School’s Setting May Be American, but Subject Is Japan

At the stroke of 9 every Saturday morning, the big school building on Oak Street in South Pasadena undergoes, almost magically, a transformation.

First, a contingent of 40 teachers marches briskly into brimming classrooms to be greeted--there among the crayon drawings, maps of California, dog-eared dictionaries and chalkboard erasers--with formal standing bows from their students.

“Ohayo gozaimasu ,” one teacher says. It means good morning.

“Ohayo gozaimasu, “ the students respond in unison.

The studies this morning at South Pasadena Junior High School bear little resemblance to the usual weekday fare.

History lessons during the week might have focused on the American Revolution or the Civil War; Saturday’s lessons concern emperors and eras. In math classes, weekday plus and minus signs give way to ideograms. There is no alphabet used in spelling classes, but hundreds of Japanese characters. Not a word of English is spoken until 3:30 in the afternoon.

Extra Homework

This is Asahi Gakuen, where Japanese and Japanese-American youngsters get a one-day-a-week taste of rigorous Japanese-style education. After five days of mathematics, science and history in American schools, the 600 or so elementary and junior high school students in the school’s San Gabriel Valley branch do it again--in Japanese. There are even extra homework assignments.

“It’s just a regular thing for us,” said 13-year-old Hiromichi Toyonaga, a ninth-grader at La Salle High School in Pasadena during he week. “It’s nothing special. The extra work doesn’t bother me.”

There is nothing odd about this tall, sleepy-looking youth with the thatch of black hair. Although engaging in serious academics on a balmy Saturday morning may seem downright un-American for the average ninth-grader from Southern California, Hiromichi knows that his life in the United States is transitory.

As inevitably as the arrival of new zigs and zags in the international business picture, Hiromichi will, sometime in the next two years, be swept from his temporary home in Pasadena and deposited back in his native land.

“My father is in textiles,” the youngster said. “I will return to Japan when my father’s business transfers him.”

That means going back to a super-competitive world, where education is paramount and where the entire course of Hiromichi’s life may be determined by his score on a single test.

Prestige in Schooling

According to Japanese nationals here, Japanese schooling tends to be elitist, with clear distinctions between “name” schools and also-rans. Getting onto the success track in Japan means passing a series of mind-stumping admissions tests, which begin in grade school, then attending a prestige college like the University of Tokyo and, ultimately, achieving stellar elevation to a job with a company high in the corporate firmament.

Ikuro Komoto, director of administration for Asahi Gakuen, explained it this way: “Top officials of the big corporations all graduated from the name schools. Naturally, they pick alumni of their schools when they hire people.”

Thus, the lives of Japanese schoolchildren, beginning in the first grade, are consumed by preparations for tests, like the Zenkoku Kyotsu Ichiji Shiken, the so-called general examination, which separates the wheat from the chaff among high school graduates every February, determining who will go to college and who won’t.

Before that, though, there will be tests to get into prestige junior and senior high schools. There may even be admissions tests for tutorial academies--the “cram” schools--which prepare students for later tests.

‘Rising Sun School’

Being thrust into that kind of a charged educational environment after four or five years in an American public school can be like getting thrown into a pool of ice water, say teachers from Asahi Gakuen, which means “rising sun school.”

“There was a girl whose parents came to this country and made the mistake of speaking only English in the home,” mathematics instructor Shigetaro Murata said. “He was the president of a company, and he was established here. But then he had to return home.

“The girl had a lot of trouble. She completely could not understand the language, the ways or the attitudes. The only school she could go to in Japan was the American school.”

Asahi Gakuen, then, serves primarily as an educational outpost of the home country for the children of Japanese businessmen, assigned by parent companies overseas to Southern California. The school soothes the business community’s fears that their children will be consumed by the grinding culture of Southern California, lost forever to their native culture.

“The longer they stay, the more the children come under the American influence,” said Yuko Uchida, principal of the school. “It’s very easy to forget the Japanese way of thinking.”

Began 17 Years Ago

The needs are great. There are 530 branches of Japanese companies in the Los Angeles area, according to the Japan Business Assn. of Southern California, which helped Asahi Gakuen get started 17 years ago. These are the “treaty traders” and “treaty investors,” companies that have staked claims in the metropolitan area through the provisions of the 1953 Japan-U.S. Treaty of Friendship, Commerce and Navigation.

