Aptly Named Freedom School Goes Against Scholastic Grain

The school’s name says it all. Jiyu Gakuen. Freedom School.

This green, rolling campus, dotted with plum trees and fragrant blossoms, is an oasis of creative learning in Japan’s academic desert of textbook drills, dry exams and mind-numbing memorization.

Yes, these students learn math, science, history and other core subjects. But, on a given day, their science lesson may be bird-watching or a spontaneous hike through the woodsy, 20.5-acre campus. They learn home economics by planning, cooking and delivering lunch to 1,400 people daily. They experience biology firsthand by raising fowl, pigs and fish and by growing everything from cabbage and rice to orchids.

In striking contrast with most Japanese youth, Jiyu students learn self-expression. On a recent Saturday, over a student-cooked lunch of chicken and spaghetti, girls clambered to the microphone to tell the crowd about their meal preparation, calligraphy--artistic writing--and other campus activities. The talks are a daily lunchtime attraction.

“They start as shy kids, but after 10 years they can really speak well and express themselves,” said Principal Gyo Hani. “It’s one of our strong points.”

Students also learn to think for themselves through self-governance. They control campus maintenance, dormitories, meals and accounting. They team up to sweep floors, do laundry, tend fields and share other work in a cooperative lifestyle. This, Hani explained, is a deliberate departure from the harsh school competition that drives regular Japanese students to stress and exhaustion.

To foster creativity, Saturdays are devoted to the arts. In the craft shop, one student worked a weaving machine, making fabric from pink thread she dyed herself and which she would sew into a suit.

The point of all this?

“To create truly free people,” according to the founding philosophy of Motoko Hani, Japan’s first woman news reporter, who established the Christian school in 1921.

She was dissatisfied with traditional Japanese education, in which “knowledge was crammed into children’s heads without letting them understand why certain things are so,” said Principal Hani, the founder’s nephew. “She wanted to start a new school where children would learn through experience and govern themselves.”

One of her early backers was American architect Frank Lloyd Wright, who designed the original school building in wood, mortar and Oya stone. It was Wright’s only school project.

From the original class of 26, the school has grown to more than 1,200 students in kindergarten through college. Most students and teachers are children of Jiyu alumni and regard their experience as extraordinary.

Shigeko Mori, 20, is a Jiyu junior college student who was just accepted into the highly regarded International Christian University in Tokyo. Before applying, she attended exam preparation courses for the first time in her life with regular Japanese students--and was startled by what she found.

“They don’t enjoy the studies. They only learn the techniques of exams,” Mori said. “But this school teaches you to think with your own mind. We not only study on the desk, we can learn about each other and life.”

Takashi Goda, a 30-year insurance broker in Los Angeles who graduated from Jiyu in 1982, said there are other noticeable differences between himself and Japanese who have received traditional educations. He said he tends to be more open, more willing to assert himself, volunteer for activities and express his real thinking. Those traits have proven essential for his job with the U.S. firm of Johnson & Higgins, where he frequently makes sales presentations.

“The general Japanese person behaves in coordination with others. They will look at someone else first to see what they are doing. They just want to be hidden in the group consciousness,” Goda said. “But whatever we think, we are trained to express.”

Other Japanese notice the differences and ask him about his background and education, he said. But it is friendly curiosity, he said, because Jiyu’s emphasis on cooperative living helps its graduates learn to get along with anybody.

As a result, many of Japan’s largest manufacturing firms have tapped Jiyu graduates for overseas service. Three of the four other students in Goda’s study group, for instance, were assigned overseas--for Hitachi, Canon and Seiko.

Hani also said a disproportionate number of students have become journalists, following the legacy of the school founder and himself. He worked for the Japan Times.

Occasionally, Goda said, Jiyu students have encountered a subtle condescension--”he must be something like a drop-out because he couldn’t stand the competition” for bigger, better-known schools. Prospective employers with smaller companies, who are unfamiliar with his school, are the ones who usually hold such stereotypes, he said. “All the big companies already accept our students, no problem,” Goda said.

Over the years, the school’s fortunes have waxed and waned. During World War II, right-wing military authorities harassed the liberal school, exerting tremendous pressure on it to change its “freedom” name. They said the name was subversive, according to the school history. Hani refused.

After the Allied victory, Jiyu was thrust into the national limelight as a school that “understood the spirit of democracy.” It was deluged with visitors, including U.S. educational missions, and a flood of applications.

Under the influence of the Occupation authorities, the Ministry of Education accredited the kindergarten to 12th-grade program. The colleges are still unaccredited, however.

Today, the small school with the giant spirit remains an anomaly in tradition-bound Japan.

“We will continue to be a small exception. People are too conservative to adopt our way,” Hani said. “It’s safer to stick to the traditional system. You don’t have to think much.”