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33 learning to roudou
Similar to conditions that Willis (1977) recorded in England, there are two exit criteria which junior-high school students in Japan face, and that play into their desire to monitor their own behavior in schools. Those students who are preparing for university entrance must work toward the examination, and also be aware that their general behavior is being monitored and recorded by their teachers on reports that they will never see, but will be made available to high-schools and colleges. For these students demeanor and performance requirements are quite severe.
Other students who are not preparing for selection into universities have less of a need to conform to the codes of correct behavior, and are freer to explore work-place style behaviors that may include a necessary show of toughness1. They are, in Willis’s terms, “learning to labor.” In Higashi-kujo, where there is a higher percentage of day labor (hiyatoi roudou), and where the daily tussle for work requires the maintenance of a physical presence among one’s fellows, toughness is just a part of the résumé.
1The social and economic disparity between the lifestyle made possible by salaried employment in a large Japanese company or in government service after graduation from a university, and those of other careers, from agriculture and small-scale manufacturing to retail trades creates a divide that is perhaps the greatest single social threshold in Japan. For working-class families to have one their children cross this divide and be employed in a large corporation or government ministry marks a profound moment in the family’s history. The growth of the large stock-holding (kabushiki) corporations in the last fifty years in Japan has brought many families to this moment, but only a token few resident Koreans.
