How Japan raises its children

The Japanese Way of Parenting: And What It Taught Me About Raising (Mostly) Calm, Caring, Capable Kids, Lisa Katayama, Workman Publishing, £16.99

Can Japan help me live better? If you’ve been anywhere near social media, television or a bookshop in the past decade or so, your answer may well be ‘yes’. The 2010s brought us Marie Kondo, the Japanese ‘tidy-up’ guru. Her book The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up (2011) was a bestseller, spawning a Netflix series in which she helped various chaotic westerners sort out their cupboards and drawers, and, with it, heal their souls. Kondo and her publicists made much of her time spent serving as a Shintō shrine attendant. She would kneel to greet a house before she set to work on it. And she sought to instil in readers and viewers the idea, drawn from Shintō, that objects have spirits – and therefore a kind of dignity, even a personality. In this way, gratitude and proper treatment of possessions turned tidying up into a quasi-spiritual practice.

Joining Kondo on western shelves were books about ikigai: reasons for living. The modern Japanese idea, prominent since the 1960s, was quite modest: an awareness of the things that make life meaningful to a person. Across the 2010s in the West, this turned into a rather grand sense of finding a single driving purpose in life – essentially borrowing the Japanese word to describe the point of intersection between what you enjoy, what you’re good at, what the world needs, and what you can get paid for. It’s a decent way to think about career options. What it isn’t is a uniquely Japanese approach to living.

If ikigai and Kondo’s tidying up had something in common, it was that they fitted a pattern dating back centuries in the West: using vaguely exotic (often South Asian or East Asian) concepts and practices as a gloss on familiar western needs, aspirations and ideals. There is nothing mysteriously Japanese about throwing away rubbish, recycling unwanted items and putting things back on shelves or into drawers when you’ve finished using them. Ikigai, as we have come to know it, is not all that different to basic careers advice circulating in the West for decades. Shinrin-yoku – ‘forest-bathing’ – is equally unromantic in its origins: dreamt up in the 1980s by the Japanese government to persuade more people to visit Japan’s forests.

Across all these ideas and more besides, western media and the publishing industry have shown a tendency to select and distort Japanese ideas, in favour of individualistic takes on self-help. But if we really want to feel better, and if we’d like the sort of high-functioning, high-trust society that impresses so many western visitors to Japan, then it is worth taking a closer look at what actually makes the country tick.

A new book by Lisa Katayama helps us to do just that. Born in Japan but now living in Northern California, Katayama wrote The Japanese Way of Parenting as a means of documenting her experiments offering her two daughters a Japanese-style upbringing. The book is a reminder that some of the successful aspects of Japanese society (there are failures, too, of course) stem from bringing children up in a particular way.

For Katayama, the most important concept here is omotenashi. It’s usually associated with a standard of hospitality so high that nothing is too much trouble, and where service is provided selflessly. Katayama uses it more broadly, to mean ‘radically caring for everyone and everything around you’. It made me think of one of my favourite aphorisms, from the 17th-century swordsman Miyamoto Musashi: ‘think lightly of yourself, and deeply of the world’. (Miyamoto also anticipated Kondo by nearly four centuries: ‘Do not hoard unneeded possessions.’)

The attitude captured in Katayama’s version of omotenashi can be cultivated at any age. But in her book she explores the way that it is inculcated within Japanese family life and in early-years schooling. At a Japanese-run daycare centre in California, Katayama’s daughter is shown a range of practical ways to care radically for the people and things around her. She takes off her shoes to respect the space that she’s about to enter, she helps tidy her own classroom, and she learns a range of Japanese words and phrases that are central to omotenashi among children.

One of my favourites of these phrases – familiar from the time spent by my own child in Japanese daycare – is ‘kashite’. It basically means ‘please let me borrow it’, but it’s part of a ritual where the next step is for the other child to hand over the requested toy with the words ‘dōzo’ (here you are).

