Education in Japan

Misplaced Modesty Hampers Sex Education in Japan’s Schools

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Asia/ Japan/ 02.12.2019/ Source: www.nippon.com.

Sex education in Japan’s schools lags behind that in other countries on many fronts. What are the differences and why is Japan behind so much of the rest of the world? We asked Hashimoto Noriko, professor emeritus at Kagawa Nutrition University and an authority on educational sociology and gender studies, to explain.

Learn About the Body—But Keep It Clothed

This is a page from a health and physical education textbook for third and fourth grade school students. The textbook is Minna no hoken (Health for Everyone, published in 2011 by Gakken) and the page is titled, Otona ni chikazuku karada (“As the Body Approaches Adulthood”).

Shown are a boy and girl, around age 10 and as adults. All are depicted wearing short-sleeved tops and shorts. Says Hashimoto: “How can you learn about the changes in the body by looking at an illustration of clothed figures?” In the 2005 edition of the textbook, the figures are naked, but someone decided to put clothes on them for the 2011 edition.

What are the textbooks like in other countries and how do they handle sex education? Hashimoto explains, “Many countries carry out comprehensive sex education based on UNESCO’s International Technical Guidance on Sexuality Education. Comprehensive sex education covers much more than just the subject of how the body develops. It encompasses everything from relationships and rights to sexual diversity and gender equality.”

The international differences are stark, as she explains. “In Finland and France, they teach biological facts, such as the role chromosomes play in determining the sex of a fetus; they delve into the diversity of human sexuality; and they explore the phenomena of human relationships. In China, they use explicit illustrations of the sexual organs to teach about sex, and the sex education in major Chinese cities is strongly influenced by the attitudes of Chinese citizens who have studied abroad. In Japan, however, as we can see by this textbook illustration, nothing is taught about the biological and scientific facts of human reproduction.

“In South Korean sex education textbooks, they even explain how to put on a condom. Thailand doesn’t go into that much detail, but does teach about safe sex as one way to deal with sexual urges. The correct way to put on a condom is not taught in Japan. Most sex education textbooks in Japan just do not meet international standards.”

Hashimoto Noriko believes Japan has much progress to make in the area of sex education. (Photo provided by Hashimoto)

A great part of this is due, says Hashimoto, to National Curriculum Standards that prohibit teaching about the processes of fertilization in fifth-grade science or about pregnancy in first-year junior high school health and PE classes.

Hashimoto explains how sex education in Japan got to this point.

“In the 1990s, sex education in Japan was among the most advanced in Asia, in part because of the AIDS scare. It was possible then to teach junior high school students about sexual urges and sexual behavior, sexual intercourse and birth control, and sexually transmitted diseases. The revised government education guidelines for elementary schools issued in 1992 for the first time called for health class textbooks for the fifth and sixth grades. A supplementary reader published in 1991 included a section on sexual intercourse. A textbook with similar content is being used in South Korea right now for sixth grade classes. But in Japan, this supplementary reader is out of print.”

Backlash Against Sex Education

Japan’s sex education was at the forefront in the 1990s. Why did it suddenly regress? The backward trend is related in part to a 2003 campaign to stop sex education at what is now the Nanao Special Support School, a Tokyo public institution for children with special needs. The campaign was led by some members of the Tokyo metropolitan assembly who were shocked to learn the school was teaching children with mental disabilities about sex using songs and dolls. They criticized the school for teaching “inappropriate” content that went well beyond government curriculum guidelines. The Sankei Shimbun concurred with a report critical of such “extreme” education, and the Tokyo Metropolitan Board of Education took disciplinary action against the principal and other teachers at the school. The faculty and parents fought back, however, taking the case to court with the claim that such intervention by metropolitan assembly members and the board of education was illegal. The case went all the way up to the Supreme Court, where it ended in 2013 in the defeat of the Tokyo metropolitan government and legislature.

These sex education materials in the health care office at the Nanao school were confiscated by the Tokyo Metropolitan Board of Education in 2003 in response to growing public disapproval of sex education in general.
These sex education materials in the health care office at the Nanao school were confiscated by the Tokyo Metropolitan Board of Education in 2003 in response to growing public disapproval of sex education in general.