Such companies have about 3,500 Japanese nationals working for them here, many of them businessmen with families who will return to Japan after stays in the Los Angeles area of three to five years. The financial companies alone--35 banks and securities houses in the metropolitan area--indicate a “sizable business community here,” a spokesman for Security Pacific Bank said.

According to the Japanese consulate general, the most recent figures show almost 27,000 Japanese nationals with visas living in Los Angeles County.

“Our problem is that we never know when we’ll have to return,” said Tomiko Tuji of Arcadia, whose husband has been working for Mitsui Ltd. here for the three years and whose 6-year-old son attends the South Pasadena school. “We want our children to have options.”

Largest of Such Schools

Asahi Gakuen--which began with 68 students in 1969 in borrowed space at the Japanese consulate--is the largest of at least 20 such schools in the Los Angeles area, Komoto said.

It has four branches, including a school in Santa Monica--the only branch that teaches high school students--one in Torrance and one in Garden Grove. Together they serve more than 2,400 students every Saturday, Komoto said.

The South Pasadena school is run much like any American school, with a series of 45-minute periods and a lunch break. Dress among students is, for the most part, American casual--sneakers, oversized sweaters and jeans--though fewer than 1% of the students are American-born. There can be, in fact, a surprising American-style informality to the classes, with children laughing openly at the remarks of fellow students and boldly waving their hands to be heard.

Textbooks in Japanese

Textbooks are the same as those used in Japanese schools, and the curriculum is tailored to the specifications of the home country. But the students can be at a disadvantage by being in borrowed space, groused Uchida, one of four educators sent to the school by the Japanese ministry of education.

“We are limited, especially in science classes,” he said. “One of the conditions of renting the space is that we conduct no experiments. It’s a disadvantage.”

The students take it all in stride. Even those who do not expect to return soon to Japan extol the benefits of Asahi Gakuen.

Hiroshi Kawai, 14, son of the vice president of a real estate company, is precise in his family’s expectations of a return to Japan. “I’d say it’s a 5% likelihood,” he said. “My father has been here so long that the company depends on him.”

But he attends Saturday school nevertheless. “If I’m stranded here, I can keep the culture of Japan,” he said. “I can remember where I came from. Our culture has many beautiful things--vivid colors in the clothing, beautiful landscapes.”

Courses Don’t Mesh

American and Japanese classes are rarely synchronized, student Hiromichi said. “Sometimes the American school goes first, sometimes the Japanese school goes first,” he said. “But here, everything is centered on Japan.”

School administrators contend that the Asahi Gakuen curriculum is generally a step or two ahead of the American.

“Our students usually find American schools very easy,” Murata said.

Perhaps that is because they must pile the rigors of the Japanese language on top of the discipline of the usual subjects, he said. “If you’re working on an algebraic word problem, it’s hard to understand the problem if you don’t understand the words,” Murata said.

The language is perhaps the most demanding of the Saturday studies, fourth-grade teacher Hasumi Taeko said. “First, there are the Chinese characters,” she said. “Then there are the simplified Chinese characters which the Japanese have adapted as hiragana. By the end of high school they must learn between 3,000 and 4,000 characters.”

Competing Interests

Although the students talk earnestly about the benefits of spending Saturdays in educational pursuits, there are sometimes problems. “There are so many things happening on Saturdays--birthday parties, parades,” Taeko said. “But these children have to go to Japanese school. If they miss one day, they won’t know what’s going on next week.”

Some of the students complain about the extra homework, Taeko acknowledged. “They don’t want to do their homework,” she said. “They say, ‘Why do we have to learn so much? Why do we have to learn about adding and subtracting if we have computers?’ ”

But the lash that keeps them going is the prospect of finding themselves set down in a homeland that is suddenly strange to them.

Hiromi Nose, an bright-eyed 10-year-old whose father works for a Japanese export-import company, went back to Japan last year for a visit and attended a Japanese school while she was there. “They seemed to understand everything,” she said. “They seemed faster than the people here.”