Kashite has the quality of an incantation, and children become frustrated when the magic fails. If the child currently playing with the car, doll, or bucket and spade doesn’t yet want to hand it over, the first child may keep repeating ‘kashite’ – ever more loudly and distinctly (ka! shee! te!) – until the matter is settled: either the toy is handed over, or an adult intervenes. The other word you often hear at this point is junban: ‘taking turns’. Any child who succeeds at all this can expect extravagant praise, powerfully reinforcing the message.

Years ago, the cliché in the West was that Japan is a conformist society, and that education serves that purpose – sometimes to the country’s detriment. There is a grain of truth here, in the sense that a public display of following rules and treating one another in a particular way has long been valued over and above whatever might go on in an individual’s heart or home.

Yet it isn’t the whole story. After the Second World War, one of the big social and philosophical challenges for Japan was how to retain the positive aspects of its old communitarianism while fostering the kind of individuality that critics regarded as lacking in the prewar era – responsible in part, they claimed, for allowing a repressive, militarised politics to take hold. You can find the results now in Japanese classrooms: children tidy and clean, serve one another lunch, and have class meetings not because their teachers are seeking to enslave them but because those classrooms are meant to belong to the students. They are being given a sense of having a stake in their school, and real agency in how it is run on a day-to-day basis.

This kind of education helps to produce citizens who are good at treating one another and their environment with respect – in public at least: witness the social media backlash earlier this summer from Japanese wives who asked why their husbands’ widely lauded efforts to clean up after themselves at World Cup matches did not translate into helping out at home. Some of the things that most impress western tourists about Japan – cleanliness, public trust and safety, functioning facilities like toilets and trains – owe much to people’s sense of seriousness and responsibility in how their actions affect others.

There are downsides. During a stint in Tokyo, Katayama experienced the intense pressure faced by parents. The threshold for children’s behaviour being considered meiwaku (annoying, troublesome) by those around them is low, and it usually falls to mothers to make sure their offspring don’t cause offence. Senior school is markedly less idyllic than nursery and primary school, thanks to high expectations and problems with bullying. And Japan’s social peace and affluent-looking public spaces are in part the product of a strong post-war economy. The strain of Japan’s current economic and demographic challenges may well, in time, eat away at some of this. Nor, of course, is western parenting either the same everywhere or straightforwardly worse than Japan’s.

Katayama is part of a rapidly expanding group of parents who are drawing on more than one cultural tradition in bringing up their children. She sees her Japanese inheritance as particularly helpful for instilling the habit of noticing others’ needs and seeking to meet them where reasonable and possible. From the American side of her life, she gets the nurturing of each child as an expressive individual. These two need not be in tension: the art of parenting, in Katayama’s case, consists of combining them as best she can.

Now that Marie Kondo has found a tidy home to be incompatible with having three children, and self-help fads are attracting scepticism, there is a case for shifting our attention to the social and structural factors that contribute to real flourishing. Japan may well, in the years to come, continue to provide food for thought here. For all that its social values have proven robust across three ‘lost decades’ of economic stagnation, the country’s rapidly declining population is forcing a rethink about how, and by whom, a healthy society is maintained.

A state under greater demographic and fiscal pressure may have to play a more limited and strategic role, while mutual aid within families steadily fades – the large, multi-generational family homes of the past are becoming more of a rarity. The emphasis instead may fall upon creating meaningful bonds between neighbours, and finding ways of interweaving what Japanese disaster-planning describes as jijo (self-help), kyōjo (mutual help within civil society) and kōjo (state help). The most important aspect here is how the state supports civil society to, in turn, support individuals.

There are examples of this in unlikely quarters. What forest-bathing lacks in historical or spiritual pedigree, it turns out to make up for in inspiration of an alternative kind. Statecraft may not sell books or make for compelling television. But ask some of the countless people who have benefited from Japan’s 60-plus government-sponsored and scientifically certified Forest Therapy Bases, and you’ll discover that sometimes it’s the unglamorous solutions that actually make the difference.