COLUMN ONE : A Lesson for Japan’s Kids: Play! : Children’s bald spots and ulcers are tipping off parents--their kids are pushed too hard in school. Time to lose the books, Japanese researchers advise, and hit the playground.

Kensuke Inouye and Yuji Omagari, both 11, live in the same city in the same country. But when it comes to their summer vacations, they are worlds apart.

Kensuke gets to sit around a campfire, fashioning whistles out of clay and listening to live musical performances amid fresh mountain air, green rolling hills and the melody of a rushing river stream in Fukushima, two hours north of Tokyo.

Yuji sits in a sterile classroom from 8:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. in one of Tokyo’s most elite cram schools, stuffing his head with such arcane facts as the name of the treaty signed between Japanese officials and U.S. Commodore Matthew Perry in the 19th Century.

In this tale of two summers, Kensuke’s fun-filled time at nature camp may seem the norm. But Yuji’s experience is the more typical here in Japan, where hyper-competitive parents send even 1-year-olds to cram school, or juku , in a desperate bid to triumph in this nation’s fierce educational wars.

While such scholastic diligence of Japanese youngsters is admired around the world, a growing number of experts are sounding the alarm that all study and no play is turning Japan’s children into physical and emotional wrecks. That is why the Fukushima nature camp was started this year--and why others like it are springing up to help children regain what should come naturally: the art of play.

“In Japanese society, the track is already set for children to enter universities as the top priority. So the emphasis is on acquiring knowledge at a very early age rather than physical and emotional development through play,” said Tokyo pediatrician Sadao Mayumi. “But when children grow up that way, they’re going to become abnormal.”

The warning bells are already clanging. Besieged by unrelenting competitive pressures, children are prematurely losing their hair and developing adult afflictions such as ulcers and high blood pressure.

The Tokyo wig maker Art Nature, for instance, reports that sales of children’s wigs have doubled in the last three years, especially among fifth- and sixth-graders who hope to hide their stress-caused bald patches.

The all-consuming focus by the Japanese on book learning is also robbing many children of basic social skills and practical knowledge.

The Children’s Life Science Research Center in Tokyo, for instance, reports that a majority of elementary school children who were tested could not identify vegetables by touch or sight, drew pictures of chickens with four legs and could not correctly name many of their own body parts.

One elementary school girl, for instance, asked to name the appendage on the side of her head, responded, “earring”; another student called his elbow “corner,” said center associate Masaaki Yatagai.

Mothers are stuffing their children’s schedules so tightly with cram school, piano, art, swimming and other structured lessons that two-thirds of 1,168 Tokyo elementary school students surveyed in 1989 had to make special appointments just to play with friends. And 53% of those surveyed did not play at all after school, citing fatigue, juku or other appointments as the main reasons.

“In my opinion, this is one type of child abuse,” said Urako Kanemori, a former elementary school teacher who now practices family therapy at the Tokyo Psychological Educational Institute. She lays the blame primarily on mothers who disguise their personal ambitions as maternal love and live out their frustrated dreams for accomplishment through their children.

“Most mothers today want to become mothers of Tokyo University students,” she said, referring to the Harvard of Japan, “but this is the mother’s dream, not the child’s. What is needed is greater independence of mothers.”

Experts say the problems are particularly acute now, because today’s children are being raised by the first postwar generation, who themselves were exhorted to make inordinate sacrifices to study and work to help rebuild the nation. As a result, those competitive values have been passed on and amplified in the current generation of children, they say.

Keiko Omagari, 35, is a soft-spoken Tokyo homemaker who takes her son Yuji’s education most seriously. So seriously that she and her husband, a banker, recently moved to a place along the Chuo railway line called Ogikubo; the spot is famed for its schools.

She has sent Yuji to the prestigious Yotsuya Otsuka juku since third grade and decided he should spend his summer there, too, to cram for junior high school entrance exams this fall. As a child, she herself attended the same juku and a pedigreed private secondary school. On a recent afternoon, she attended her son’s class, sitting in the back with five other mothers, taking copious notes.

During the school year, she says, the sixth-grader studies as much as 12 hours a day. He eats outside the home most days. He rarely plays outside with friends. Until the junior high exams are over, he has even given up television and put his TV computer games away.

Because of Yuji’s studies, the family plans no vacation this year.

Yuji, a strapping youngster, tells visitors that he enjoys the class. But his mother says later that he explodes emotionally nearly every day under the stress.

She says she would prefer to give him a more leisurely life and enrich him with different aesthetic experiences through nature and play. But, she says with a helpless shrug, Japan is a gakureki shakai , a society in which one’s career and future success are inordinately determined by one’s academic pedigree. As a result, the pressure on her son “can’t be helped.”

Mieko Inouye, 40, has a different view. A bright, talkative elementary school teacher, she tried sending her son Kensuke to a prestigious juku last year but pulled him out after a few months. As Kensuke himself describes it: “It was really hard. I didn’t understand a lot. And I lost all my time to play.”

He says he particularly hated the way that classroom seating arrangements were decided every week by test grades. Those like himself who did not score in the top of the class were relegated to the back of the room in a public show of humiliation.

“I know my children won’t do well what I force them to do, so I prefer to let them find their own path,” Inouye said, as she sat around the campfire baking clay whistles with her son at the nature camp on a recent afternoon. “He’s just not the type to spend hours and hours at his desk studying. It doesn’t matter if he doesn’t go to a university. I just want to raise a good child.”

She and her husband, a construction manager, allow Kensuke to indulge his passion for soccer and other sports. He swims and plays the piano. Twice a week, he attends a different kind of juku that balances study with outdoor experiences--mountain hiking, outdoor cooking, log cabin building and volleyball playing. Kensuke says this juku is far more interesting and that he has made more than a dozen friends, compared with just a few at cram school.