“The court decision stated that the National Curriculum Standards could not be interpreted as word-for-word legal writ,” says Hashimoto. “In other words, the Standards are simply guidelines and a school’s decision to do something outside of the guidelines cannot be immediately judged as illegal. This case took ten years to resolve and went all the way to the Supreme Court. During this decade, sex education stagnated in Tokyo schools, where the disciplining of the Nanao teachers had a chilling effect.”

In 2004, immediately following the furor over the Nanao incident, the Tokyo Board of Education revised its handbook on sex education to emphasize that sex education must be pursued systematically and in stages appropriate to students’ physical development and in line with the National Curriculum Standards.

The Nanao defeat did not deter a Tokyo assemblyman involved in the case to once again, in 2018, decry as “inappropriate” a school’s approach to sex education. This time the criticism was aimed at a ninth-grade class on birth control and abortion in a public junior high school in Adachi, Tokyo. The National Curriculum Standards recommend that these topics be covered in senior high school, but this does not mean the junior high school acted illegally by including them in their curriculum.

“This junior high school had found in a survey that nearly half of its students thought it was OK to be sexually active once they moved on to high school. This, and the fact that the school was located in a less affluent district, led to the decision that earlier education on birth control and abortion was imperative. The school did not bring up the topics all of a sudden. The teachers began by teaching the seventh graders about relationships and the importance of equality, gradually leading up to the topics of birth control and abortion.”

Hashimoto stresses: “Children who undergo sex education learn to control their bodies. Without proper knowledge, they are left defenseless. And yet there are people who do now want to give children the knowledge they need.”

The Problem with Sex Ed in Ethics Classes

In the case of this junior high school, the Tokyo Board of Education reprimanded the school for prematurely introducing topics that did not coincide with the children’s level of development, but the Adachi Board of Education refuted this claim. Against this background, the revised Tokyo Board of Education guidelines for sex education issued this year for the first time concede that sex education going beyond the National Curriculum Standards may be implemented with the approval of the parents. Still, Hashimoto sees a problem in the numerous examples given in the guidelines of sex education being implemented within ethics classes.

“I see problems with every one of the eight publishers of government-approved junior high school ethics textbooks,” says Hashimoto. “Take for example, the ethics textbook for public junior high schools published by Nihon Kyōkasho, a textbook publisher with close ties to Nippon Kaigi, an ultranationalist group. This ethics textbook—which, by the way, Tokyo decided not to use in its schools—has a section titled ‘Life Roles,’ which tells the story of a mother on the day she is to be interviewed for a promotion at work. Both parents work in this family, and they usually have the grandmother who lives nearby take care of their youngest elementary school child during the day. On this important day, however, the grandmother falls ill and needs to be taken to the hospital. The father says he must go to work, and the elder daughter, a university student, says she has to go to school to make a presentation. The mother phones her company to cancel the promotion interview saying, ‘It appears I have another role to play.’ The family’s junior high school daughter is left to wonder what this ‘other role’ might be. The message is: Housework, childcare, and nursing care of elderly parents take precedent over a woman’s career. This is completely out of line with the concepts of gender equality and diversity in UNESCO’s International Technical Guidance on Sexuality Education.”

The Impact of the Failure to Teach About Sex

The biological, scientific facts of sex, noted earlier, and the concept of gender equality are missing in Japan’s sex education, says Hashimoto. Gender equality is a core concept in the global standard set by UNESCO’s Guidance. Japan’s failure to teach this concept is evident in a number of areas.

“Some years ago Thailand introduced a policy allowing married couples to choose to have different surnames. This is still not allowed in Japan. As with the approval of oral contraceptive pills, Japan is once again the last holdout in the United Nations to approve such policy. The virility drug Viagra was promptly approved to treat erectile dysfunction in men, but it took a long time before contraceptive pills were approved. As can be seen in the ethics textbook example cited earlier, there is a neoconservatism, which first appeared in the 1970s, that blames Japan’s economic ills on a decline in morals and advocates a return to traditional conservative values. This dovetails nicely with the neoliberal interest in the pursuit of profit.”

