Hello TPR listeners, my name is Sam Porter and I will be writing a new monthly column on this site about my experience as a senior exchange student at a Japanese high school between August of 2007 and June of 2008. This column will provide an insider’s view of what Japanese high school feels like from a student’s perspective as well as present issues related to the Japanese education system. For this first installment I thought it would be good to explain who I am and why I’m going to be doing a year of school abroad in Japan.

I grew up in Brookline, Massachusetts (in the USA). Brookline is a small town adjacent to the city of Boston. Much like neighboring Boston, Brookline is an intensely international and political town. Walking through Coolidge Corner or Brookline Village, the two main centers of town, one often hears numerous languages being spoken or encounters some political protest or social demonstration taking place. My first and most influential exposure to Japanese culture occurred during my elementary school years.

I attended the Lawrence School, which hosted Japanese students whose parents were doing graduate studies at local universities. Lawrence’s student body of around 400 students is an amazing 1/3 Japanese. My earliest memories of going to school have always involved Japanese students, the Japanese language, but most of all, Japanese culture. I remember playing soccer in gym class and at recess with my friends Kansuke and Takahiro. Throughout my time at Lawrence I wanted to learn Japanese so that I could understand their culture and their country.

Each year Lawrence celebrated numerous Japanese festivals, and invited traditional Japanese performance groups such as story tellers and taiko drummers to perform at our school. Unfortunately, no Japanese language classes were ever offered. Twice a year the very popular Japanese crafts and food fairs occurred. For these events, all of the mothers of the Japanese students came out in force to transform the school auditorium into a traditional mock open air Japanese market. As an elementary school student, this was an amazing experience.

One memory that remains vivid in my mind is of Mr. Nagano, the Japanese teacher at our school. Mr. Nagano was a middle aged man with a large plume of well groomed white hair, a weathered face, and large round wire rimmed glasses that never left his face. Each morning, for the eight years I walked to school, I always saw him dressed in a suit riding his old bike with his briefcase hanging from his shoulder. As a teacher at our school he was always friendly to me and other students. For me at the time, Mr. Nagano embodied what Japan was all about.

By eighth grade I became an avid reader of any history book or newspaper that I could put my hands on. Just a few years earlier Brookline High School started a four year Japanese language program. When I entered as a freshman four years ago I started studying Japanese immediately. I began reading extensively about Japan and other topics in politics and history. I’d become certain that I wanted to pursue a future that included Japan, politics, and history.

In the summers after freshman and sophomore years I attended The American school in Thorpe, England. I went to classes with a student body of just five Americans, and two hundred other students mainly from the Middle East, Nigeria, Japan, Korea, Italy, Spain, Russia, and a few other world regions. Becoming close friends with fellow students from regions such as Middle East and West Africa made me want to travel outside of the West. Without this experience, it’s doubtful that I would have been so eager to go to Japan.

During my junior year I had the chance to participate in two exchanges to Japan. The first was during April of 2006. Through my high school’s Japanese class I lived with a host family in a small two room LDK apartment in the town of Fujidera while attending high school at Kawachi Nagano High School. This apartment was cramped indeed; it was no bigger than the kitchen in my house in Brookline. There was one bedroom where all four of us slept, and one kitchen where we ate and socialized. The only private space was in the small closet sized bathroom. These conditions were small for American standards, but quickly this small apartment and its family enchanted me. I remember walking in through the front door the first time I arrived at the apartment with my host brother. He and I had just come from a long ninety minute train ride from his school. I entered his home nervous and unsure of what to do, but the second I heard the Beatles playing on the stereo and when I saw the welcoming face of his mother, I knew my time in Japan would be great. Some people talk about the dysfunctional state of modern Japanese families, but my host family proved to be more wonderful and functional than many families I’ve encountered in the west.

My second stay in Japan was through American Field Services (AFS). I lived with a host family in Taketoyo-cho, a small town south of Nagoya in Aichi prefecture. Unlike my previous family experience, I lived with two grandparents in their mid 70’’s and an adorable yet loud dog in a large semi-traditional Japanese house. My host parents, like my previous host family, were loving and kind. I was always impressed by how much they went out of their way to help me, from learning Japanese to making fancy dinners.

