Tokyo: Red Carpets, Jetlag, and Beautiful Murders

The crowd is going wild. The air – filled with waving rectangles of red, white and blue, patterned in American, New Zealand, Taiwanese and British ways. The walls – adorned with other, more exotic and colorful flags – the flags of the various colleges of the day’s celebrities. The ground – occupied by two empires of students separated by a river of red – a real, real red carpet. The screen proudly proclaims “Japan Tour” – and now! – now the names and photos of the first group of professors float onto it. The tutors step onto the carpet, cheered on by the crowd. And after a while – Ewa Bigaj, Pembroke College, Oxford. She walks onto the carpet with two other student-celebrities. The Technos students closest to the carpet wave and grab her by the hands. She is handed a slender rose, and her photo is on a big, big screen, probably for the only time in her life.

This is how we were welcomed to Japan Tour. I was told by the students who came to Technos last year that there was a red carpet and a large screen involved – but nothing could have prepared me for this hour of stardom.

After the welcome ceremony, we were treated to an all-you-can-eat buffet of Japanese delicacies. Over lunch, conversations with the students and obligatory photo shots ensued.

One particular exchange repeated itself over and over throughout my visit.

Technos student: “What’s your major?”

Me: “Math and philosophy.”

“Oh my God! Math? Really? I’ve always hated math! And how long is your course?”

“Four years.”

“Four years of math?! How could you do this to yourself?!”

If I was less predisposed to try and find something interesting in everything under the sun, though, I probably would have exclaimed much the same upon hearing the majors of my Japanese interlocutors. Hotels and Hospitality, Tourism, Civil Aviation – though learning how to make different cocktails sounded like fun, I couldn’t imagine wanting to do this for two or three years – let alone saying, with perfect honesty, that it is one’s greatest dream to work as an airport clerk. But then they couldn’t imagine wanting to be a professor.

There was something slightly Huxleyesque about all these students so happy to do jobs which in the West would not be considered especially attractive, but on the whole I think it was more impressive than frightening. Japanese employees did seem to always do their jobs with an honest smile, and I think (tentatively) that their choices to do their particular jobs were no less their own than my choice to study math and philosophy.

The attraction for that evening was a visit to the kabuki theater. And an attraction indeed it was. The audio guide we were given (which, apart from a translation of most dialogues, gave an informative commentary to the plays) told us that kabuki is sometimes called “moving ukiyo-e” (woodblock prints) – and for an enthusiast of ukiyo-e like me, this meant internally squealing in excitement for half of the play. For the half that I didn’t nearly sleep through, I hurry to add... We were severely jetlagged, the whole group of visiting students and professors, and there comes a point when sleep is much more attractive than beauty...

Kabuki started out in the seventeenth century as a collection of dances performed by a Shinto priestess’s troupe of female dancers. The subsequent kabuki shows were deemed inappropriate and vulgar, and so in 1629 women were banned from the practice. And so originated kabuki as we know it today, with its onnagata – male actors specializing in female roles. But why are female roles still performed by men, even today? The audio guide claimed that women would not be able to play female roles the way onnagata do – a kabuki female cannot be too natural, and besides, the roles often require extremely heavy costumes. Whether this sounds convincing or not, the female-mimicking abilities of the onnagata we saw that day were highly impressive. I found myself thinking “what a beautiful woman!” an embarrassing number of times, and I saw nothing “unnatural” in the onnagata’s acting. I don’t know how they do it, but the audio guide also informed us that young boys could be played by old men in kabuki and it would look perfectly natural...

The series of plays we went to lasted a total of five hours (now you can forgive us our sleepiness, I think) – the first one was about a woman who had left her husband for his brother, and after a year ended up hiding from a snowstorm inside an abandoned hut – only to find the husband-brother seeking shelter in the very same hut. The storm raged outside with a flurry of delicate snowflakes harmonizing with the white make-up of the actors, and the scenes float in front of our eyes with the gracefulness of a winter sketch.

The repentant couple kneels in front of the husband, begging for forgiveness. They yell at him and at each other, he forgives them, blames them, blames himself, wants to kill them, wants to kill himself. The characters are a bit insane, their rapid changes of mind are a little unbelievable, but their gestures and mimicry are utterly sincere. Kabuki, we are assured by the audio guide, is all about the individual actor, his story and his facial expressions. Which are always beautiful, even when they are bizarre.

