Moving on from the drama and disturbing news

I am now in Hiroshima. The last few days of orientation were relatively uneventful. "Drama" ensued when a bunch of guys went out to Tokyo for the night and returned at 8am since the last train was missed. Luckily, I was too tired to go out (as well as the majority of the people) which resulted in everyone being "lame" and the guys being too cool for everyone. Needless to say, we are in high school. The male ego still surprises me to this day. I do not understand it at all. Apparently, we were all "lame" because we did not pay enough attention to this group of individuals. Oh well. I don't think I missed much.

Moving on...there were a couple of things that I found a bit disturbing during my orientation. We had four "special lectures" for two mornings--three of them being "the history of Japan" in evolution, medicine and aerospace. While most of these were interesting, the scope was lost a bit in the "history of medicine" lecture, as the professor started the lecture with the rising of Japan from the Earth's core. Unfortunately, time did not permit for us to reach modern medicine, as after an hour and a half, we were still in 1860.

Of the three lectures, the one on evolution was perhaps the most interesting. As a biologist (and hopefully future educator) I was shocked and disturbed by the way biology is taught in Japan. The professor who gave the talk was a female prof and was very outspoken--something that I found very surprising considering the stereotypes of sexism in this country. She described to us the way biology is taught and there is one standard textbook that almost all school utilize. The reason there is one is because all classes are geared towards a general exam that determines your fate (literally). So this biology "textbook" is about 250 pages in paperback, smaller than 8.5x11 type (in comparison, a typical HS biology text is over 600pgs and much larger dimensions). There are SO many restrictions as to what can be put into the textbook and need to be checked with about 15 people.

So, as I mentioned, this lecture was on the history of evolution. As you may know, the basis of biology is the principle of evolution. While the "idea" of evolution has recently become a "hot topic" in the US, it has only recently been accepted in Japan. For a long time, the Darwinian theory of evolution was not accepted. In fact, a discredited theory (Lysenkoism) was followed for a long time. The Darwinian theory was only accept in early 1990! This theory has been around for AGES and only 15 years ago did the Japanese decide to accept it. The bothersome part is that it wasn't accepted, not for the actual biology behind it, but because it was a "Western" idea. Any Western ideas about biology were pretty much ignored (an actually Western ideas in any field). In fact, there was a man from Japan who came up with his own theory of evolution called Imanishi-ism and this was accepted as THE evolutionary theory to follow, although it was based on several Darwinian principles with some differences in the idea of selection. The only reason it was taught (and only amongst graduate students, but I'll get to that later) is that it was a "Japanese" idea and therefore more important than Darwin's. It was shocking to me to hear this, perhaps because I thought the whole ethnocentrism thing related mostly to culture not to scientific principles. Moreso, I think the troubling thing was that this was not based in any sort of "faith" as the Japanese generally do not have any religion. The controversy with the teaching of evolution in the US is at least based in Faith. While I do not approve of the non-teaching of evolution and reject the idea of intelligent design aka creationism, myself, I can at least somewhat understand the arguments for intelligent design and its basis of faith. Whereas here, the rejection was simply because these were "Western" ideas.

Fortunately, things seem to be changing and this particular prof seems to be a frontrunner in this change in education. Despite her efforts, the word "evolution" cannot be included in any "official" HS biology textbook and neither can any ideas referring to evolution such as the word "selection". What is surprising is that the idea of inheritance is mentioned and DNA can be mentioned, however the terminology is as so: "a chemical A, a chemical T, a chemical G and a chemical C combine to generate information for the cell". The DNA bases cannot be called their official chemical names (adenine, thymine, guanine, cytosine). It boggles people go on to study biolog when it is taught this way. Also the words "variant" or "selection" cannot be used in any combination with anything referencing DNA because this may infer the idea of evolution.

With this said, we were informed that there are biology textbooks that are more like American or "Western" biology texts, however these are not approved by the government and therefore most instructors do not use them. While I understand the need to simply biology so that even students who do not want to pursue it past HS aren't bored, I find that it is critical to at least inform students of the different areas in biology that can be pursued, even if it is not taught as a lesson in class. After listening to this lecture, it made me appreciate my US education so much more and also angry that goverment can be so powerful as to block such essential information from its citizens. Ok, maybe that was a bit dramatic--not everyone is a biology geek like me.

More to come on the special lectures, but I'll make that a separate entry as this one is making me mad again and is already very long.