Explore everyday life in Japan
It is flu season in Japan, which means that many schools across the country are closing classrooms and asking the students of those classrooms to stay home for four or five days in order to prevent large outbreaks of Influenza. Yes, that’s right. You read that correctly. Entire classes of students, sometimes up to 38 students per class, are being asked to stay home for an entire week of school.
Maybe some of the details in the last paragraph don’t quite make sense to you. Maybe you are wondering why schools would close a classroom, or how a school could have a class with only 38 students in it. You might even be wondering how asking students in one math class to stay home while allowing the students that they study history or science with to come to school would help prevent an outbreak of Influenza.
Well, let me tell you a little about Japanese schools.
Whereas in other countries, students are assigned individual class schedules that are based on their abilities and the various elective courses they have elected, junior and senior high school students in Japan are assigned to a single homeroom class, the members of which do not change throughout the day or the year. In other words, the students of a single class are expected to study the same subjects with the same class members all day long.
One of the implications of this is that the classroom is considered the students’ classroom and not the teacher’s classroom. As such, students tend to spend most of their time throughout the day in a single classroom with the same students. This is why, when a single homeroom class has as many as seven students absent on the same day due to an infectious virus like Influenza, that class is asked to go home and not return to school for four or five days until the dormancy period of that virus has passed.
In Japanese, this kind of classroom closing is called Gakkou Heisa, and it happens fairly regularly from year to year.
Image Credits: The image in this post is original and is not of a typical homeroom classroom. It is, instead, a picture of a typical junior high school science room in Japan.
This is an ongoing series that will explore various aspects of daily life in Japan. My hope is that this series will not only reveal to its followers, image by image, what Japan looks like, but that it will also inform its followers about unique Japanese items and various cultural and societal practices. If you are interested in getting regular updates about life in Japan, please consider following me at @boxcarblue. If you have any questions about life in Japan, please don’t hesitate to ask. I will do my best to answer all of your questions.