And when it comes to bizarreness, the second play far surpasses the first. The protagonist chases after his father-in-law with a sword – and he chases, and he chases, and he chases, and as his victim runs and fights back, he tries and tries to stab him. But, as ever, kabuki is beautiful, even in its dark insanity. The fight is not a fight, but a dance – the sword never touches its opponent, hands hit without hitting – and yet hit without any doubt, in the most hitting way possible. Every single movement of the figures, even as seen from under drooping eyelids, emanates fear for one’s life on the one side, and on uncontrollable anger instilled by years of injustice the other.

After long, exquisitely long minutes, the body of the father-in-law is thrown into the lake – it is obviously thrown in, though it walks into the water – which opens up for it, revealing stairs – on its own.

The last play is sheer perfection. Not in the storyline – a man kills his lover’s father, then when she learns the truth he kills her – but in the movement of the actors. It is more a dance than a play – a slow, elegant dance. I had never seen anything like it, and am at a loss for comparisons.

But throughout our evening at the kabuki theater, a comparison sprung to mind every minute. The theater was not as alien as I had expected it to be – the storylines, though bizarre, were not dissimilar to the ones I had seen in Western plays. Love and death and even the more traditionally Japanese honor are intercultural, human themes. The artistry of the scenes and the emphasis on the actor were, up to a point, uniquely Japanese elements – and ones that the West could learn from! But only up to a point. Is kabuki theater unique? Certainly. Is it, with a little help from an audio guide, comprehensible and beautiful to Westerners? Without doubt.

Nightmares Revisited: On Polish Education

This is going to be singularly unpatriotic. Quite awful of me, really, beating the hell out of Poland's educational system on an English-language blog. But throughout the whole of this year, my brother would tell me things about his school that made me really want to hit someone, and so I couldn't stand it any longer and decided this beating would have to take place, even against a defenceless enemy.

When I told a friend that we decided Chris would be best off being homeschooled, he replied in a voice full of concern “Are you sure about this? You know, there’s risks attached”.

The thing that would have risks attached would be keeping him in Polish school any longer. The risk of his voice trailing away into inaudibility, of his smiles hardening into irony, of “learning” becoming a synonym for “torture”. How can anyone believe homeschooling could have a more negative impact on social skills than Polish school? If I had been homeschooled, would I be any shyer than I am, would starting a conversation terrify me more than it already does? Or had my social inability perhaps been caused, at least in part, by collections of kids and teachers who mocked any attempt at uniqueness?

If there’s any non-genetic reason for my brother’s being more outgoing than I am, it’s the fact that he went to a private school, with a maximum of eight students per class. When I visited him there, I was astounded that he had absolutely no qualms about asking teachers questions. “But aren’t you afraid?” I would ask, and he would look at me with uncomprehending eyes and answer “Why would I be?” On entering middle school, he was not afraid either – yet. He would raise his hand during history lessons, sharing fascinating facts – for the first two months or so, at which point he realised that the teacher never once showed any appreciation of this, though she readily rewarded with “pluses” students who raised their hands to summarize the previous lesson or read a page in the textbook... Woe on you if you don’t fit in the tight box we’ve prepared for you...

About those boxes... There’s much talk these days of tolerance, of combating discrimination and that sort of thing. But – I say – intolerance will never be defeated. Not as long as the average human is anything like what he’s like today, anyway. Sure, you can have black and gay people star in leading roles in films, and yes, it will make the average TV-viewer think better of them. But the most you can achieve that way is getting people to leave some boxes alone. Ah, he’s black, can’t touch him. But what if someone doesn’t fit in any box? Or rather, what if your box is too unique for the common man? Long as there won’t be any Beatle-loving, American-accented but Polish-born movie stars who wear chequered shirts and don’t believe in God or free will but smile much more often than is socially acceptable, kids will continue to make fun of other kids.

So, I ask – where’s the social danger of homeschooling? In having fewer, but much closer and realer friends? In having time to be with your family, who gives you infinitely more support than even the best of teachers? In segregating yourself from people who don’t appreciate you? In living in a pretend world? Damn it, I say – leave me alone, let me live in my “pretend” world. Oxford is such a world – why should it be any less real than the bleak reality of Polish middle school?

So much for the defence of homeschooling. I still owe you an attack on Polish school, though – for there are stupid kids everywhere, yet we didn’t consider homeschooling when living in Bristol.

When I describe the Polish education system to friends here in England, I hear my voice from a new perspective and somehow I find that what I’m saying is too incredible to be true. And yet Polish people on the whole cannot even imagine it being different.

