The Japanese educational system gets a lot of bad press about overworked teachers burning out or bullied students dropping out. Films set in schools here also typically portray the educational process as a boring grind full of disengaged students and droning teachers.
In her documentary “The Making of a Japanese,” Ema Ryan Yamazaki presents a more positive view of the country’s schools taken from hundreds of hours of footage shot in an elementary school in Tokyo’s Setagaya Ward from April 2021 to March 2022.
The teachers face challenges — one confesses on camera that he may not be cut out for the job — but are all dedicated and caring. And the first and sixth graders the film profiles have their struggles, from a first-grade girl who bursts into tears after being scolded by a teacher for a botched cymbal performance to a worried sixth grade boy on the cusp of adolescence who says he would rather remain a child.
Nonetheless, in the course of a school year, we see the children learning character-building lessons that keep the school and, by extension, Japanese society running more or less smoothly — lessons the Kobe-born, biracial and bicultural Yamazaki says motivated her to make the film.
“I ended up in New York City in my 20s being complimented for my teamwork, being on time and my dedication to my work,” she says in an interview at the University of Tokyo’s Hongo campus, where she was meeting students for a discussion of the film. “I was thinking I'm just Japanese. I don't particularly feel special about it. And that's when I reflected on these experiences in elementary school that I think really laid the foundation of how I viewed life.”
In making the film, Yamazaki says, “My goal was basically immersion. I was there for 4,000 hours so you can watch the best 99 minutes,” referring to the film’s running time.
In editing the footage, Yamazaki intentionally included moments that showed the strictness of teachers, such as the aforementioned scolding, for personal reasons. “Thirty years ago, I was that little girl being pushed to do better,” she says. “I'm grateful for that. It gave me my work ethic, my sense of what it's like to accomplish something.”
And we later see the scolded girl confidently banging her cymbal in concert, having learned her part — and how to triumph over a setback.
Yamazaki says such scenes shocked some audience members when she showed the film in the United States (“They were like, ‘Whoa, we don’t do this anymore.’”), but they were also impressed.
“They said maybe there’s a value to (being strict) since (Japanese) society works. The trains run on time,” she explains. “But when people in America say Japanese things are amazing, I'm like, ‘Well, it's because of our education system.’ It's not like we're just naturally born that way.”
As seen in the film’s scenes of first graders cleaning their classroom and performing other tasks, the teaching of responsibility starts early. “Kids actually look forward to that responsibility,” Yamazaki says. “Whereas in the West you have to clean your classroom as a kind of punishment.”
“The Making of a Japanese,” she says, got a particularly warm reception in Finland: “It was a huge hit there.” One reason, she was told, is that “the Finnish school system used to have a community-based educational system with the kids doing chores, but somehow that’s been lost, so now they're dealing with a lot of self-centered children.”
She also heard that the film prompted reflection in Finnish society: “They’re thinking, ‘What do we want to do with our education system?’ That was surprising because we in Japan think the Finnish system is the best in the world.”
Japan is heading in Finland’s direction, she believes. “It's harder to be a strict teacher that wants to challenge the kids while being compassionate,” she says. “It's easier to just be the fun teacher that doesn't push the kids. But you need teachers that set up students for challenges. At least that’s how I got my strengths.”
She also recognizes that the Japanese system’s collectivist mentality has its downsides. “The collective thing can turn into pressure,” she says. “Like when you make one person's mistake everybody's fault. One person being late is going to cause everybody to do a pushup.” Such collective punishment often leads to bullying or worse.
Yamazaki, however, didn’t witness acts of bullying that required the intervention of a teacher in the thousands of hours she spent observing and filming. “I'm not saying it doesn't happen, but maybe there's just been an overemphasis,” she says.
Instead, as shown in a scene of children comforting the crying cymbal player, the Japanese educational system “is good at creating kids who are really empathetic,” Yamazaki says. “Since everybody's in it together, it's easier to emphasize because you know exactly what they're going through. In the Western system they almost pit you against each other.”
Her goal was to create a film that showed situations that everyone, non-Japanese included, could relate to. “Kids everywhere are struggling but also having these magical childhood moments,” she says. “I wanted to show that universality, as well as the Japanese system specifically. I like that the film is being received that way.”
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