Hashimoto goes on: “These people want to cut back on social security. The family should be the safety net, they say, and women should sacrifice themselves for the family. But this perception of society goes completely against the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women which calls for the elimination of gender-based roles.”

The CEDAW was adopted by the United Nations General Assembly in 1979, took effect in 1981, and was ratified by Japan in 1985. Later, in 1999, an amendment was added that allowed for individuals to directly appeal to the UN’s Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women when their rights as stipulated by this treaty were violated and they were unable to find recourse within their own country. Hashimoto notes, though: “This is an optional protocol, and Japan is the only developed country that has yet to ratify it. If Japan had ratified this protocol, it would be possible to appeal to the United Nations to make Japan give couples the option to each retain their respective surnames after marriage.”

What does this kind of delay in promoting human rights mean for Japan?

“The UNESCO Guidance asserts that sex education from early childhood through adulthood can determine a person’s happiness throughout life. The failure to provide proper sex education hinders individual development and happiness. If things continue here as they are now, Japan is going to find itself isolated within the international community.”

Source of the notice: https://www.nippon.com/en/japan-topics/c06603/misplaced-modesty-hampers-sex-education-in-japan%E2%80%99s-schools.html

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Moral education may not reflect the realities of life in Japan

Michael Hoffman

By Michael Hoffman.

What’s wrong with the following story?

A magician, skilled but unlucky, finds success passing him by. One day, wandering lost in gloomy thoughts, he meets a boy who is unhappier still. The magician does some tricks. The boy cheers up. They become friends. They agree to meet the next day.

That evening the magician receives a visit from a friend. The friend brings news: The scheduled performer at the next day’s magic show can’t make it. Will the magician fill in?

Here it is, at last, the big break! Ah, but — the boy! He has promised to meet the boy! Can he disappoint him? No, he cannot. Success, fame, fortune are important, but friendship is more so. He will turn down the offer. He will keep his promise.

What’s wrong with the story? As a fairy tale, nothing. But as a moral lesson — since that’s what it’s meant to be — it seems to lack an essential ingredient: realism. Does real life work that way? Can it? Should it? If Japan’s did, what would become of its economic competitiveness?

It’s an old story, going back some 40 years, according to the Asahi Shimbun, and it has found its way, in one form or another, into all eight of the government-approved textbooks in use in a new — resurrected, rather — elementary school subject known as moral education. Discredited following World War II for its prewar and wartime militarist leanings, moral education sank into an informal limbo from which a reform backed by the education ministry has rescued it, effective this year in elementary schools, next in junior high schools.

History aside, critics fret about a key element of the reform. Moral education is now, as it was not in its informal phase, to be graded. How can teachers grade morality? By rewarding the loudest professions of determination to emulate the magician? Hypocrisy pays, while sincerity must be its own reward.

Another character figuring prominently in the new moral education textbooks is one Ninomiya Kinjiro (1787-1856). Born to a peasant family in Sagami Province (today’s Kanagawa Prefecture), he taught himself to read, worked himself up from poverty and became a noted figure of his time — an agronomist, economist, philosopher and forceful advocate for the starving poor. His posthumous life extended deep into the 20th century, via a famous 1-meter-high statue, much reproduced and adorning elementary school grounds across the nation, instantly recognizable by the load of firewood on the boy’s back and the book in his hand, symbolizing his indefatigable determination to work and better himself at all costs.

Readers of Kappa Senoh’s fictionalized wartime memoir “Shonen H” (“A Boy Called H”) will remember H, as an elementary school fourth-grader, getting into trouble over Ninomiya Kinjiro. A teacher rebukes H for reading while walking. “But,” protests H, “Miss Hayase (his homeroom teacher) said we should model ourselves on the statue of Ninomiya Kinjiro.” Yes, says the teacher, but not to extremes: “Modeling yourself on him means you should study hard, not that you should read as you walk.”

