Bullying and Quality in Japanese Universities
My experience of Japanese universities is restricted to only 2, Tottori and Shimane, but by being in the system for 2 years I have got something of an insight into how the system works and what it achieves. A few comments are in order.
Bullying: As observed in various private communications, my reason for leaving my PhD was largely bullying by my supervisor. The bullying took a mostly classic, universal form: yelling, insulting, deriding students to other students (and in some instances, saying bad things about me to friends of the Delightful Miss E!), publicly humiliating students, isolating me, and trying to control my personal life. Not all of these had happened to me (yet), but were targeted at younger students in our lab and would inevitably have crept on to me. The uniquely Japanese element of the bullying was the use of a particularly degrading form of language, usually reserved for pets and small children, which is specifically intended to enforce the relative power differences between student and supervisor. Aside from this, however, the bullying was of the classic sort one observes in Australian university supervisors all the time (and of the sort which has been directed against me before in Australia). Some of my friends have asked me if the bullying was an integral part of Japanese University life, and I can honestly say I don't think it is. I checked my supervisor's behaviour against that of other teachers, and they behave very differently. They are kinder, they use different language, they don't intrude on their students' personal lives as much, and they are supportive in public rather than humiliating. They certainly don't adopt the cultural nuance which my supervisor took, described as "samurai manner". His bullying was not some kind of locally accpetable cultural manner, either - he had a reputation as a strange teacher, and he also has a reputation for aggressiveness and rudeness amongst the students. His behaviour in one seminar, in particular, embarrassed and discomfited the other teachers, so I think we can safely say his style was quite unique.
Like all bullies though he is at heart a weak and pathetic man, and I dealt with him accordingly. But day-in day-out preparing for confrontation is emotionally draining and creates a fair amount of tension, so I am glad to be rid of it. Particuarly when I was preparing to give an all-Japanese presentation at a two-bit conference in Tokyo - a conference I knew he had only organised for me after he discovered I was going on holiday to Australia, in order to force my early return - the pressure became way too much. My Japanese was sadly not up to the task, and I had no guidelines or information about the conference or the proper Japanese presentation style. It was a deliberate attempt to humiliate me in front of an audience of my "superiors", using the one method he knew was guaranteed to work - my language. He also was explicitly breaking an agreement we had for me to present in English this year and Japanese next. Obviously one cannot take on this kind of duplicity and bloody-mindedness for too long without wilting. But aside from the particular language-related elements, none of it seemed to be specific to his cultural origins. Anyone who has had as much bad luck with academic supervisors as I have knows that bullying of this sort is hardly specific to the Japanese.
However, there is a specific element of Japanese life which makes this harder to deal with. The university uses the "sensei system" for providing education to PhDs and 4th year students, and it is the backbone of their graduate system. It is set up to give almost complete power and control to the professors, and makes bullying very easy to do. Under the sensei system, one presents seminars to ones supervisor (sensei) every week as a form of education, and the sensei has near complete control over ones educational path and the content of ones studies. If ones sensei is a bully, or incompetent, or both, ones study will suffer. The sensei system not only grants the teacher great power, though - it is supported by the entire University system, and external means of assessment are minimal, as are external means of support or redress. Even yesterday, the day I left Matsue, I was receiving phone calls from the International Student Office pressuring me to change the contents of my resignation letter, in which I wrote I had "irreconcilable differences with my supervisor". Nobody at any level wants to interfere with the rights, authority or power of the supervisors, and they reign unimpeded over their students. In the case of some of my friends this has been fine, since their teachers are skilled mathematicians and good teachers. But in my case, and that of my other laboratory members...
Quality: I did not know this when I came to Matsue, but Shimane University is ranked second lowest in all of Japan's universities. I moved from a Masters Degree at the world's 31st ranked university to a PhD outside of the top 1000. Not such a good decision! The library is very small with many of its specialist books set aside for exclusive use in particular laboratories, and although there is a lot of money for equipment at one of the specialist labs here (geology), most of the normal facilities are lacking. There is no community amongst teachers, either - no seminars at faculty or department level, no staff lunches, no communal meeting place. All social life happens at the level of the laboratory. This ensures that bullying is not noticed by laboratory outsiders, and also ensures that poor-quality teaching is not noticed. It also ensures that everything one learns comes from senior figures inside one's own research group - there is no "corridor learning", no professional interchange of any sort that one does not seek out on a 1-to-1 basis. Even senior professors are afflicted by this problem, failing to learn anything about the activities of people in even closely-related areas without seeking it out on a personal basis.
