, but schools used to restrict their thinking and the diversity was lost."

That format is, at last, changing, but "it will still take many years for a new breed of people to come in," he added. "But we should not be too pessimistic about our long-term future."

As the discussions wound down, James Delia emphasized that educators from overseas "don't know all the answers."

"We thank you very much for allowing us to give you our opinions, and they are just opinions," he said. "I am very much encouraged by the things I have heard here today."

At the very least, however, Kikuchi reiterated that both sides have had the opportunity to learn from one another and hopefully such exchanges will speed up the pace of change and improvement in the respective nations' education systems.