INTRODUCTION
As I continue to teach in Japan, I become more convinced of the importance of knowing how to read and interpret Japanese body language. Though the skill of reading ongoing feedback is essential in any learner-centered teaching environment, this is particularly true in Japan.1
There are several reasons for this. Japanese people often prefer to express meaning implicitly rather than explicitly, so as to avoid conflict, and to allow for a more ambiguous open-ended interpretation of meaning.2 Japanese society is hierarchically structured, and the language demands the speaker choose verb forms and verb stems determined by the speaker's hierarchical relationship to the person being spoken to.3 Therefore, opinions are often better suggested discretely, rather than expressed directly. On the college level, most professors remain aloof, lecturing from their podium by microphone, and expecting nothing more from their students than regurgitation of the material covered in the lectures. Contact with students is rare, and role specific.4 The Confucian ethic of authority, benevolence, and paternal responsibility is still very much a part of the Japanese national educational policy.5
The Japanese student to teacher ratio reflects the historical assumption that college classes are for listening, and not for responding to the lecturer. Classes tend to be large, with 40 to 60 students in a class being common. A system with such large classes, and where speaking up is tantamount to asking for trouble, creates a fertile garden for non-verbals. Recently, due in part to competition for student enrollment and, in some cases, a more realistic awareness of language learning needs, conversation classes in some universities are being made smaller. At Ritsumeikan University, for example, a split session system is employed for college freshmen to allow for more time with native-speaker instructors, the usual class of fifty is divided in half. I instruct twenty-five students for half the school year, while a Japanese instructor teaches the other twenty-five, switching midyear. Though this may appear to be an advantage over the usual fifty in a class, the advantage is diminished proportionately by the loss of half a year in actual contact time.
This is compounded by the fact that Japanese instructors tend to use a direct translation reading methodology, with students standing one by one and translating the next sentence in a text from the English into Japanese. At Ritsumeikan, this leaves only twelve ninety minute class sessions for students to adjust to my methodology of student class participation. In classes such as mine, in which students are encouraged to respond spontaneously without relying on text or translation, the feeling is dramatically different from what most students are accustomed to.
I teach between 15-18 classes a week each term, common for many part-time instructors in Japan, with over 400 students in my various universities. My class population ranges between 17 and 45 students per class. My class student to teacher ratio on average is lower than many of my peers, because I have scheduled myself in schools with this in mind. Yet even with this lower ratio, it still allows me on average less than three minutes per-student per-class or only thirty minutes, at best, of actual one on one instruction for each student in one school term. No matter how one divides the class time, the pervasive structure of large classes, and how students and teachers have learned to cope with these large numbers over the years, will influence student and teacher interaction.
In this environment, with students striving to be in harmony with their peers while never overtly expressing contradiction to their teachers and upperclassmen, and where teachers strive to streamline their teaching to accommodate the large numbers, student expression may appear impossible. Yet students in Japan, as students all over the world, do have a great deal to say, mountains of emotion and ideas to express.
To avoid being singled out from the group and risk being ostracized, the Japanese culture as a whole, and students in particular, have developed a large vocabulary of signs and devices to express their feelings. Though occasionally similar to body language used in the West, this subtler language of gesture and innuendo has unique and expressly Japanese forms. Much of this needs to be studied carefully for accurate interpretation.
The non-Japanese instructor of English, lacking long-term Japanese cultural experience and the language skill to extrapolate meaning, can often feel frustrated and out of touch with students. This thesis describes body language used in the Japanese classroom, to assist EFL instructors in reading and interpreting ongoing feedback. Comments are provided throughout, to help new teachers with cultural details different from those found in the American classroom.
The text is organized into six chapters: concerning the use of the hands, the use of the face, the use of body posture and gesture, the use of silence, and my conclusion. I have attempted to distinguish between those signs used to convey a message consciously and those which are done subconsciously, yet for a student struggling with a second language, often there is an overlap of the two. All in all, there is a great deal of visual information for the careful observer of Japanese body language in the EFL classroom.
