Figure 1.--The photo shows a primary school class in Kobe. This is of course a large city with many primary schools. We do not know which school it was. We are guessing the schools had numbers rather than names, but perhaps a Japanese reader will be able to tell us more about how the schools were named. From the background it looks like a school in the suburbs outside the central city. The children look to be about 7 years old. Notice the size of the class, nearly 45 children. Their teacher is standing in the rear. Many more women entered the teaching profession after the War. Put your cursor on the image to see the rest of the class.

The photo shows a primary school class in Kobe. This is of course a large city with many primary schools. We do not know which school it was. We are guessing the schools had numbers rather than names, but perhaps a Japanese reader will be able to tell us more about how the schools were named. From the background it looks like a school in the suburbs outside the central city. The children look to be about 7 years old. Notice the size of the class, nearly 45 children. Their teacher is standing in the rear. Many more women entered the teaching profession after the War. That is quite a large class for one teacher, especially younger children. The portrait is interesting because it was taken in 1946, just after the War. The boys are wearing short sleeve shirts and shorts. They look like white shirts. The uniformity suggests a uniform. Children at most city primary schools wore basic uniforms before and during the War and this is probably a continuation of this. The girls wear dresses, but they do not look like uniform dresses. We can see in the front row a girl wearing strap shoes, some children wear zori, but most are barefoot. This is probably a reflection of the difficult conditions following the War. The boys have their hair clipped very short as was common in Japan before the War. This cropped hair gradually declined in popularity during the late-1940s. A reader writes, "The class size is not unusual. When I was in Japan and the rest of Asia. There was discussion about the Japanese system and how that worked. As I understood those discussions: The Japanese system emphasizes lectures from teachers who present the material and then it is up to the student to learn. So class sizes in general are much greater than in the United States. Also, students often work in groups of four and are expected to assist each other in learning." We believe what are reader says is an accurate descripotion, but we suspect that classes this size for little ones in Japan are now much smaller. We also think that sometimes we lay too much on the teacher. We believe that success in dealing with this lot was largely due to the fact that their parents had prepared them for school and made it clear how important sdchool was. We also believe that these children tended to be well behave because of training at home and they came from two-parent, hard-working, law-abiding families.

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Created: 11:11 PM 12/24/2010
Last updated: 8:25 AM 3/24/2011