Shimane University is, like a lot of Universities in Japan, on the edge of business failure. Japan has too many universities even for a society with a growing youth demographic, let alone an ageing society, and enrolment rates are plummeting. As this happens, third-tier universities seek to expand their pool of students by lowering entrance requirements, with the result that many of the students at Shimane University are really incapable of any form of organised study beyond High School. Students also expect that University study should be easier than school, and spend much of their University lives either bludging, working in part-time jobs or looking for full-time work in their last year. University life is a period of freedom before the company life, and universities are seen largely as a way to get a job in a company, not to learn a discipline. As a consequence, I am told that Japanese universities frequently provide no guidance on fields of study, and students do not have to choose majors/sub-majors along a particular educational path as I did. They pick and choose whatever they want to learn, because they know they will never be working in their technical field unless they continue studying past masters level. Shimane University is also pretty lazy with its pre-requisites and its assessments. Pressure to pass students is hardly unheard of in Australia, but in Shimane University it is so strong that I have personally passed a subject without meeting any assessment requirements because none were set.
Language has also for me been a problem, since for example there are very few statistics texts in English in the library and they are almost all sequestered away in individual laboratories. But why would English-language texts be sequestered away in a Japanese university? This points at a larger problem for Japanese universities - many technical texts are only available in English, and many of the best ones especially. One of my junior students in my lab told me there is only one basic Japanese-language book on the statistics programming language S and its corresponding software package S-Plus. The library appears to be funded only for general books, so specific texts and graduate texts go into the labs of individual teachers, not into the library. This is another educational consequence of the sensei system, I suspect, but it has profound problems for a non-Japanese speaker, or anyone working in a discipline like computational statistics which is not hugely popular in Japan. For example, one of the students in my lab had to write a program (for assessment) to complete a Cox Proportional Hazards Regression calculation explicitly using the Newton-Raphson method, handling ties. There is no information in Japanese for him to do this, and because his sensei doesn't do computational stats, he sent the student in question away to read an English text - though the student cannot read or speak English. Interestingly the Maths Department has a specialist library which is quite extensive, but it is uncatalogued, no-one uses it, no-one told me about it, I cannot borrow from it, and I don't have a key. I think this shows how much people keep their study within their own laboratories - even their perfectly well stocked library is unused, because being unrelated to a particular laboratory it is not funded and not supported.
Finally, the University system in Japan is suffering what I consider to be the long-term effects of running a fee paying, strictly user-pays system with limited public funds. Even though a University education is essential to get a company job, and even though science and technology is the bedrock of Japan's economic success, there is no student support system and limited public funds for professors. A mathematician in Japan can expect to spend a year looking for their first job after they leave their PhD, and their first job may not be a proper research job or a postdoc. The only form of student support available for living expenses is a loan, so almost every Japanese student has to get a part-time job or live off their parents' money. There is no student union and no compulsory subscriptions beyond tuition fees, so there are very few public facilities at the University. The sports clubs are entirely voluntary, their equipment falling apart and the grounds crumbling. The gym is absolutely terrible, because students cannot afford membership fees and there is no union to support renovations or staff. The university relies so much on student fees that even entrance examinations form a significant revenue source - some second tier universities used to take 10% of their annual income from entrance exams before the population of 18 year olds shrank, and they are having to revise their entire business model to account for the 10-fold reduction in income from this source. It is a testimony to the willpower, goodwill and community-spirit of Japanese young people that any kind of sense of community exists on campus at all, and most of it is powered by the voluntary effort of hard-working club members.
All of this obviously spells a serious problem for Japan's university system, and in time I think it will - like Japan's agriculture sector - have to go through a serious period of adjustment. My prediction is that Shimane University will collapse and be absorbed into Tottori University (which is vastly superior) sometime in the next 20 years, along perhaps with some technical colleges and prefectural universities in Yonago and Hamada, to form the "University of the San In coast", based in Tottori. Unless Japan reforms its agricultural sector significantly, this will have long-term implications for the economic prospects of a small rural town like Matsue.
And in the short term, it had terminal consequences for my pursuit of a PhD in mathematics. It hasn't helped my respect for academia or academics either. So for now I shall return to a real job, and try to forget all about the unsavoury personal relations I had to endure for the last 6 months of my time in Matsue...
