The Secrets of Mariko by Elisabeth Bumiller

Author:Elisabeth Bumiller [Bumiller, Elisabeth]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-76588-8
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2010-09-29T04:00:00+00:00

Nine-thirty in the morning, on a brilliant autumn Sunday. The sky was a deep blue; the leaves were turning; Tokyo was at its best. None of that mattered, however, to the thirty-two fourth-grade students who were spending their one day off that week inside an antiseptic, fluorescent-lit cram school classroom working out math problems. “A boy named Hasegawa ate 5,760 roasted rice balls in three hours,” the teacher said. “How many rice balls did he eat in twenty minutes? How long will it take to eat 16,000?”

A boy had his hand up. “But usually people eat roasted rice balls very fast in the beginning, and not so fast at the end,” he said, obviously wanting to be helpful.

The instructor offered a pained smile. “Don’t worry about that,” he said. “Hasegawa can eat them all right away.”

None of Mariko’s children happened to be in cram school that fall, so I took up an offer from Sachiko to go to the cram school her own son attended, comparable to the ones Mariko’s children had gone to in the past. Sachiko’s son, Yota, a ten-year-old, was there that morning, in a sweatshirt and shorts, head bent over his notebook. The school was in a second-floor walk-up off a busy side alley of coffee shops and video rental stores in the business district of a suburban neighborhood near Mariko’s house. The classroom itself was new and modern, like a computer training center, with none of the smells and texture of Ichomachi Elementary. On one wall was a list of the students from this cram school who had passed the 1991 exams into some of Tokyo’s most prestigious junior highs.

The instructor this morning was a Mr. Ito, who, I noticed, was different from the authoritarian types I had seen in public schools. He was talking to the students as a friend and was dressed with a little more style—longish hair well over the back of his collar, aviator glasses, a pin-striped shirt, and a tie. Cram school instructors made more money than public school teachers, and many parents considered them better at educating their children. Ito was forty-three, had been with the cram school for two decades, and made $80,000 a year teaching and administering this particular branch, more than half again as much as he would have made teaching public elementary school. He told me, disingenuously, I thought, that his cram school did not push its students, but it was a claim echoed by Ken-chan’s public school teacher, who told me she thought cram schools were a good influence in general because they made students “more willing to study.”

But what was the use in criticizing? Cram schools had become so pervasive in Japan that they were operating like a parallel school system. In the early 1990s, Japan’s Yano Research Institute found that nearly 4.4 million students were enrolled in as many as 60,000 cram schools nationwide; they represented 18.6 percent of elementary school students and 52 percent of those in seventh through ninth grades. In Tokyo the percentages were even higher.

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