During the war the statues were melted down for ammunition, and Kinjiro more or less disappeared from view. He’s back — raising, on his return, the same question raised by the fictional magician: Is morality realistic?

Yasuhiro Ninomiya, a 71-year-old descendant of Kinjiro’s and a member of the Association of Japanese Intellectual History, tells the Asahi Shimbun that legend somewhat exaggerated his ancestor’s merits, considerable though they were. Kinjiro did teach himself to read, says Yasuhiro — but later in life, not as a child. And a famous story of him — again as a child — making straw sandals on his own initiative for laborers building a levee is “probably baseless” — a late 19th-century authoritarian government’s conscious attempt, in Yasuhiro’s view, to symbolize selfless dedication in opposition to a campaign then simmering for individual rights.

Two textbooks feature that story. Does factual accuracy matter? Yes, but secondarily, an education ministry official tells the Asahi Shimbun: “The essential point, in selecting content, is its educational value. Factual accuracy may or may not be an obstacle in that regard.”

Suppose a bright kid raises his or her hand in class and asks, “Is this story true?” What would the teacher say in reply — that “factual accuracy may or may not” matter?

It seems to matter less and less in society as a whole. Two examples, one benign, the other not:

Earlier this month the business magazine President ran a feature on job interviews. How should a job candidate approach one? Gingerly and yet boldly — gingerly because so much depends on it, boldly because bold is what an employer wants its employees to be. President cites an astonishing fact: A first impression of a stranger we meet is formed within, on average, 0.2 seconds. Once formed, it is more or less indelible. (“If you spill red ink on white paper, you can’t change it to blue ink,” is how psychologist Isamu Saito puts it.) The successful job candidate is he or she who seizes control of that crucial one-fifth of a second.

There are ways to do it. Sixty percent of a first impression is determined by the expression on your face. What do you want yours to say? Compose it so that it says it. Dress, too, says Saito, is important. The cut and colors of your suit, necktie and accessories send subliminal messages: red — extroverted and novelty-seeking; blue — polite, knowledgeable and traditional; gray — unassertive; and so on. What do you want to convey to your prospective employer? Whatever it wants to see in you — which you’ll know, having done the requisite preliminary research into the company’s corporate character.

Sincerity? A virtue no doubt, but first things first, and the first thing is: Get that job!

Having got it, the “first thing” is apt to become: sell products, maximize profits, gain power, keep power, expand power, protect your boss, protect yourself — and so on. The long list of corporate and government scandals unfolding over the past year and a half suggests a moral crisis that is pervasive rather than aberrational.

Truth? The admission this month by KYB Corp., a manufacturer of earthquake shock absorbers, that it has been fabricating safety data for more than a decade, is merely the latest reminder among many that, in a society whose primary goals are not moral but economic, the moral high road belongs exclusively to itinerant, luckless magicians. More power to them.

Source of the article: https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2018/10/27/national/media-national/moral-education-may-not-reflect-realities-life-japan/#.W95XW9ThDwd

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Japan: Hiroshima Prefecture to open International Baccalaureate school as it looks to move away from Japan’s passive education style

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Asia/Japan/26.06.18/Source: www.japantimes.co.jp.

Hiroshima Prefecture is set to open an International Baccalaureate boarding school next spring — a rare move by a local government that officials hope will help schools shift away from Japan’s typically passive style of education.

The prefectural government, with a goal of nurturing future global leaders, is launching Hiroshima Global Academy (HiGA), where it will offer IB programs for junior and senior high school students with a particular focus on English-language education. And unlike many IB programs, tuition will be free for most pupils.

Rie Hirakawa, superintendent of the Hiroshima Prefectural Board of Education, said opening the school is part of the prefecture’s efforts to break away from the country’s conventional teaching methods.

“Teachers across the prefecture are now trying to change the education style in elementary and junior and senior high schools, but it’s difficult to do something drastic all of a sudden (at existing institutions) so opening a baccalaureate school would be a step in that direction,” Hirakawa said in a recent interview with The Japan Times in Tokyo.

