No excuse

Japanese schools have lots rules, which sometimes don’t make any sense, but they have improved over the years. The middle I attended was extremely strict. I had to keep my hair in certain ways, length of socks, uniforms, hairs were all regulated, and my teacher used to check once a week or so. Another thing is that we were told repeatedly not to make excuses. My school teachers told us not to make excuses and take full responsibilities when we make mistakes intentionally or unintentionally. So I was very surprised to see students in American college make millions of excuses in an attempt to get an extension to submit their homework, waive the curriculum requirement..to change their grades because there isn’t much flexibility to make changes that cater to individual justifications in Japan.

I recently wrote about the differences between the U.S. and Japanese educational systems, but having to actively speak up in the class was definitely one of the most challenging barriers that I had to somewhat cope with in order to graduate. And I also realized that I had to make some type of attempt to let the instructors of the classes know my circumstances because many of them didn’t realize that I was one of few foreign students in university classes and I felt really bad about even letting them know because I felt it was an excuse. English isn’t the first language, but so what? Should I be given a special assistance because of my language barrier? Well, it did work out when I was still in a community college but after transferring to the University, no way.

I knew that I was attending one of the best public universities in America and that I shouldn’t be making any further excuses about being a foreign student and I didn’t. I vividly remember the day I received an F grade in Research Theory Course because I forgot to set 1″ margin for my 10-pages research paper. T-T That was devastating because I had to pass this course at least with “C” to maintain my immigration status. Foreign students are required to maintain minimum of 12 units per quarter and 2.0 GPA and my student visa could be suspended otherwise. Anyways, I still didn’t go to the professor and explain about my English issue but did fairly well in the Final Research Project so passed the course with C. ^_^

So the “No-excuse” attitude has been my disadvantage in certain ways because American society is all about suing other people, defending yourself, justifying certain actions, so most Japanese students including myself struggled to adjust to the “excuse welcome” kind of culture. I hope this article will be extremely useful for Japanese people who are planning to study in America or foreigners who are planning to attend Japanese Universities. There are differences and regulations but it is definitely better to incorporate this in a subtly way instead of telling straight about your language problem.

My Japanese mentality continues to this date. I’ve worked with non-Japanese scientists, professors, financial people, and students, but