The one thing that neither my Oxford friends nor I can ever understand is the practice of “oral answering”. What it means is that during each lesson, the teacher has a right to choose any student and ask him or her questions (while the student stands up, oftentimes in front of the whole class) about the past three lessons – and grade him or her on his or her answers. What – will someone ever explain this to me? – can the purpose of such a practice possibly be? To make your insides do somersaults at the start of each lesson? To teach you that what matters in life is ultimately luck (for no student ever prepares for each and every lesson)? And what claims to fairness can this practice have? How does asking one student one set of questions compare to asking another student another set on a different day?

Perhaps the idea is to teach you to work under stress. Great. Concentration camps probably taught people the same.

Oxford tutorials are stressful. But they serve a purpose – they make you think more clearly, teach you to defend your point of view, structure your argument clearly, etc. But the typical “oral answering”, consisting of questions about facts, not puzzles to think about, serve none of these purposes. And even the few that are a bit more sensible (e.g. physics “answering”, which tends to consist of solving problems on the board) differ from Oxford tutorials in that they are graded.

This brings me to another issue I have with the Polish system – students are graded on how they learn, not just on what they learn. You are expected to be systematic – learn from day to day, do your homework regularly, etc. But people are different. Some are organized, some aren’t, and I don’t think there’s a strict correlation between this and intellectual ability. From my point of view, if you learn what you need to learn in time for the exam, it shouldn’t matter whether you studied twenty minutes each day for the week leading up to the exam, or the whole night before it. But here, you have to opt for the twenty minutes per day.

And what of free time? In middle school in the US, right before going back to the nightmare of Polish education, after arriving home after the day’s lessons I’d play Pinball on the computer for an hour. Then I’d talk to my family for a long time, laze around, maybe play some games with my brother, go to the park and play tennis with Dad, go to a concert maybe. I’d spend perhaps an hour doing homework.

Now the Polish teacher will mock this with all the venom he can spit out, and cite my description as evidence of the awful state of American education. But – I believe with all my might – long hours spent talking with family over dinner, tennis, concerts, even Pinball are extremely important, in a way that memorizing definitions of biological terms never will be. Polish teachers think their school should be your life – but to what end? Do I remember any of the definitions I struggled hours and hours to learn? You improved your memory, they’ll say – but science is not about memory. I would have done better to read a book of my choice than to study for those pointless exams. And that’s what bothers me most about the amount of work you get in Polish school – you don’t even have time to learn other things you might have preferred to learn.

In Poland, you have to take all the courses there are. Even in high school, every student takes, apart from mathematics, Polish, and physical education, things like “knowledge about society”, "history of art”, and “preparation for defence” (yes, “preparation for defence”, or “military education” – sounds like we’re in communist Russia, doesn’t it? After two years of that subject I still haven’t a clue what it’s about...). The belief behind this is that there are things everyone needs to know. This myth is so widespread that when I moved to Bristol to do my A-levels, even otherwise perfectly sane and sensible friends from Poland asked me whether I was worried that if I only studied maths, physics and English, my “general education” would suffer. But what is the general education hidden in falling asleep in “preparation for defence” lessons or memorizing definitions of biological terms? Surely the free time I spent in England reading books, watching BBC documentaries, visiting museums and travelling contributed to my general education in an infinitely richer and more meaningful way...

Another contrast between the Polish and Western systems I’ve lately discovered is the fact that while in the West education seems to be geared towards success, in Poland it is geared towards failure. Let me explain. I’m a student at Oxford, allegedly a pretty good university. And yet – the horror! – all our lecture notes are available online, as is the syllabus, which tells us exactly what will be on the exams, and as are past papers from the last ten years, which make doing well on an exam, to Polish eyes, trivially easy. For a professor, master of your future, should have the divine power to throw whatever questions he fancies at you, laughing manically as you struggle to attempt them.

When I hear intelligent Polish friends worry whether they’ll pass their exams, I think something’s deeply wrong. Exams are for passing, not failing, my friend.

In the same way, Polish middle school teachers fail to praise. As if saying “good job” hurt. And it certainly hurts less than not hearing it said does – and much, much less than hearing the venomous comments teachers sometimes make in Poland (I’ve said this in another article in another place: when I first moved to the US, I was greeted with “How wonderful you joined us!”, whereas in Poland the greeting was “You’ll have so much work you’ll never catch up – the level of American education is so low”...).

Did I mention cheating on exams? If you’re expected to memorize ridiculous amounts of utterly unimportant facts, the temptation is just too strong... The students in my brother’s class, the most intelligent and resourceful in the school, cheat on almost every exam. The one time he followed in their lead, he was caught...

