This blog explores two sets of culturally specific practices in Japanese schools: school lunches and daily cleaning. It analyzes the origins, purposes, and impacts of these practices, drawing on both my own ethnographic research and prior studies. My time spent attending Japanese public schools, as well as my fieldwork at a special school for hikikomori (those who withdraw from school and society for years at a time), deepened my interest in how these everyday routines have taken on unique characteristics and importance in Japanese schools. Using both an autoethnographic and ethnographic approach, alongside existing research, this study centers these practices within broader historical, educational, and cultural contexts.
Various scholars have studied the policies and customs in public schools in Japan, both as standalone systems and in comparison with schools in the United States. Amy Damrow, in her study “Navigating the Structures of Elementary Schools in Japan: An Ethnography of the Particular,” discusses various practices and daily rituals in Japanese schools, analyzing the experiences of one student as he transitioned from an American school to a Japanese one (Damrow 2014). Another paper, “An ethnographic study exploring factors that minimize lunch waste in Tokyo elementary schools,” by Betty Izumi et al., specifically analyzes how students, teachers, and administrators in the schools collaborate to minimize lunch waste (Izumi et al. 2020). Ryoko Tsuneyoshi et al., in their study “Cleaning as Part of TOKKATSU: School Cleaning Japanese Style,” explore school cleaning practices as an integral part of students’ education that furthers both cognitive and non-cognitive abilities (Tsuneyoshi et al. 2016). While these studies cover the customs, habits, and outcomes within Japanese schools, they do not consider the lived experience of various students who may have different reactions to these practices, nor do they consider school lunches and cleaning in relation to each other and in relation to hikikomori.
To explore this gap, I aim to answer this question: What are the origins, purpose, and impact of policies and customs in Japanese schools, particularly lunchtime and cleaning? I do so by analyzing the characteristics, historical context, intended purpose, and impacts of these practices. In addition to reflecting on my own experiences through an autoethnographic account of Japanese public schools, I discuss the results of my fieldwork at a special school for hikikomori, and I analyze Japanese government documents and policies as well as the work of other scholars.
Before I began this study, I hypothesized that the practices and customs in Japanese schools effectively promoted and taught values beyond academics to develop the students’ characters holistically. My findings both confirm and challenge this assumption. The policies and customs indeed aim to instill values such as discipline and responsibility, but they are shaped by other objectives as well, such as cultural sustainability. Moreover, these objectives can have unintended consequences such as social pressure, discomfort, and alienation for certain students, as evidenced by the struggles of hikikomori. This blog first examines lunches and cleaning individually within the context of Japanese schools to determine their individual objectives and impacts, and then examines their shared characteristics and unintended consequences.