Bullying: As observed in various private communications, my reason for leaving my PhD was largely bullying by my supervisor. The bullying took a mostly classic, universal form: yelling, insulting, deriding students to other students (and in some instances, saying bad things about me to friends of the Delightful Miss E!), publicly humiliating students, isolating me, and trying to control my personal life. Not all of these had happened to me (yet), but were targeted at younger students in our lab and would inevitably have crept on to me. The uniquely Japanese element of the bullying was the use of a particularly degrading form of language, usually reserved for pets and small children, which is specifically intended to enforce the relative power differences between student and supervisor. Aside from this, however, the bullying was of the classic sort one observes in Australian university supervisors all the time (and of the sort which has been directed against me before in Australia). Some of my friends have asked me if the bullying was an integral part of Japanese University life, and I can honestly say I don't think it is. I checked my supervisor's behaviour against that of other teachers, and they behave very differently. They are kinder, they use different language, they don't intrude on their students' personal lives as much, and they are supportive in public rather than humiliating. They certainly don't adopt the cultural nuance which my supervisor took, described as "samurai manner". His bullying was not some kind of locally accpetable cultural manner, either - he had a reputation as a strange teacher, and he also has a reputation for aggressiveness and rudeness amongst the students. His behaviour in one seminar, in particular, embarrassed and discomfited the other teachers, so I think we can safely say his style was quite unique.
Like all bullies though he is at heart a weak and pathetic man, and I dealt with him accordingly. But day-in day-out preparing for confrontation is emotionally draining and creates a fair amount of tension, so I am glad to be rid of it. Particuarly when I was preparing to give an all-Japanese presentation at a two-bit conference in Tokyo - a conference I knew he had only organised for me after he discovered I was going on holiday to Australia, in order to force my early return - the pressure became way too much. My Japanese was sadly not up to the task, and I had no guidelines or information about the conference or the proper Japanese presentation style. It was a deliberate attempt to humiliate me in front of an audience of my "superiors", using the one method he knew was guaranteed to work - my language. He also was explicitly breaking an agreement we had for me to present in English this year and Japanese next. Obviously one cannot take on this kind of duplicity and bloody-mindedness for too long without wilting. But aside from the particular language-related elements, none of it seemed to be specific to his cultural origins. Anyone who has had as much bad luck with academic supervisors as I have knows that bullying of this sort is hardly specific to the Japanese.
However, there is a specific element of Japanese life which makes this harder to deal with. The university uses the "sensei system" for providing education to PhDs and 4th year students, and it is the backbone of their graduate system. It is set up to give almost complete power and control to the professors, and makes bullying very easy to do. Under the sensei system, one presents seminars to ones supervisor (sensei) every week as a form of education, and the sensei has near complete control over ones educational path and the content of ones studies. If ones sensei is a bully, or incompetent, or both, ones study will suffer. The sensei system not only grants the teacher great power, though - it is supported by the entire University system, and external means of assessment are minimal, as are external means of support or redress. Even yesterday, the day I left Matsue, I was receiving phone calls from the International Student Office pressuring me to change the contents of my resignation letter, in which I wrote I had "irreconcilable differences with my supervisor". Nobody at any level wants to interfere with the rights, authority or power of the supervisors, and they reign unimpeded over their students. In the case of some of my friends this has been fine, since their teachers are skilled mathematicians and good teachers. But in my case, and that of my other laboratory members...
Quality: I did not know this when I came to Matsue, but Shimane University is ranked second lowest in all of Japan's universities. I moved from a Masters Degree at the world's 31st ranked university to a PhD outside of the top 1000. Not such a good decision! The library is very small with many of its specialist books set aside for exclusive use in particular laboratories, and although there is a lot of money for equipment at one of the specialist labs here (geology), most of the normal facilities are lacking. There is no community amongst teachers, either - no seminars at faculty or department level, no staff lunches, no communal meeting place. All social life happens at the level of the laboratory. This ensures that bullying is not noticed by laboratory outsiders, and also ensures that poor-quality teaching is not noticed. It also ensures that everything one learns comes from senior figures inside one's own research group - there is no "corridor learning", no professional interchange of any sort that one does not seek out on a 1-to-1 basis. Even senior professors are afflicted by this problem, failing to learn anything about the activities of people in even closely-related areas without seeking it out on a personal basis.
