School Gives Japanese Students a Yen to Stay in U.S.

They may live in America, but they’re brought up strictly Japanese. Indeed, an elementary school for the children of Japanese businessmen and diplomats working in New York caters to this apparent “contradiction,” Principal Torao Endo says. “We are trying to teach children to be Japanese and show them about the freedom of America and New York at the same time,” says Endo, head of the Japanese School of New York, which has about 460 students. The school offers such classes as “morals,” in which the children learn the importance of working in groups, the necessity of struggling for success and why order in society is critical for social harmony. The teachers, from Japan’s Ministry of Education, also have a much more intense influence than their American counterparts, with teachers routinely discussing personal problems with the students and even commenting on their dress. Still, the students are often perceived as too precocious and aggressive upon their return to Japan. Some have even opted to stay. “I will be freer here than in Japan,” said 14-year-old Mayumi Yamada, who will attend the Bronx High School of Science. “I like it in America. I like they way they think.”

--A syndicated columnist moved by the honesty of a teen-ager who turned in a valuable ring she found at the site of the Northwest Airlines jet crash has vowed that she will not go unrewarded. Chicago Tribune columnist Bob Greene said he will turn over $7,500--the value of the ring--in cash or in a trust fund to 14-year-old Denise McNeely of Taylor, Mich. McNeely found the ring after police removed the barricades around the Detroit street where Flight 255 crashed Aug. 16, killing 156 people. She turned it over to police, who said it would be returned to the husband of a 50-year-old Arizona woman who died in the crash. The girl said news of Greene’s reward “makes me feel good” because her mother is unable to raise her three children without welfare.

--It was the slain cabdriver’s favorite song and seemed a fitting selection for a group of 50 prominent British session musicians and singers making a recording to benefit the families of the cabbie and 15 others killed in a gunman’s rampage. The recording of “Bridge Over Troubled Waters,” immortalized by Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel, features singers Marti Webb and Sinitta and was cut at a London studio, with sales to aid the families of the victims of the Aug. 19 massacre in Hungerford, England, by a gun collector who later killed himself.