International Baccalaureate, an internationally recognized program adopted in over 140 countries and territories, promotes active learning, insightful thinking and initiative on the part of students.

As of April 1, Japan had 58 schools that offer a total of 81 IB programs across three age levels. The program is mostly available at international or private schools.

“(Students) can experience something close to studying abroad without leaving Japan and acquire English skills that would enable them to study at an overseas university,” said Hirakawa, a former top salesperson at Recruit Co. who assumed her current post in April.

“We hope to get children who are interested in this type of education to come to this school,” she added.

“The tuition fee is basically free, so students from Japan and abroad can receive International Baccalaureate-standard education regardless of their economic situation,” she said.

IB programs at private institutions cost as much as several million yen annually, making it difficult for most households to enroll their kids in the program. At HiGA, only high school students coming from families with a household income of more than ¥9.5 million will be required to pay tuition of ¥9,900 per month. Room and board will cost ¥40,000 per month for every student. For Japanese students, English is not a prerequisite to enter the prefecture-run school, which will debut with 40 first-year junior high school students next April.

Eventually, each grade in junior high will have 40 Japanese students, while each high school class will comprise 40 Japanese and 20 foreign students, Hirakawa said.

Applications for HiGA’s inaugural class will be accepted from Nov. 8-14. Students from across the country are eligible for admission.

In the school’s first three years — before it admits its first group of foreign students — major subjects, including mathematics, social studies and science, will be taught in Japanese.

But others, including art and physical education, as well as after-school and extracurricular activities, will be conducted in English to prepare Japanese students for rigorous English-language high school education in line with the IB program.

The Hiroshima academy is set to offer the Middle Years Program and the Diploma Program for junior and senior high school age students, respectively. Toshikazu Hasegawa, vice president of the National Institution for Academic Degrees and Quality Enhancement of Higher Education, said he sees the academy’s undertaking as “ambitious.”

“Japan’s secondary education follows a traditional system that is very different from International Baccalaureate education, so the introduction of such programs is a welcome move that will bring diversity and international viewpoints to secondary school teaching,” Hasegawa said.

The location of the new school promises to be another attractive aspect of the institution for prospective students. The ¥7 billion campus is being constructed on Osakikamijima, a remote islet in the Seto Inland Sea.

“It’s a scenic island. Blueberries and lemons are grown here, there’s a farm that cultivates oysters and lobsters, and there’s a hot spring in the mountains,” Hirakawa said. “The population is on the decline, but we’re working on revitalization under the concept of turning it into an island for education.”

Osakikamijima’s population, at 7,646 as of the end of May, has been shrinking — down from about 14,000 in 1985 — and aging — the proportion of residents age 65 and over sits at around 47 percent, more than double the figure from three decades ago, according to Osakikamijima town officials. The island is only accessible by ferry, mainly from Takehara.

Kensaku Yoshida, director of Sophia University’s Center for Language Education and Research, noted that while the number of IB programs is likely to grow in Japan, one of the challenges involves training enough teachers to be able to meet the demand for this unique style of education.

“In that sense, we could see more programs that have elements of IB rather than official IB programs down the line. A realistic and quick approach may be to promote IB education by using it as reference and not be too particular about the brand,” Yoshida said.

Hirakawa said the academy has been sending Japanese teachers overseas to undergo training for the IB system. As for foreign teachers, the school plans to hire people who have yet to be trained with the program and prepare them over the coming three years.

“We’d like to hire people who are interested in living in the countryside and teaching children as part of a learning community,” Hirakawa said, adding that targets include those working in Japan as assistant language teachers.

“Hiroshima Gov. (Hidehiko) Yuzaki is thinking big and soliciting students from outside the prefecture. He considers children who spend six years in Hiroshima to be local kids and thinks it’s a good idea for the prefecture to raise internationally minded leaders,” she said.

 

Source of the notice: https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2018/06/22/national/hiroshima-prefecture-open-international-baccalaureate-school-looks-move-away-japans-passive-education-style/#.WzFbBlVKjIW

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