Japanese Junior High School: A Day in the Life

Now that I've been teaching for a few weeks, I feel reasonably equipped to begin my presentation of what life is like at a Japanese junior high school. I teach at three different junior high schools, and they all function the same way; in fact, considering how fully the government has standardized education in Japan, it's safe to say that the vast majority of JHS work exactly the same way.

To begin with, junior high schools in Japan are comprised of 7th, 8th, and 9th grades. Since this is universal throughout Japan, people are often surprised to find out that I went to elementary school until 5th grade, and then middle school from 6th to 8th grades. However, in Japan the grades are referred to as 1st, 2nd and 3rd grade of junior high rather than 7th, 8th and 9th, and the same goes for high school. As such, I will probably refer to my students as 1st years, 2nd years and 3rd years.

Let's start with a rough schedule:

7:30-8am: Arrival of students and teachers
7:55-8:05: Morning teachers' meeting
8:10-8:30: Homeroom
8:40-9:30: 1st period
9:40-10:30: 2nd period
10:40-11:40: 3rd period
11:40-12:30: 4th period
12:30-12:45: Preparation for lunch
12:45-1:05: Lunch
1:05-1:25: Cleanup/Lunch break
1:30-2:20: 5th period
2:30-3:20: 6th period
3:20-3:35: Cleaning Time
3:40-3:55: Closing Time

By the time I get to a school around 7:40, at least half of the teachers are already there. A few trickle in rather close to the morning meeting's starting time, but as long as you're in your seat when the chime rings at 7:55, you're OK. If you happen to be late, you dash off to your seat half bent so you won't obstruct anyone's view of the principal, nice principal or superintendent, and while bent, you bow a few times to show your shame at being late. Luckily, I haven't been late yet!

The morning meeting consists of going over the daily schedule in case there are any changes, talking about any upcoming events, and announcements from individual teachers. Much of the meeting is conducted in high-speed Japanese, so I miss a lot of it, but I understand the schedule and the school nurse's swine flu warnings and updates, so I think I'm getting the essential stuff. There was one time that I missed the admonition to bring one's athletic suit to school the next day and chose that particularly day, inevitably, to wear a skirt. I was a touch embarrassed, as I watched the kids practice for Sports Day, standing on the sidelines in my kitten heels and skirts, ruing my rare decision to look particularly cute that Friday. I was further tormented by my principal's quip, "Why, if you come from New Jersey, are you not wearing a new jersey?" So clever!

During the morning meeting, the students go to their homerooms and get ready for class; no adult surveillance necessary. Since all teachers must be there for the morning meeting, I'm pretty sure the kids just chill out and get their stuff together. The homeroom teachers run up to their classes as soon as the morning meeting's over, to be sure, but from what I've seen, the kids here are rather responsible and reliable. Can you imagine leaving a group of 40 American 14 year olds in a room together alone and expecting them to get ready for school in an orderly fashion?

That's the other thing: the class sizes here are huge. 38-40 students per class is the norm. A few of my classes have only 35 kids, and at each of my schools, one grade's English classes are divided in half, so in those cases I'll have about 17-20 kids per class. I'm not sure of the reason behind such large class sizes...there may be a shortage of teachers, or perhaps just the fact that the teachers can handle 40 kids with ease if they're well behaved is enough to justify cramming so many students into one class. In any case, the periods between classes aren't as hectic as you might imagine from the numbers, since most of the time, teachers move from one class to another instead of the kids. There are exceptions, like art, music, and gym class, and the English classroom, used when the classes are divided in half. In general, though, I suppose it makes more sense for a dozen teachers to move around than several hundred kids. Then again, the students have all of their classes with their homeroom class, so even when they do change classrooms, they're almost always with the same group of kids. There are advantages and disadvantages to both systems.

There are usually 6 periods per day. So far, the most I've taught in one day is 4, and I've had a few days when I only taught 1 or 2 classes. I think days when I have to teach during all 6 periods will be rather rare, but I hear that they do occur. Currently, I tend to have days with few classes because the daily schedule changes frequently to accommodate practice for the Sports Festival (undokai 運動会、or taiikusai 体育祭）. For example, on Wednesday I had no classes because there were no classes. The whole day was devoted to practicing for the Sports Festival.

What is this intriguing Sports Festival, you ask? Every junior high school in Japan has one each year, usually in late September; I believe most elementary and senior high schools have them, too. When Japanese people ask me if we have Sports Festivals in America, I mention the Field Day my elementary school had, but I stress that it was rather different. Field Day involved a lot of different races, competitions and obstacle courses for which prizes were awarded; other than a few group activities, individual performance was key. At the Sports Festival, the vast majority of the activities require teamwork. I'll save the details for a Sports Festival post later on, but there are several variations of the three-legged race idea, from the basic two-person model to three people similarly bonded at the legs and jumping rope, to a line of 20 girls running together with these black bands binding their legs into 11 composite legs. There's also the mukade kyoso, or caterpillar group, which to me looks like a chain gang: two ropes with cloth straps that bind a line of 20 or so girls or boys one in front of the other, in which format the individual classes race each other. I actually joined in with a few of the girls groups at one of my schools, and it's not easy!

I think that perhaps the most culturally indicative aspect of the Sports Festival is the amount of times they have practiced for it, with such attention to detail. They spend hours practicing how exactly each class in each grade should line up, march from the respective sitting areas to the center of the field, spread out for strecthing, get back in line, and return. The students have to practice running from one side of the field to the other, in order. They've practiced the opening ceremony at least a few times. Just in case that's not enough, tomorrow (Saturday, I'll note) we have a full rehearsal of the whole Sports Festival. The entire school gets a day off in compensation for this dress rehearsal, and another one for the actual festival on Sunday, but you get the idea: practice makes perfect. The gym teachers, walking around with their timers and yelling at one group or another for taking longer than 30 seconds to run from one place to another, are understandably particularly involved in the process.

All three principals, benevolently watching the various practices with me (which means they've been practicing like this for three weeks!), have mentioned that this constant drilling is very similar to military organization. One of them told me that the Sports Festival originates from the Meiji era, Japan's period of modernization, so the military connection is quite understandable. Part of me thinks it's all a little much, especially considering the one measly rehearsal each I had for both my high school and college graduations, arguably much more important events. However, the dry and unsentimental part of me thinks that the constant drilling and all of the exercise it entails probably help to keep junior high schools students out of trouble. Any opinions on the matter?

I think this post is long enough, but stay tuned for more on the Sports Festival and teaching news!

One of my three schools, Minami-chu (short for Kawanoe Minami Chugakko, Kawanoe South Junior High School), has its own website, which the vice principal updates fairly regularly. It's entirely in Japanese, but it has quite a lot of pictures of the school and the students. For some reason, the page doesn't show up in proper Japanese on my computer, even though my laptop is set up to read Japanese pages, so I can say from experience that if you just click on the different links you're likely to find many pictures which might be of interest to you. There are a few shots of school lunch, actually quite delicious and homemade in 2 of my 3 schools, and of cleaning time, which is absolutely amazing: all of the kids just go to their station and start cleaning their spots with no prompting needed, though a teacher does nominally review their work after the 15 minutes are up. You might even stumble across a picture of me giving my original self-introduction to the entire school during the summer. Enjoy!