Japanese Lessons: A Year in a Japanese School Through the Eyes of an American Anthropologist and Her Children

Gail R. Benjamin reaches beyond predictable images of authoritarian Japanese educators and automaton schoolchildren to show the advantages and disadvantages of a system remarkably different from the American one...--The New York Times Book Review Americans regard the Japanese educational system and the lives of Japanese children with a mixture of awe and indignance. We respect a system that produces higher literacy rates and superior math skills, but we reject the excesses of a system that leaves children with little free time and few outlets for creativity and self-expression. In Japanese Lessons, Gail R. Benjamin recounts her experiences as a American parent with two children in a Japanese elementary school. An anthropologist, Benjamin successfully weds the roles of observer and parent, illuminating the strengths of the Japanese system and suggesting ways in which Americans might learn from it. With an anthropologist's keen eye, Benjamin takes us through a full year in a Japanese public elementary school, bringing us into the classroom with its comforting structure, lively participation, varied teaching styles, and non-authoritarian teachers. We follow the children on class trips and Sports Days and through the rigors of summer vacation homework. We share the experiences of her young son and daughter as they react to Japanese schools, friends, and teachers. Through Benjamin we learn what it means to be a mother in Japan--how minute details, such as the way mothers prepare lunches for children, reflect cultural understandings of family and education. Table of Contents Acknowledgments 1. Getting Started 2. Why Study Japanese Education? 3. Day-to-Day Routines 4. Together at School, Together in Life 5. A Working Vacation and Special Events 6. The Three R's, Japanese Style 7. The Rest of the Day 8. Nagging, Preaching, and Discussions 9. Enlisting Mothers' Efforts 10. Education in Japanese Society 11. Themes and Suggestions 12. Sayonara Appendix. Reading and Writing in Japanese References Index

About the Author :
Gail R. Benjamin is Lecturer in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Pittsburgh and has taught at Saitama University and Tsukuba University in Japan. [Author Bio]

Review :
"A useful and engaging history of women in the British intelligence service during World War I. The book is an important contribution to the history of British intelligence and sheds light on the unglamorous reality of a highly romanticized aspect of women's work." -"American Historical Review", "How did women's work contribute to the propagation of war, and impact their own changing relation to the nation-state? How did women themselves, their contemporaries and popular culture represent their war work in gendered terms? Tammy Proctor addresses these significant questions in her intriguing study of women spies. As Proctor shows, women's substantial work for the developing British intelligence service belied the figure of the treacherous and seductive woman spy." -Angela Woollacott, author of "On Her Their Lives Depend: Munitions Workers in the Great War" "In "Female Intelligence", Tammy Proctor attempts to rescue female spies from cliches that classed them as either sexual predators or martyred virgins, manipulators or dupes, heartless vamps or emotional basket cases." -"New Yorker", "Retells forgotten stories and unearths new evidence of intrepid female field agents. . . . Proctor's archival discoveries hint at countless small acts of audacity and defiance. . . . Thanks to books like this one, the history of female espionage--from Aphra Behn to Elizabeth Van Lew to Lotus Blossum to Stella Rimington--is slowly being filled out." -"London Review of Books", "This engaging and intelligent study of women in espionage adds to our understanding of the experience of women during the First World War and of the legacy of their work, both mythic and real. Proctor carefully explores why the image of the female "spy seductress"--notably the iconic Mata Hari--has endured and uncovers the largely unknown history of this pivotal generation of women intelligence workers." -Susan R. Grayzel, author of "Women's Identities At War: Gender, Motherhood, and Politics in Britain and France during the First World War"