Shimane University is, like a lot of Universities in Japan, on the edge of business failure. Japan has too many universities even for a society with a growing youth demographic, let alone an ageing society, and enrolment rates are plummeting. As this happens, third-tier universities seek to expand their pool of students by lowering entrance requirements, with the result that many of the students at Shimane University are really incapable of any form of organised study beyond High School. Students also expect that University study should be easier than school, and spend much of their University lives either bludging, working in part-time jobs or looking for full-time work in their last year. University life is a period of freedom before the company life, and universities are seen largely as a way to get a job in a company, not to learn a discipline. As a consequence, I am told that Japanese universities frequently provide no guidance on fields of study, and students do not have to choose majors/sub-majors along a particular educational path as I did. They pick and choose whatever they want to learn, because they know they will never be working in their technical field unless they continue studying past masters level. Shimane University is also pretty lazy with its pre-requisites and its assessments. Pressure to pass students is hardly unheard of in Australia, but in Shimane University it is so strong that I have personally passed a subject without meeting any assessment requirements because none were set.
Language has also for me been a problem, since for example there are very few statistics texts in English in the library and they are almost all sequestered away in individual laboratories. But why would English-language texts be sequestered away in a Japanese university? This points at a larger problem for Japanese universities - many technical texts are only available in English, and many of the best ones especially. One of my junior students in my lab told me there is only one basic Japanese-language book on the statistics programming language S and its corresponding software package S-Plus. The library appears to be funded only for general books, so specific texts and graduate texts go into the labs of individual teachers, not into the library. This is another educational consequence of the sensei system, I suspect, but it has profound problems for a non-Japanese speaker, or anyone working in a discipline like computational statistics which is not hugely popular in Japan. For example, one of the students in my lab had to write a program (for assessment) to complete a Cox Proportional Hazards Regression calculation explicitly using the Newton-Raphson method, handling ties. There is no information in Japanese for him to do this, and because his sensei doesn't do computational stats, he sent the student in question away to read an English text - though the student cannot read or speak English. Interestingly the Maths Department has a specialist library which is quite extensive, but it is uncatalogued, no-one uses it, no-one told me about it, I cannot borrow from it, and I don't have a key. I think this shows how much people keep their study within their own laboratories - even their perfectly well stocked library is unused, because being unrelated to a particular laboratory it is not funded and not supported.
Finally, the University system in Japan is suffering what I consider to be the long-term effects of running a fee paying, strictly user-pays system with limited public funds. Even though a University education is essential to get a company job, and even though science and technology is the bedrock of Japan's economic success, there is no student support system and limited public funds for professors. A mathematician in Japan can expect to spend a year looking for their first job after they leave their PhD, and their first job may not be a proper research job or a postdoc. The only form of student support available for living expenses is a loan, so almost every Japanese student has to get a part-time job or live off their parents' money. There is no student union and no compulsory subscriptions beyond tuition fees, so there are very few public facilities at the University. The sports clubs are entirely voluntary, their equipment falling apart and the grounds crumbling. The gym is absolutely terrible, because students cannot afford membership fees and there is no union to support renovations or staff. The university relies so much on student fees that even entrance examinations form a significant revenue source - some second tier universities used to take 10% of their annual income from entrance exams before the population of 18 year olds shrank, and they are having to revise their entire business model to account for the 10-fold reduction in income from this source. It is a testimony to the willpower, goodwill and community-spirit of Japanese young people that any kind of sense of community exists on campus at all, and most of it is powered by the voluntary effort of hard-working club members.
All of this obviously spells a serious problem for Japan's university system, and in time I think it will - like Japan's agriculture sector - have to go through a serious period of adjustment. My prediction is that Shimane University will collapse and be absorbed into Tottori University (which is vastly superior) sometime in the next 20 years, along perhaps with some technical colleges and prefectural universities in Yonago and Hamada, to form the "University of the San In coast", based in Tottori. Unless Japan reforms its agricultural sector significantly, this will have long-term implications for the economic prospects of a small rural town like Matsue.
And in the short term, it had terminal consequences for my pursuit of a PhD in mathematics. It hasn't helped my respect for academia or academics either. So for now I shall return to a real job, and try to forget all about the unsavoury personal relations I had to endure for the last 6 months of my time in Matsue...
posted by Sir S at 1:00 PM
3 Comments:
Hello.. I've randomly come across your blog and reading your latest piece, it's a wow for me. Is rural japan that bad??
Leah
No, no! rural japan is great, but the university is bad, bad. You may hear people speak in the abstract of crumbling towns and failing economies, but in person you get to experience a particular atmosphere of kindness and acceptance which is really hard to imagine without going there. I recommend it!
Not to mention the countryside. The area Sir S is in, for instance, is vastly different (give or take +1 for hyperbole) than much of Japan. It's considered the heartland of Japanese myth and legend, and the ancient forests there certainly lives up to it.
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