Information Center of the Consulate General's Office in Chicago hosts this highly selective Japanese Speech Contest every spring. Students of Japanese from elementary school age to adults are eligible to compete, if they are not Japanese nationals, do not use Japanese in their daily lives, and have only lived in Japan for less than two years. Second prize of the contest is the Osaka Sister City Award which allows the winner to travel to Osaka and stay with a family for one week.
This year on March 21st, Mr. Brandon Roberts was selected through his speech presentation to receive the Chicago Sister City Osaka Award. He is a student at the DePauw University.
Please enjoy Mr. Brandon Roberts's comment on winning the award as well as the English translation of his Japanese speech.
First of all, I would just like to thank the Japanese Consulate of Chicago and the Osaka City Chicago Branch Office for affording me this wonderful opportunity. I am truly grateful for everything they have done for me. When I was practicing for the speech contest, I never thought that I would win such an award as this one. Also, on the day of the speech contest I made several mistakes and because of that a wave of sadness came over me. However, when my name was called by Mr. Hatasa I was utterly shocked. As I walked to the stage at the front, I couldn’t believe that I had actually been chosen to receive such an honor like this exchange program. I was and still am so very thankful for this opportunity being afforded to me and I am anxiously looking forward to this summer.
I cannot express enough just how thankful I am to everyone who made this speech contest and this opportunity possible. To the people who put on this contest every year, on behalf of all the participants I thank you so much. Your hard work and dedication to enriching the lives of today’s Japanese students is commendable and admirable—your work is not going unappreciated. I would just like to thank my teachers and my friends who helped make this opportunity possible for me. Thank you so much for your support and encouragement!
A Life Decided By Exams
Brandon Roberts
Please close your eyes for a moment and picture your perceived image of a typical Japanese high school student. What sort of image did you see? Was it perhaps a diligent student with thick-glasses? Or, perhaps, your image was one of a student wearing one of those sailor suit uniforms, staring intently at a blackboard, hastily scribbling the items written upon it into their notebook? These are certainly the way that most people picture them to be from the way that the media and popular culture portray them. While I too once partook in the belief that these stereotypes were actualities, the image of a Japanese high school student that I see in my mind is drastically different. It was during my internship at Higashimurayama High School that I became cognizant that our popular stereotypes could not hold a candle to what high school students are really like in Japan and almost concurrently, many other realizations crashed over my like waves upon a shore—the most striking of which concerned the salient position that teachers had in the lives of their students. As a result of this experience and these realizations, my impressions and long-held thoughts regarding the Japanese school system itself and the role that teachers and students each play within this sheltered sphere of society changed as well.
It was just last summer that I participated in this internship at Higashimurayama High School in Tokyo. The position I occupied during this experience one was of an assistant to the teachers in the English language department during their daily lessons and tutoring sessions. Briefly stated, the students of Higashimurayama High School, and the school itself, were just normal—completely average. You may be wondering what exactly “normal” is and why I used such a subjective word. When I say this word, I mean normal by our own standards and stereotypes of a typical American high school student and school. The students were not all industriously completing their schoolwork and they were not merely robots being programmed by the school system to study and succeed. They were simply normal kids, behaving normally in regards to their schoolwork and their social lives. According to the Tokyo Metropolitan High School Entrance Examination Ranking List prepared for middle school students to aid them in their decision of a proper high school, on a scale from A to E where a school ranked with an A is considered to be an elite school and a school ranked with an E is considered to be lacking in its educational rigor, Higashimurayama was ranked as a C school. Thus, it was not just me—merely a foreigner in Japan adopting a foreign perspective to examine this school—who thought that this was just an average school, the educational division of the Tokyo metropolitan government held the same impression. However, for the Japanese who lived in the city of Higashimurayama, this was not the case.
It was said that Higashimurayama was a school for the “outcasts” of society. It was a school for kids who did not hold education in high esteem or for those who were labeled as troublemakers and delinquents. My host family oft asked me, “Why did you choose to come to that school? It would have been better for you to pick a better school than Higashimurayama, would it have not?” However, the reason I elected to work at Higashimurayama was merely a matter of prior connections to Higashimurayama rather than one of a well-informed decision. When I was a junior in high school, one of the English teachers at Higashimurayama contacted my high school asking for volunteers to write letters in English to their students. My Spanish teacher thought that it was a great idea and it was decided that we would start a pen pal program with Higashimurayama High School. It was upon this experience that my impressions of a Japanese high school student were founded. To me, it seemed as though these students wanted to learn English and wanted to practice writing and reading in a foreign language so earnestly that they wanted to participate in a letter exchange with native speakers of English. “What great students!” I thought to myself. However, the most shocking thing I realized during my internship was that it was not only the residents of Higashimurayama, but the students and teachers of Higashimurayama High School themselves who held the notion that the school was a gathering place for rejects and unengaged students. They all seemed to believe that this was a school that only attracted these types of students.
I was always presented with opportunities to engage in discourse with students and teachers and I took full advantage of them to satisfy my curiosity about this situation. One question I often asked to students was whether this high school was their fist preferenced school to attend—whether they had earnestly desired to attend this school from their earliest days—and the answer I always received from students was a rather blunt, “not as all.” Most of them said that they had performed poorly on the entrance exams and as a result, they somehow or another ended up at Higashimurayama High School. According to the students, they had simply messed up on one test and their entire lives were stripped away from them because they had been placed in a substandard school. When I went to verify whether this was truly the case with the teachers, they responded with a rather cold, “yes, that is usually how it happens.”
The teachers told me that because the students had been unable to obtain high marks on the entrance examinations for high school, they were forced to attend Higashimurayama. As a result of the students’ poor performance on the exams, the teachers were required to teach the students at an academic level well below the ability level of the students. The teachers were under the impression that the students could not perform well academically and the students in response to such teaching styles were utterly disengaged in their schoolwork. They saw no point in exerting themselves for a system that held no faith in their abilities and that essentially cast them aside. The students thought it easier to just give up and give in to the impressions that others held of them. The teachers, noting the students’ lack of initiative and drive in their studies, wondered why they should exert themselves to teach to this disengaged crowd when no one was being receptive to their lessons. In response to the teacher’s lack of effort in their lessons, the students felt no need to take their education seriously. Thus, an alarming cycle had been engendered. The students had no hope in the educational system and threw away their concern for their teachers, and in response the teachers became irresponsible and disregarded the need to educate and motivate their students. The students who had seemingly messed up on one exam had been thrown into a rapidly, downward-spiraling educational system and the teachers were doing nothing to upset the tragic fate of their students.
The image I once held of Higashimurayama High School students and the image I held of students all over Japan was utterly shattered by my experiences during my internship. Prior to my experience there, I had no real idea of what exactly the true purpose of a teacher really was, but after spending an entire summer as a teacher, I came to realize something. The job of a teacher extends well beyond just the instruction of a subject or skill. It is their responsibility to motivate their students and instruct them not only about the paths that they may traverse academically, but also the veritable plethora of other paths that they may traverse over the course of their lives. They need to equip their students with not only the tools to succeed in the world of academics, but with the tools to succeed in the world beyond the gates of Higashimurayama. The aforementioned downward spiral that today’s youths are cast into is not just a Japanese problem, but it is a problem the world over. It is a teacher’s duty to ameliorate this tragic cycle. If teachers were to take up this charge, then they might be able to show students a way out of this situation and, in this way, teachers, students, and the world at large could all move forward and progress together towards a newly illuminated future.
Related link: Brandon Roberts's Speech in Japanese