Cross-cultural communication （76）　

76) Developing Global Human Resources
In the morning edition of the Nikkei newspaper on September 17th 2017, there was an interview with Nissan director Toshiyuki Shiga. The title was “Developing Global Human Resources”. In that article, there was a part that made a lot of sense to me when I thought back to my own student days. That was the statement “In Japan, apart from the sciences, there was a culture of boasting about things you didn't study at university”.

Mr. Shiga says that this is true apart from the sciences, but even in medical school (which is technically a science), it is not uncommon for doctors who have risen to the rank of professor to boast, “I was so into rugby when I was a student that I hardly ever attended lectures.” Perhaps this is something that the person in question is proud of because he worked hard as a doctor after graduating and rose to their current position, but I feel that it is strange for him to be talking about this with a sense of pride to young doctors. I think this kind of atmosphere is connected to the neglect of university education in Japan.

It's true that medical education at Japanese universities in the 1970s was not very efficient, and the teachers were probably too busy, but they were not enthusiastic or well-prepared. At a time like that, when I was frustrated with a lecture, I would go back and read the relevant section in Harrison's Textbook of Internal Medicine, the best textbook in the US at the time, and I would understand that the lecture had lacked that part, and it would make me feel better. Even bad lectures have their own value. But you have to listen to the lecture to understand it.

One of my favorite books from my student days was Hiroyuki Itsuki's “Seishun no Mon or The Gate of Youth”. The main character, Shinsuke Ibuki, leaves his hometown of Chikuho in Kyushu to go to Tokyo and enrolls at Waseda University, but he spends all his time working part-time and training for boxing matches, and in the end he barely attends any of the lectures at Waseda. However, after Shinsuke leaves Waseda and encounters various incidents, he sets off on a global adventure. For more on this, Hiroyuki Itsuki has resumed writing a sequel to “Seishun no Mon” in 2016, so if you're interested, please read it. It is also possible that “Seishun no Mon” created a trend of neglecting university education in the Showa period; a trend that said that society was a university even if you didn't study at university.

There is another reason for the disregard for university education, or to put it more simply, there is a clear reason why Japanese university students are so easy to skip classes. That is, the majority of Japanese university students have their tuition fees paid by their parents. I can't say for sure, as I myself was in the same situation, but it is almost certainly true. The reason I can say this with such certainty is from my experience in the United States, where university tuition fees are much higher than in Japan. When I was a resident doctor in New York for three years in the early 1980s, I asked my American colleagues about university tuition fees, and found that, in contrast to Japan, most of them had become working adults and prepared the funds themselves (in the United States, you have to graduate from a general university before you can enter medical school), or found scholarships, and were not relying on their parents. Of course, they would never skip a class at medical school. I think that if you were to start attending a language school or something like that after becoming an adult, you wouldn't easily skip classes if you were paying for them yourself. After all, you can't achieve anything without paying for it yourself.

In June 2018, I read “Murakami-san no Tokoro” (Murakami-san's Place) by Haruki Murakami, published by Shincho publishing company. This is a collection of questions from readers about Haruki Murakami and his answers. One of the questions was from a female lecturer at a women's college, asking what she should do about the students in her class who were chatting, putting on makeup, eating and drinking, and not concentrating on the lecture. Haruki answered with an episode from when he was teaching at a university in America. One time, at the end of a lecture, he gave the students an assignment, saying “Please read this book by next week.” One student raised his hand and said, “Mr. Murakami, we're paying a high tuition to study here. Please give us more assignments.” and Haruki himself thought it was amazing.
To all readers who are peers or seniors, if you are asked about university education by young people, please talk about the positive aspects of university education. Even if you think you did a right thing, please don't boast about your own “skipping” experiences.

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