Graduation

This past Friday the 9th grade students graduated. The Japanese academic school year ends in March. I’ve actually got a couple weeks of teaching left before Spring Break. The 9th graders get out early so they can prepare for high school entrance exams and what not.

Graduation is an odd affair in Japan. Every year I write about it, and every year I am again amazed by the strangeness of it. I’ve only had this weblog up and running for just over a year now, but some of you may recall long e-mails about graduation that I sent the first couple years I was in Japan.

Anyway, I don’t want to repeat myself too much, so I’ll just quickly reference some of “Joel’s Greatest Graduation Hits.” There is the blog entry I wrote on it last year. I was at a different school then, but a lot of the same stuff. And then there is this article I wrote for the Tombo Times about the singing of the National Anthem during graduation, and why it is always such an awkward moment.
Also Mike wrote a good blog entry about graduation at Ajimu High School. Again, different school, but a lot of the same stuff really. And by the way, that thing he says about always bowing at the wrong time and looking like an idiot, I could really identify with it.

So, trying not to repeat myself to much and doing my best to stay brief, here’s my take on graduation. I guess there are two main things that strike me as odd about graduation in Japan. One is the excessive preparation. For about two weeks before the actual ceremony, every afternoon is spent practicing graduation. Now here’s the really odd thing: Graduation is always held on a weekday morning, so very few people can attend; almost no fathers, a few mothers, and then various guests from the town hall and the Board of Education. So they spend weeks practicing so they can perform basically in front of each other.

And the kinds of things they practice are very Japanese. They practice sitting straight in their chairs, standing up when called upon to do so, and bowing at the correct angles. To me as an American it is valuable education time that could be better spent, but it’s important to them.

The other thing I find odd is the excessive emotion at graduation. There is always a lot of crying. This is partly because 9th grade is the last year of compulsory education in Japan. High school is not only optional, but students actually select which high school they want to attend and take entrance exams in order to enter. The process of selecting a high school in Japan is a lot like selecting a University in the US, only of course the kids are a lot younger and don’t handle the stress quite as well. There are always a lot of behavior problems in the 9th grade class during the last term before graduation. And the teachers understand that the kids are stressed out, and seem to be amazingly tolerant of what seem to me to be major offensives, such as windows being broken on purpose, or fist fights breaking out in the hallways.

I guess I’m getting off topic a little. The point is after 9th grade the junior high school class does not commonly proceed to the same high school together, but is scattered to the four winds, so it is a bit of a sad time for the kids.

Now in Ajimu, although in theory the kids could go anywhere they wanted, almost all of them proceeded to Ajimu High School right down the street. So all the crying seemed a bit out of place to me. In my present school the situation is a bit different. There’s not even a high school in my town (even though the town is bigger than Ajimu. There’s no consistency.) So the kids are all going in different directions next year, and the crying seems somewhat more natural.

This marks the fourth graduation ceremony I’ve seen since I’ve come to Japan. But since I’ve only been at this school since September, I don’t know these kids quite as well as some of the other classes I’ve seen graduate, and in that since it’s not as much as a big deal.

On the other hand, since I’ve only been at this school since September, I was much more of a novelty to these kids than I was to the kids back in Ajimu. And in that sense I got a lot more attention, and spent a lot of time with this year’s 9th grade class, and got a lot of really touching farewell notes from a lot of them. I was sorry to see them go, as I’m always sorry to see the 9th grade students go. But I’m also used to it by now.

The thing that really scares me is that back in Ajimu, the class graduating Ajimu high school now (again, reference Mike’s blog), started out as my 9th grade students when I first arrived.

In spite of the fact that I’ll soon be 27, I often think of myself as still a college student, or just fresh out of college. Perhaps that’s partly because living in Japan, the past four years have seemed like a time warp, and not real time passing. But if there was ever a slap in the face that those years are long past, it is the fact that my former junior high school students are now college freshmen.