Students have participated in school cleaning since the Meiji era, although the origin of cleaning by a student or disciple can be traced back to Buddhist temples in medieval times. The Buddhist tradition stems from the idea that cleaning is good for a person’s development and character growth – values that have been adopted into Japanese society (Okihara 1978). This idea of cleaning as an educational tool remains today in Japanese public school cleaning practices. Japan’s Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science, and Technology writes in its Curriculum Guidelines, “Through classroom activities, students will develop positive interpersonal relationships, participate as members of a group in creating a better life in the classroom and at school, and develop an independent, practical attitude and healthy lifestyle that seeks to solve various problems” (Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science, and Technology 2008). The concept is that through cleaning in and around the classroom, students learn to work as part of a group and contribute to the betterment of their environment.
Starting in first grade, students spend 15 to 20 minutes each day, after lunch, cleaning their homerooms and the surrounding hallways and communal spaces. The descriptions that follow are from my experiences at a Japanese public school. Like in the kyushoku touban (lunch duty), students are split into groups and assigned a different part of the school to clean, with the duties rotating each week. But unlike lunch duty, the entire class participates in the cleaning. One week, students will use a zoukin (cleaning cloth) to scrub the floors of the classroom and hallway right outside it; the next week, they will take out the trash; some of the other tasks are sweeping the floors, wiping down the chalkboards, and watering the plants. In one of the final days of the semester before summer break in elementary school, there was a whole-school cleaning – from the cubbies in the entryway, where students put on their shoes, to entire large rooms, like the theater. Perhaps surprisingly, students sometimes find that this is an enjoyable part of the day, talking and joking with their classmates: they may make doodles on the blackboard before cleaning it, or race to see who can sweep the floor the fastest.
Through working together from such a young age, students learn how to collaborate toward a common goal. As Ryoko Tsuneyoshi et al. explain in their study “Cleaning as Part of TOKKATSU: School Cleaning Japanese Style,” the manner in which school cleaning is conducted “emphasizes the building of interpersonal relationships” and teaches students how to “work autonomously” (Tsuneyoshi et al. 2016). “Autonomous” can apply to both the students as a group, separate from the teacher, or as an individual. The students are assigned tasks by the teachers, but after that, their efforts are mostly self-directed, and they organize among themselves which members of the group clean each specific section. Individually, students must also work hard to play their part in the team to accomplish the goal and “gain internal satisfaction” from their work (Tsuneyoshi et al. 2016). A sense of responsibility is intertwined with these personal relations, and the entire group hinges on each individual’s responsibility (Damrow 2014). Each person must play their part in the group to create a productive atmosphere and to not let the others down. If one student fails to do something, it is not merely that one individual who bears the responsibility, but the whole group. The whole class may be chastised because some students were too rowdy during this cleaning period or did not clean thoroughly enough. These cleaning habits result in students learning to take care of a collective space. However, a problematic effect of these interpersonal relations is that when someone gets distracted or doesn’t fully complete the task they are assigned, relations between students may become “mildly strained” (Damrow 2014). As there is a large teamwork aspect to the cleaning, not performing the duties well can cause irritation and annoyance among classmates.