Learning to Bow is a journal written by Bruce S. Feiler during the year he worked as a exchange English teacher in the middle schools of Sano, a rural town north of Tokyo. Mr. Bruce, as he’s called by his students, learns first hand about the Japanese educational system and Japanese culture. However there wasn’t much material that was new to me so I really had to stretch to find something I could say I learned from it and that’s why this paper is so short.

The most interesting insight into Japanese culture for me was the decreased emphasis on self reliance and instead focus on the group thinking. This was well shown in the scene where Mr. Bruce is at the hospital and in traction for a sprained ankle he got during a tennis match. Mr. Bruce is lying in a hospital bed begging to go home to his apartment. But the descion isn’t left to him, his co-workers from the school have to hold a meeting right in the room to decide if Mr. Bruce will be able to survive by himself given his horrible injury.

As someone who also hopes to get into the teacher exchange program there are two things in it that make me worry. The first is the amount of drinking that is part of Japanese culture, I chose not to drink because all of the men in my extended family are alcoholics and I don’t want to end up like them. The other thing that bothers me is Mr. Bruce’s social like in Japan, or rather lack of it. It seems that being an exchange teacher is very lonely.