Quote:
Oisin Bourke wrote:
Adding to the other posts, children learn pretty much everything in a formal setting by Kata. When I was teaching English, a lot of kids would mimic not just my pronunciation, but also my gestures and body language in order to get it. Also, when my daughter was in kindergarten in Japan, the teachers there would teach the kids basic skills, like doing up shirt buttons and folding clothes by showing them in a step by step manner the "set" way to do it. The kids would then repeat the "set" way until they could do it "properly" (i.e. the "set way). When I was training with adults and kids in budo, everyone would constantly (some would say obsessively) mimic the instructor, even while the instructor was verbally explaining something. Basically, they watch, copy and learn, and in general, can pick up a lot of detail. It's a great skill to have, and I suppose most aikido and budo practicioners do this to some extent, but the level generally done in Japan is quite hard to recreate in "the West" We just have a different approach to learning. BTW, this has positives and negatives, but it is definitely a Japanese cultural hallmark.
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Thanks, Oisin, that's really interesting. I knew (from studies of quality and business processes) that Japanese business culture emphasizes doing a thing as correctly as possible, and I know that it's a mindset that pervades traditional Japanese arts, but I didn't know it was quite that pervasive.
You probably know the "ritual cat" Zen story, which goes something like this: a spiritual teacher used to hold meditation sessions, which were disturbed by the monastery's cat, which made noise (and, if it was like my roommate's cat, did a lot of other "cat vs. meditation" things). So the spiritual teacher tied up the cat in another room, which solved the problem. Time went on, new disciples came to study, eventually the teacher died and another teacher took over, and all this time the cat was tied up during meditation. Finally, one day the cat died...and what did they do? They went out and bought a new cat so that they could tie it up, because tying a cat up was necessary to create the right environment for meditation.
Here in the West, we tend to get againsty when we're asked to play "monkey see, monkey do". We want to understand why we're doing what we're doing, even before we do it for the first time. The problem, of course, is that unless the thing you're doing is completely straightforward, or you can relate prior knowledge from another domain, you're unlikely to understand the explanation. So, you get stuck, and you never get beyond the first step. I think we all understand the dangers of "monkey see, monkey do" -- that's how you end up buying a new cat so you'll have one to tie up during meditation -- but I think you need a body of knowledge to hang any explanations on, and I don't think there's any way to get that body of knowledge without a good chunk of "shut up and train". Lots of practice, a little theory, lots more practice, a little more theory. Not always in that order, but the understanding comes with practice, not in advance of it. At least I think so.
ExBoss told an interesting story. He said that if you had a manufacturing facility in Japan and another in the US, making the same part to the same specs out of the same material, you'd find that in the US, they would aim at the tolerances, while in Japan, they'd aim right at the mark. In other words, if the spec said 100mm plus/minus 2 mm, the US plant/workers/process would focus on hitting anywhere between 98mm and 102mm (and would consider them all pretty much equally good...isn't that what the spec says?), whereas in Japan they would focus on hitting 100. As a result, products made with the same part manufactured in two different plants would have a different MTBF, because the US plant would turn out more 98mm and 102mm parts, which would go out of tolerance and cause problems sooner.