Examples of exaggerated body language can be found in Japanese comic books, television, and contemporary theater. I continue to find these sources useful in helping me decode Japanese student behavior. As the majority of Japanese students spend six days a week involved in classroom activity throughout their youth, much popular entertainment, such as television romances, skit comedies, and comic book stories, take place in a classroom setting. There are also classical art forms, e.g., the tea ceremony, Noh and Kabuki theater, Kyogen comedy, martial art, which have contributed to the evolution of Japanese body language, as well as historical and religious factors, e.g., Chinese and Korean influences, Buddhist and Shinto ritual, Samurai codes of behavior. I refer to these when they expressly relate to the use of body language in the EFL classroom.
The basis of my research for this paper has been threefold. My most important source of knowledge has been the experience and insight gained through trail and error, while attempting communication with my students in the classroom. These observations of student behavior during my last eight years of teaching in Japan, have been essential in discovering and then verifying student non-verbals. Of particular help have been observations made during the last three years, in conjunction with my graduate work at SIT. During this period I have been teaching at three universities in or near Kyoto; Ritsumeikan, Kyoto Gaidai and Kansai Gaidai .
To help me understand the cultural reasoning behind my students’ classroom behavior, I draw from my readings on Japanese society, as documented in the bibliography, and from a variety of Japanese popular and traditional art forms. To place these Japanese cultural and anthropological studies in perspective, I have studied the writings of a variety of contemporary educational theorists. Caleb Gattegno creator of The Silent Way and Charles A. Curran founder of the Counseling Learning Institutes have been very useful.
An equally significant source has been my ongoing discussions with EFL professionals working in Japan. Many of my peers have expressed support and a willingness to contribute to this research. Japanese professors, including my wife Reiko Inokoshi Seltman who is also a university EFL teacher, have helped translate body gestures and provide important cultural insights, while my Western peers have verified or challenged my observations and analysis.
In Japanese the term Gaijin (outsider / foreigner) is used for anyone not appearing Japanese. Even legal citizens who speak the language fluently may be called Gaijin. White, black, and non-Japanese Asians usually remain Gaijin no matter how long or how many generations they live in Japan. As there are many exceptions for most terms and I do not wish to offend anyone, I use the terms Western, foreign, or non-Japanese teacher to describe teachers for which Japanese is not their native language. When using the term Western, foreign, or non-Japanese, my purpose is to distinguish between those who were raised in Japan and therefore may intuitively understand Japanese body language and those who must learn it as a second language.
The majority of non-Japanese English teachers working in Japan are North American, followed by those from Great Britain. In the universities where I teach, EFL teachers from a full spectrum of nations are represented, e.g., Australia, New Zealand, India, Ireland, South Africa, Denmark, etc., though far less than those from North America. As my teaching and learning experiences before Japan were primarily in America my comparisons may often be from a North American point of view.
Generally, students are unaware of the origin of their body language, and in many cases are unaware that they are using it. Students are also not aware that it may differ in meaning from that of the teacher's own culture. I believe that learning to understand these unique communicative devices in my student's culture, can facilitate my teaching. The first step for me has been to learn how to read and interpret this nonverbal kinetic language properly and effectively.
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1 - For another view read; Watts, Brenda. "Student Feedback in Japanese EFL Classes" Unpublished MAT Thesis. School for International Training, Brattleboro, Vermont, 1990.
2 - Reischauer, Edwin O. The Japanese. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1977.
3 - Christopher, Robert C. The Japanese Mind: The Goliath Explained. New York: Linden Press/Simon & Schuster, 1983.
4 - This is changing as new theories of education trickle in from progressive educators, particularly in the EFL classroom and among native English-speaking instructors, yet learner-centered methods are still rare and seldom influence school policy.
5 - Halloran, Richard. Japan: Images and Realities. Tokyo: Charles E. Tuttle Company, 1969.