Report Card from Kyoto

For a thousand years the feudal capital of Japan, Kyoto is still the nation's capital of learning and culture. Its small luxury shops are almost as bright, smart and busy as when Kyoto was called Japan's Paris. Its many huge temples make Kyoto, like Rome, a city of bells. As Japan's holy city, and a second-rate target to boot, Kyoto escaped bombing. Last week, amid spring's pink and white cherry blossoms, Kyoto seemed full of changeless charm. But beneath the surface stirred the changes of postwar U.S. occupation and tutelage. Surveying the scene, TIME Correspondent Sam Welles found the ferment "still far from democracy, but fascinating and startling."

No Gum, Chum. In the schools, especially, new impulses were shaking old Japanese ways. Boys & girls were now studying together where before the war they had been strictly segregated. With the new freedom, they were voicing their own opinions, instead of dutifully doing what their elders bade them.

To Kyoto's Horikawa Senior High coeducation came last October. Now, of 2,531 pupils, 1,104 are girls. None had ever studied with boys before; they went to separate, inferior schools in line with the feudal principle that boys are superior beings. "At first I was bewildered and frightened," said Reiko Yasuda, a slight, pretty eleventh-grader, "but after I got used to it I found it a challenge to try to keep up with the boys." Another coed, Yoko Kira, added: "Coeducation is very enjoyable."

At Fushimi Senior High, Keishi Kanno, editor of the school paper, led a discussion of the new sex equality. "The girls," he charged, "are more otemba [tomboyish] and masculine than we expected." Both boys & girls were openly critical of Japan's traditional family system which gives the family head almost complete power over all members. "The system should be changed," argued Kanno, "for now a father can even tell his children whom to marry."

Fushimi's plump principal, Hisahiko Okutani, observed: "If it had not been for the war you would have had to accept the traditional way." Little Chieko Tsuchida took up the argument. "My grandfather," she said,-"wants to pick a husband for me. I am opposed to an arranged marriage. My character won't permit it. I'm simply not the quiet or the obedient sort." Said Kanno: "She's an example of the otemba type."

The high-school faculties, still dubious about mixed classes, are trying to let students make their own decisions--even to chewing gum. One teacher, Tadao Naka-nami, caught a boy chewing gum and bawled him out. The student fired back: "In America the students chew gum." Stymied, the teacher put the issue up to class debate: Was it proper to chew gum in school even if Americans did so? The class long and earnestly debated the issue, then decided it was wrong, ordered the offending boy to apologize.

Questions for Teacher. From Kyoto, headquarters for the Occupation Army's First Corps, the Americans have also launched a program to educate adults--a 19-lesson course, with films, lectures and discussion groups. It meets for two hours twice a week, covers every field of postwar reform from taxes and public health to trade unionism and the new constitution. Given in seventh-grade language, it is designed to teach 30 million adults, in the next five years, "the principles of democracy which everyone can understand."

Right now the Japanese have their own peculiar understanding. One local group wanted to put police at the adult school door to keep out Communists, "as Communists would disturb free discussion." In Kyoto's Kitano Junior High, Correspondent Welles heard the following discussion among adults:

"Formerly," said a brown-kimonoed matron, "the Emperor was the focus of the state. Now where is the focus and what can we strive for? If it is for democracy, what is the exact goal? No one seems able to tell us our objective."

"The new constitution," replied the Japanese high-school teacher leading the talk, "has as its focus the building of responsible citizens in a responsible democratic state. But we, too, are deeply puzzled about making the focus effective."

Ten-Year Course? How soon, if at all, might Japan's re-education come to a focus? "To leave something sound behind," said one American officer, "will take us another ten years--if the U.S. taxpayer can stand it," Other Americans thought two or three years might be enough for a start. Whatever the period, most education officers agreed that with Communism on the march in Asia, the U.S. has little choice but to continue its schoolmaster's task in Japan.

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