Interesting Translation, short version

If you're in a hurry scroll to the end of this entry. I went off on a tanget. How unlike me.

I find that people I know here tend to view the world as Japan and Gaikoku. (Gaikoku means "foreign country") Tony Blair is thus the Vice President of Gaikoku. Of course every society distiguishes betweem themselves and outsiders, and tends to lump other people and places together. For example, Americans tend to view sub-saharan africa as just one big messed up country.

But I think Japan takes it to an extreme. There is just the Japanese Way and The Gaikoku Way.

So one of my cool students came back from Czechoslovakia and gave me a great souvenir: two cans of czech beer: the original Budweiser and Pilsner Urquel (sp?).

Another person in the class asked me"Do they taste good?"
and I said "Oh yeah! Very good. Famous too. Not everyone likes, but I do."
She waved her hand. "I don't like "gaikoku" beer. It's weak."

So there you have it. All the kinds of beer from Guiness, to Weissbier, Trappist fruit beer, down to Corona (ech!) are Gaikoku Beer, and weak.

Not to mention that it overlooks the popular fallacy here that Japanese beer is robust and ful bodied and so on. I like Japanese beer but on the scale of world beer flavor, it falls toward the "thin and light" side. It's much closer to Coors than it is to bass pale Ale.

Another student went to Switzerland. The swiss you see are like the Japanese because they "both make small things." Americans make big things and broccoli. In Switzerland, she got desert somewhere and it didnt cme with coffee. I don't know if the Swiss drink coffee after dinner or not, I suspect they do but she just didn't get any... But here reaction:

"On my vacation, I didnt get coffee with dessert. We Japanese always have coffee for dessert. Foreigners dont drink coffee for dessert. ONLY IN JAPAN!" (Perhaps the sweetest words to a Japanese' ears.)

She has travelled to a lot of countries by the way, mostly Europe of course because it's better.

Somehow this brings me to the reason I started to write this entry. Japan's tendency to focus on itself while overlooking gaikoku. A team of US researches checked all over the world to find good methods of teaching match to grade schoolers. One thing they found that Japanese texts (now discontinued and watered down by the way) were very good and provided lots of good examples and practice for American learners. So a lot of these books have been translated and are starting to be used in the US.

Good job Japan. I agree that US schools could be more rigorous, especially at the lower levels. Japanese grade schools also have a good reputatation. And perhaps to shed a positive light on this without rewriting the entire news article I'd like to point out a few things:

- The education system had the sense to realize thier shortcomings
- They were willing to learn from and adopt practices from other counries
- The said book was released in 1999 and became a bestseller.
- One of the guys who's in charge of the program was a Japanese expert who works full time at a university in Chicago. (Universities here are notorious for not hiring foreigners, not giving them full time positions and firing them after 3 years. After all, they can return back to gaikoku and get a job easily. Too bad if they have family or connections in Japan. There are more foreign professors at a single US university than in all of Japan...)
- This expert pointed out that these books are no longer in use in japan and have been watered down for the new curriculum.

Of course Japan should be proud of it's success in this field. It's just the way people get so self satisfied about it. (One of my students was shocked that a local dance festival isn't famous in the US. Heck, it's not even famous in some parts of Japan...)

But I digress.

Anyhew...

The title of the US book:
"The Teaching Gap: Best Ideas from the World's Teachers for Improving Education in the Classroom."

Japanese Title
"Nihon no Sansu Sugaku Kyoiku ni Manabe"
or
"Let's Learn from the Japanese Way of Math Education"

what happens is these success stories enter the popular mythology and become "We have the best math in the world and the rest of the world loves our math." Once these things take hold they refuse to die. The gov't could ban math and people would still talk about it for 30 more years.

[ info from Oct 6, 2006 Yomiuri Shimbun ]