“Good luck!” vs. “Ganbatte!”

I think the difference in the choice of words used in North America vs. Japan to encourage someone who is about to take on a difficult task reflects the different attitude people have towards work in general.

In North America, one would usually say ‘good luck!’. This sounds like the amount of effort you put into the work you’re about to take on will have no impact on the results.

In Japan, they say ‘ganbatte!’ which loosely translates to ‘do your best’. It implies that hard work will give you good results.

There are many aspects of Japanese society that I really admire. The importance placed on education is something that I think North America could use a bit more of.

Also, the value of hard work. I’m blown away by the way students strive to do their best in everything (studies, extra-curricular activities etc.). I don’t know where these students find their motivation. In school, not only subjects at taught, but also how one should behave in society. When you speak to students, it’s amazing how much the well-being of the society they live in is at the forefront of their mind. You don’t appreciate just how strong the ‘group mentality’ is until you live here.

I’m responsible for preparing Oral Communication classes for the first year students at my high school. However, recently my work has involved correcting 3rd year students’ essay during my free time at school because they will be taking their university entrance exams, which incidentally begins tomorrow. Everything the students do while in school revolves around the university entrance exam. It’s kind of like the French Bac, but much more difficult to succeed. Because Seiryo is an upper-academic high school, about 95% of the kids will be accepted to university. There is a lot of pressure on both the students and the teachers to be prepared for the entrance exams.

So, in preparation for this entrance exam, students have been doing many kinds of writing exercises. One of them involves giving reasons why they agree/disagree with a given statement. One of the topics was:

‘if you could change one thing about your school education system, what would you change?”.

The students' answers were interesting. One student stated that they would implement an entrance test to be taken by children before they enter elementary school. This test would determine what school children should be placed in, because the way the system is now, children are randomly placed in elementary schools. This, according to this student, holds back the students who really want to excel. This shows just how much some students want to excel here..

I doubt anyone in Canada would dream of making 4-5 year olds write a test in order to decide what elementary school they should be admitted to.

There are obviously good and bad points to having students’ lives revolved solely around school until they are 18 years old. Though I have to say that their school life also includes mandatory participation in many physical activities (such as the ‘Sports Festival’, marathon, and the bi-yearly ‘sports day’, a hike, among others.), as well as community involvement types of activities. These all help to balance out all the studying the kids do.

The results of the Japanese school system are very capable young adults who are hard working, polite, respectful and willing to put up with a lot of hardship (studying in non-air-conditioned classrooms during summer, and no heating during winter..these kids really suffer. Actually, we all suffer at school). What I see graduating from schools in North America, for the most part, are kids who try to get by doing as little as possible, to be paid as much as they can for doing as little as possible, think only of themselves and show no respect for the community they live in.

Though the Japanese school system is not perfect, I think it’s much better than what we currently have in North America.

"We protect only what we love, we love only what we know, we know only what we are taught." -Author Unknown