Last week, we continued to discuss how the provision of education appears to have been watered down over time especially after the reform wave hit the public sector. We highlighted how the spectrum of learning has been steadily narrowed down by hazily rationalised changes to set curricula and breadth of assessments. A cursory analysis of the content of student exam papers over the past five decades churns up some interesting thought provokers. We then moved focus to the administration of education by focusing on how rules used to be sacrosanct in the not-too-distant past. They are now negotiable at best and irrelevant at worst. Here, we take this discussion further using the “then and now” framework again.
Pursuing a Master’s Degree in Tokyo
Readers will recall that in earlier articles (FT 1/10/22, 2/12/23, 9/12/23), I passingly covered some parts of my stay in Japan as a Monbusho Scholar from 1987 to 1991.
I was to return to Tokyo in 1994 for another year as a Japan Foundation Fellow. What I want to focus on here is the content of the curriculum that I had to complete and the manner in which the whole program was administered.
While completing my Diploma in Japanese Studies at the Osaka University of Foreign Studies, I returned to Fiji against passionate family advice in late September 1987.
Some of the interesting aspects of that trip amid a charged-up coup environment are covered in my article (FT 1/10/22).
The point is that when I finally reported at Sophia University to register for my MA, I was two weeks late.
My short introductory saga began with a bang as after painstakingly navigating my way from Yotsuya Station to Yotsuya Campus and then to the university gates at Ichigaya Campus with a cumbersome brown suitcase that had obviously seen the better part of its life, I truly looked like a precursor to the homeless hermits who were to dot parts of Tokyo by 1994.
I noted during my last trip in 2019 that they are now an integral part of that great city.
Anyway, this bedraggled specimen from Fiji must have looked like a truly alien novelty to the security guards who greeted him with thinly hidden looks of disbelief.
After I showed two of them my credentials with the name of my contact at the university, a stressed-looking Professor Susumu Nagara, rushed over from the main building and greeted me with, “But, you see”.
I was to later learn that was the favourite phrase of this kind gentleman who welcomed me into his home in Inage Kaigan (Chiba) without any apparent second thoughts.
He hustled me with my awkward luggage to his office. He disappeared for a while before reappearing and steering me, minus my trunk, to the “inner sanctum” where I met Professor Robert Ballon who would later become my mentor.
I explained that I had just arrived from coup-torn Fiji and that seemed to explain everything as the registration process rolled out with no hiccups.
That evening, Professor Nagara and I travelled by train from Ichigaya Station to Inage Kaigan before taking a 25-minute walk to his condo.
This walk was to become much shorter without my by-now embarrassingly obvious trunk.
When we returned to campus the next morning, I was told that the all-important Comparative Culture seminar class was on that very evening from 6-9pm.
In class, I felt like a headless chook as some 30 students sat around an egg-shaped table with three professors at its head.
There was no lecture, no lecture slides, and no blank stares. Let me explain how this class was run.
The focus of this particular course was to enlighten students on the peculiarities and finer points of using the anthropological lens when attempting to make sense of behaviours and practices across cultures.
We covered history, the arts, economics, and especially cross-cultural research.
A book was assigned for every week of the semester.
Some of the books we covered included: The Anthropological Lens (James Peacock), Civilisation and Capitalism 15th-18th Century (Fernand Braudel), Outline of a Theory of Practice (Pierre Bourdieu), A History of Gold and Money 1450-1920 (Pierre Vilar), Kaisha: The Japanese Corporation (James Abegglen & George Stalk Jr.), etc.
Students were expected to read the book assigned for the week, write and submit a brief report on it, and be ready to discuss it during the weekly seminar sessions.
Nobody was allowed to even let out a squeak about the volume of reading involved.
We simply read in the library, on the trains, in bed, etc.
There were no options.
After all, we were part of an elite who had come through our own education systems and risen to qualify for graduate studies.
That was supposed to mean something and the whole system with its expectations was tuned to take this to higher levels.
The debates and discussions that followed left in me an unrequited hankering for a different type/level of intellectual stimulation that persists today.
This might be one reason why I cannot sleep without reading.
This might also explain partly why I write these columns regularly.
Anyway, aside from the Comparative Culture course we also took two other courses to make the load for each semester.
Those courses also had prescribed readings like Japan’s Options for the 1980s (Radha Sinha), Japanese Electronics Technology: Enterprise and Innovation (Gene Gregory), MITI (Chalmers Johnson), etc.
There were reports to write, seminars to present in class and the whole work.
And we simply dug in and got the job done. In addition to this, we eagerly attended any and every seminar or event organised at our university.
There are two that I wish to highlight here.
Japan followers will recall that after Professor Ezra Vogel (1979) published his book: Japan as No.1: Lessons for America, there was heightened interest around the world in the “Japanese Economic Miracle”.
Researchers pointed to a unique culture and Confucian work ethic (Ruth Benedict; Jansen, Jansen & Rozman), inter-connected banks, trading companies and industrialists forming conglomerates called “keiretsu” (Kenichi Miyashita & David Russel), the Japanese education system (Shuji Hayashi), the Japanese manufacturing system (Nick Oliver & Barry Wilkinson), total quality management (Edwards Demming), Japanese industrial policy (Chalmers Johnson), etc.
I remember the excitement at Sophia University in 1989 when Professor Chalmers Johnson came from the University of California (Berkeley) to relaunch his internationally acclaimed and deeply respected book: MITI and the Japanese Miracle.
After a highly informative and provocative presentation, Professor Saadollah Ghaussy introduced me to the visiting luminary as a potential PhD candidate as we mingled after his presentation.
We exchanged business cards with a few words, and he moved on among the attendees.
I was walking on cloud nine and can’t remember much of what followed.
Another renowned academic I had the privilege of liaising with at Sophia University was Professor Sir Hans Singer of the University of Sussex.
Little did I know at that time that in 1933, Joseph Schumpeter (theory of “creative destruction”) convinced John Maynard Keynes (father of Keynesian Economics) of Cambridge University to accept a young Hans Singer as one of his first PhD candidates; Singer received his doctorate from Cambridge in 1936.
I was his translator, bag boy, and companion during his stint at Sophia University.
I believe Professors Vijay Naidu, Wadan Narsey, and Steven Ratuva will have known this luminary well during their days at the University of Sussex.
The point I am trying to make here is that these were internationally renowned intellectual giants, and we were in absolute awe of them.
We were eager to imbibe whatever knowledge and guidance came from them.
We also did not even think about negotiating the requirements – be it deadlines, content, etc – placed before us for getting that graduate degree. I will take this further next week.
- DR SUBHASH APPANNA is a senior USP academic who has been writing regularly on issues of historical and national significance. The views expressed here are his alone and not necessarily shared by this newspaper or his employers subhash.appana@usp.ac.fj