Learning to Bow: Inside the Heart of Japan.  By Bruce Feiler. (1991).

Imagine this sight on your first day teaching at a new school:  Several dozen junior high school students are waiting by the side of the road near the school. As you drive past, they bow in unison and yell "Good Morning."   You ask about this, and are told that they are practicing their greetings. This is in case, after practicing daily greetings for at least five years, they had forgotten how to do it over the three-week summer break.

Welcome to school in Japan. 

Feiler spent a year – probably 1985 – working in Sano, Japan, teaching English and American culture to junior high school students.  This was part of an official effort to introduce Japanese students to other people and cultures, to  “internationalize” them. Six years later he published his memoir of the experience. 

This funny and affectionate book covers many of the things we’ve heard about the Japanese educational system, including: 

• The national curriculum, which means that all the students in the same grade in Japan are studying the same thing on the same day.
• The effort put into teaching Japanese children to put the group before their individual achievement and desires.
• The long hours of study Japanese children put in, during and after school, which help them place at the top of the international achievement tests.

It covers the good and the bad, too, including the bullying that is often ignored by adults, and the persecution of the burakumin, the people whose ancestors did “unclean” work such as tanning and leather-work.

Feiler also looked at everyday Japanese life: picking up girls, Japan’s nonconformists, and Japanese weddings.

There are a number of good books by Westerners in Japan. This is a new personal favorite, though, because it covers children and education, a major concern of every society, and the place where you really learn what a society values.

I’d also recommend:

• Mishima's sword : travels in search of a Samurai legend. By Christopher Ross.
• Shutting out the sun: How Japan created it’s own lost generation. By Michael Zielenziger
• Bar Flower: My Decadently Destructive Days and Nights as a Tokyo Nightclub Hostess. By Lea Jacobnson