When faced with all these accusations, a teacher might say: your brother is lying. Or at least exaggerating. Even if I hadn’t gone through the same hell of Polish school and didn’t know exactly what my brother was talking about, I’d have a strong urge to punch the teacher in the face. Students. Are. To. Be. Trusted. Innocent until proven guilty. Praised before blamed. Appreciated.

I believe in education without stress. If you say a stressless school wouldn’t prepare you for the real world, I reply: we make the real world. If we have an educational system which teaches students not to trust anyone, to be eternally stressed out, cheat, memorize random facts thoughtlessly and despise people different from themselves, that’s what our real world will be like.

To sum up: my brother and I are wimps who are/were unable to survive in the completely sensible world of Polish school, a world of loving teachers and caring pupils who form one big, happy family. We require constant praise, ridiculous amounts of free time, we have no concern for the value of general education and no respect for teachers or students.

That’s the idea – now if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to a wimpy tutorial with a wimpy tutor who praises me, to prepare for a wimpy Oxford exam.

Stuck-on smiles

I chanced upon this text I wrote in Polish during the first few days of our stay in Bristol, when I had too much free time on my hands. As we're leaving Bristol in a week and the text isn't too bad, I thought it was appropriate to translate it and add a few ending sentences.

"This is a very important test," says the n-th lady with a wide smile I see that day. "But it’s nothing to worry about," she adds, seeing my not-too-enthusiastic expression. "Just try to do it as quickly and as carefully as possible," she smiles even more widely.

With a deep-set belief that there is some internal contradiction to her words, I start the test. It turns out that it’s an insult to my intelligence. Which makes the situation all the worse, since, deeply insulted, and strained by two hours of trying to sign up to a British school on top of that, the aforementioned intelligence decides to abandon me completely...

I press the “play” button on the computer screen for the third time. While I manage fairly well on the conventional, written questions, to which I’m used from Polish school, my thoughts are already miles away halfway through the problems that necessitate the use of headphones.

The test is disgustingly practical, and therefore presupposes knowledge of British reality. I’m supposed to click on the check which is filled out correctly – and no one gives a damn about a Pole that might not know what a British check looks like.

I’m being unfair. Oh yes, everyone gives much more than a damn about me. If it hadn’t been for the chemistry teacher that had been helping me out for the whole day, I would’ve been running from one part of the school to another not for two hours, but for five, and my frustration would’ve reached its heights after five, not ninety minutes.

Yes, the first hour-and-a-half was alright, and at times even pleasant. At each turn I was struck by how “American” the British are – smiles almost never leave their faces and kind words almost never leave their lips – words such as “That’s lovely!” and “How can I help you?”. A Pole finds a smile so wide for such trifling reasons difficult to believe, so he says loftily and sarcastically: “How fake!” . I reply that it’s just good manners. It’s hardly reasonable to accuse someone of “fakeness” when, for example, being angry, he doesn’t show his anger.

Besides, if I’m to be sincere (and that, as you can see, is a prime virtue for a Pole), I don’t care much whether the waitress that serves me is really happy or not. I only want her to smile at me and ask me if I have everything I want, because that’s part of her job. And sometimes the mask can become the face; I think that a waitress that smiles more often turns happier. During our first few days in England it felt as if everyone here took a deep liking to us personally. I find it hard to believe that a completely insincere smile could have caused such a feeling.

All this doesn’t alter the fact that after two hours of signing up to school my smile felt unskilfully stuck on and I would’ve liked everyone to just leave me alone, instead of constantly asking me if everything was alright. I was beginning to run short of synonyms for the word “yes”...

It seems that the turning point was somewhere in the office of the maths (not “math”, this is Britain, after all) teacher. I tried to persuade him that I’m really capable of finishing a two-year course of mathematics in a year. "But you won’t be able to attend all the courses, you don’t have enough room in your timetable ," he protests. He’s so persuasive that I begin to believe that the feat I am proposing is indeed impossible. Then I remember that I went to a mathematical school. Explaining this to him is no easy task. You can hardly blame a teacher for doubting a student from a foreign country – and a girl at that! – when she says that she’ll finish a two-year course ( a course that English students often have troubles with) in a year.

Eventually, I managed to persuade him. Nineteen exams in a year was a bit tough, but boy am I glad that I didn’t give up and attend first year courses like he wanted me to – trying not to fall asleep would have been much tougher.

As for the test on that first day of school, I never did find out my results and it seems it was not such an important exam after all.