My host mother taught tea ceremony and flower arrangement to students each day in a part of the house constructed in a traditional Japanese layout. To my benefit and great discomfort, I participated in some of the tea ceremonies, and on one day I got up for a three hour session that began at 4 AM. As I was heading for the shower in my pajamas at 3:30 AM, I shocked to find six students women and men students dressed in their colorful summer kimonos. In my disheveled state, I felt quite embarrassed. I greeted each student and dashed off to the shower. Once the ceremony began I found that I was unable to sit traditionally for longer than thirty minutes without my legs and feet falling into spasms. To my immense surprise my host mother’s students, all aged in their 70’s, showed little sign of being tired or uncomfortable.

Instead of attending Japanese high school, I took five hours of Japanese language classes each weekday for five weeks at the International Communication Nagoya language institute. By myself, I traveled total three and half hours by train to and back from school each day for five weeks. Riding Japan’s trains alone as a 17 year old gave me a lot of time to observe life in Japan. At times I felt acutely aware of being a gaijin, such as when a group of high school students kept on speaking about me while staring at me only to divert their gaze when I turned to look at them. But most of the time I was left alone, except when the head of a sleeping passenger dropped on my shoulder. With a quick flurry of apologies and noticeable embarrassment, the person would quickly fall back asleep. Surprisingly, this happened a few times every week. What made those five weeks significant for me was that I was able to explore the area around Nagoya on my own before and after school each day. I became more confident about finding my own way. I knew I wanted to return to Japan as soon as possible.

That brings me to my present trip to Japan. The one question I have been repeatedly asked over the last year by friends and family is, “Sam, you’re graduating high school, why on Earth are you willingly going through another year of it, and why in Japan?” I’ve provided many answers, probably all slightly different for each person who’s asked me. But having had a year now to give thought to why I’m going, it all comes down to when I returned to Boston from Japan last summer.

A year ago on my return to America from my summer in Japan I promised myself that I would return the first chance I had. I’d made some amazing friendships, but more significantly I understood that if I was to study Japan in college I wanted to have a cultural and language immersion experience now. I’ve accumulated two shelves full of books on Japanese history and society. The one thing that struck me about western books on contemporary Japan was that many authors only have experienced Japan as academics or as university aged adults. Going to Japan before I entered college would give me a view of Japan that few foreigners can get.

I believe that one of the many ways a nation can be understood is through its schools. The way a nation’s people and its leaders behave is crafted greatly by how they are taught in school. Ever since Mori Arinori was the first minister of education of Japan, the public education system of Japan has had one goal: to produce the desired population for Japan’s economy and politicians’ interests. I hope by going to school in Japan I can learn things about Japan that can‘t be taught in a college classroom. I know from past experience that there are going to be some awfully difficult times, but I also know that there will be numerous rewarding experiences if I stick it out.

One day at school in Japan last summer I noticed that my friend Lorenzo was unusually silent and glum. I asked him what was wrong. He told me Japan was nothing like he had imagined it. He was 15 years old, nearly fluent in Japanese only after three years of intensive study, but coming to Japan was suddenly a shocking disappointment for him. He told me Japan was too urban and that its people were too hard to relate with compared with the West. The more I spoke with him the more I learned just how negative and critical he’d become of daily life in Japan. Whatever his image of Japan may have been, it was certainly not what Japan was, rather it was what he hoped it to be like.

Once being in Japan I had good and bad experiences. But at no time did I ever expect people to behave or for the country to be just like America or the West. Japan was Japan. It was silly to pretend that Japanese people should behave according to my own expectations based in western thought.

For years I had an image of what Japan might be like. Old fashioned, full of old towns, and other images that have been popularized in the west of Japan. But eventually I came to realize that this “Japan” was only what those living in America and Europe fantasized or wished it to be like. Over my last two stays in Japan I have learned to let my experiences and adventures show me that Japan, like any other country, is neither any one thing nor can it be easily defined. It has to be experienced.