What happens inside a Japanese kindergarten?

When a 5-year-old boy slapped her in the face, the 24-year-old Japanese teacher simply said, “Oh, you really hurt me.” She did not scold or punish the student, she simply rubbed her cheek, grimaced in pain, and continued her lesson as if nothing had happened…

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RD Muth - an English teacher from Hawaii (USA) moved to Japan to teach at a kindergarten and was shocked by the behavior of the young Japanese female teacher in the same class. RD Muth shared his experiences in an article in Metropolis magazine, here is an excerpt from this article. Readers can draw lessons from Japan's preschool education.

“When I walked into a Japanese kindergarten on my first day as an English teacher, I had to fight the urge to run away like a loser. It was as if I had stepped into a huge bird cage at a zoo.

Everywhere I looked, children were screaming and clawing at each other, jumping off plastic slides and hanging upside down from basketball hoops. It was terrifying. And the one brave enough to face the “battlefront” was a 24-year-old Japanese teacher, slim as a dancer, with pigtails and an apron.

Japanese kindergarten children in PE class. Photo: Japantimes

“Please sit down,” she repeated to each child, in the same soft, barely audible voice. It was like trying to catch a flock of wild geese with a butterfly net. I think what she really needed was a tranquilizer gun.

It was not what I had imagined. Before coming to Japan, I had imagined that my English teacher would be a middle-aged woman. My students would be well-behaved, obedient, and respectful to their English teacher.

But as I discovered in the months that followed, the truth was different. Kindergarten teachers in Japan are not authority figures to whom children obey. During my first week as an English teacher in a Japanese kindergarten, I had erasers thrown at my head, chalk dust blown into my eyes, and my bag thrown out of a second-story window.

Japanese kindergarten children in outdoor activities. (Photo: Japantimes)

“Japanese kids are monsters,” I lamented to my English teacher friends. “Haven’t their parents ever heard of time outs? Or don’t they set consistent rules for their kids?”

As an American, I grew up with the idea that a “good mother” or a “good teacher” is someone who sets strong boundaries with consequences. And I assumed these standards were the same all over the world.

But in Japan, rules are less important than fostering the development of friendships between children and teachers. There is a theory that if children have a close relationship with their teachers, they will not misbehave because they are afraid of disappointing the teacher.

As authors Roger J Davies and Osamu Ikeno point out in their book “The Japanese Mind,” a “good parent” will do everything possible to “avoid creating any mental distance with their children,” even if that means giving in to their demands. As my Japanese teacher did in the same class, she did not react when five-year-old Kenshiro slapped her in the face.

“Oh, you really hurt me,” was all she said. She didn’t scold, punish, or call a parent-teacher conference. She simply rubbed her cheek, grimaced in pain, and continued her lesson as if nothing had happened.

But it was clear that this non-reaction was part of a larger plan. By drawing attention to the pain the boy was causing himself, the teacher hoped to shape Kenshiro into a good team player, a sensitive soul who could deeply feel the emotions of those around him.

According to the author of “The Japanese Mind,” this isn’t just limited to feelings toward family, friends, or goldfish—it even applies to the feelings of houseplants or old furniture, which is something I learned when I caught little Kenshiro trying to knock over a classroom bookshelf.

“Kenshiro!” I shouted, for the third time that morning. “Don't do it!” The boy stared at the floor, his face expressionless.

“You hurt the bookshelf,” the Japanese teacher said gently, bending down to the boy’s eye level. She gently touched the spot where Kenshiro had hit it with the hula hoop a few minutes earlier. “The bookshelf is crying.”

I stared at her incredulously. Did she really think this strange move would work? If the kid didn't care that he was about to hurt his teacher's feelings, he certainly wouldn't care about the hypothetical feelings of an inanimate object.

But then something truly amazing happened. Kenshiro stared at the bookshelf in embarrassment and mumbled, “Sorry.”

According to Dantri