Inouye says she sometimes envies her friends who are sending sons to prestigious jukus. But based on her 18 years as a teacher, she questions how the children are developing as human beings, saying: “I have doubts as to whether they can decide things for themselves based on their own will, when they are forced into a life path by their parents. I also have doubts about these children’s social skills. They seem more weak-hearted and have a harder time making friends.”

Computer games don’t help, she adds. Children who spend most of the day in solitary study then proceed to spend much of their free time in solitary play with such pastimes. As a result, Inouye said, “They are losing contact with other children, nature and their communities.”

In fact, the Japanese media have proclaimed the arrival of a new breed of youngsters called otakuzoku-- socially inept, nihilistic computer whiz kids who manipulate machines brilliantly but lack skills to deal with other humans.

Said to number in the hundreds of thousands, otakuzoku prowl through the world’s electronic databases, hunting for weird news on select topics to exchange with others in their zoku , or clan. (There are zoku for all manner of topics, including comics, tropical fish, monsters, the military, idols, even jeans.) The point is not whether the information is relevant. Only that it be accurate and new.

Social critics fear that such youngsters worship information but possess no ability to put it in context or to assign it value. And while most otakuzoku remain harmless techno-nerds, the gory molestation and mutilation of four preteen girls by an otakuzoku several years ago set off cries of alarm that Japan’s high-tech, high-pressure system was indeed producing a malevolent new creature.

Such concerns are extreme. But a growing number of teachers, parents and bureaucrats are crying for action.

In fact, the Ministry of Education--in an unprecedented move--agreed that Japanese youngsters would get one Saturday a month off from school. While adults debated the necessity of the brief academic break, kids frolicked over the weekend when they got that unheard-of free day for the first time.

Recently, the Ministry of Health and Welfare announced plans for a national study of children’s problems, while the Ministry of Education has begun new classes this year to try and balance book learning with hands-on experience.

Alarmed by the surge of “adult diseases” among youngsters, the Health Ministry plans to study current lifestyles. Research topics will range from how much fast food children eat to how long they play with computer games and the effect of living in high-rise apartments. It is expected to be the most comprehensive study of children’s sleep, play, study and commuting patterns ever undertaken.

The Health Ministry estimates that four of every 10 children are at risk of experiencing such problems as ulcers, diabetes, high blood pressure and obesity. Already, cholesterol levels among Japanese teens have overtaken those of their U.S. counterparts.

Some localities already have conducted similar studies. A teachers’ group in the southern prefecture (state) of Kagoshima surveyed 697 elementary school students last year and found that 40% suffered from some kind of physical ailment associated with stress. Shinichi Baba, a teacher, said that strange behavior in his class, such as children trying to pull out their own hair or suddenly shouting in the middle of class, is not uncommon.

Constant study also has diminished Japanese children’s physical abilities. Last year, a public education committee in northern Hokkaido surveyed 50,476 elementary school students and found that flexibility, endurance and basic strength had all declined compared with a similar survey in 1982. Height and weight, however, had increased.

The most recent data shows that in 1985, 44.5% of junior high students and 16.5% of elementary school students attended juku. But experts believe the number has increased considerably since then--perhaps to as high as 75% in some middle schools.

Parents seem to be aware that they are shortchanging their children’s childhoods. Most of those surveyed in January by the government said their children were not enjoying a rich life and largely blamed the youngsters’ heavy study load. But in the classic Japanese expression of resignation, more than one-third said, “It can’t be helped.”

Meanwhile, the Ministry of Education, already aware of the lopsided emphasis on book learning, started new classes this year for first- and second-graders aimed at enriching children through more direct life experiences. Teachers are freed from set curricula and instructed not to transfer mere facts but to stimulate creative activity through hands-on learning.

While some experts criticize the program as too little too late, and some teachers have no clue how to use the time, others are growing vegetables or raising animals in the classroom, said Yatagai of the children’s research center.

Giving children more hands-on experiences is also the idea behind the play groups and nature camps springing up around Japan.

In Tokyo, the Shiraume Kindergarten opened a special playroom three times a week for 2-year-olds after noticing an increase in children who refused to mingle with others.

On the southern island of Kyushu, Naoto Odagiri started a Cram School for Play three years ago when he realized that more and more children were forgetting how to play. The former grade school teacher says he was shocked when he took students to a play village with tents, ladders and mud paddies, and most simply stood frozen in the middle, unsure what to do.

He began a summer camp where children climb rocks, explore caves, go mountain trekking and carve chopsticks from wood. He says he is particularly concerned with the diminishing ability of children to think for themselves. So he includes an overnight camping trip where children must decide themselves what to bring and eat, where in the field to put their sleeping bags and how to work with other children.

Similar ideals motivated Chuya Hashimoto to begin his Dance With Nature and Children camp in Fukushima this year.

There, children ate all-natural foods. They pitched two tepees and were encouraged to scrawl colorful pictures and graffiti on them. In a toy-making seminar, they learned how to make fire with sticks, design whistles and craft simple toys of wood and string handed down from the aboriginal Ainu and other native peoples. The clearly enchanted children greeted the lessons with squeals of delight and intense concentration.

Hashimoto says that his camp is a small start and that far broader efforts are needed.

Quoting a German friend, Hashimoto said: “The Japanese are turning out learning machines with minds of computers but corrupt hearts. If this keeps up, we’ll have no future.”

Chiaki Kitada, a researcher in The Times’ Tokyo Bureau, contributed to this article.