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Yukiko Ano Kato: The First Graduate of Nishimachi School
By Elisabeth Rubinfien
The Nishimachi Internationalist, Spring/Summer 2009, Vol. 43
Over her thirty-six years as a teacher, whenever one of Yukiko Ano Kato’s students would confront her with a question or problem, Ms. Kato would reply, “Find the solution!” And when Ms. Kato looks back on her career as an educator, that trademark answer can be traced to her own childhood years at Nishimachi.
Tané Matsukata “taught us to be independent thinkers,” Ms. Kato recalls. “When I was teaching, I’d try to teach that to the children. I’d say, ‘Find the solution.’”
Ms. Kato is Nishimachi’s very first sixth grade graduate. Year: 1952. Size of Nishimachi’s inaugural graduating class: One.
In those days, Nishimachi International School had just five students altogether. Classes were held in a large Western-style house in Azabu, the private home of the Takaki family, friends of Ms. Matsukata. At the time, Nishimachi’s first school building was under construction, and the students would visit regularly to keep track of progress. The Matsukata House was being rented by the Swedish Embassy, and the backyard, with its deep green trees and enticing shadows, was fenced off.
“We weren’t supposed to go into the backyard of the Swedish embassy, but it was such a temptation,” Ms. Kato says, recalling one day when she and the other children tried to sneak into the garden to play. “Ms. Matsukata—she didn’t miss a thing. I remember her standing and watching me. ‘What are you doing?’ she said. I was mortified, because I was the eldest. She didn’t miss a thing!”
Ms. Matsukata’s mother was a good friend of Ms. Kato’s grandmother, the wife of a Japanese naval officer who had served as military attaché in Washington, D.C., in the 1930s. The three years she spent in Washington, D.C., gave Ms. Kato’s grandmother a bigger sense of the world, and she became convinced that an international, bilingual education must begin as early as possible.
Ms. Kato had already been attending a prestigious school in Tokyo, but when her grandmother told her about Nishimachi, she agreed to switch schools. A faded black-and-white photograph of Ms. Kato’s Nishimachi classroom shows five children seated at wooden desks in a semicircle, a map hung prominently on the nearby wall, and Ms. Matsukata bending over the shoulder of one boy to check his work. With only five students in the school, Ms. Kato and her classmates received a lot of individual attention. Ms. Matsukata’s charge to her students to be “independent thinkers” came through loud and clear.
“It was so unique, so different,” says Ms. Kato today. “I still feel very much a part of Nishimachi. Although Nishimachi’s curriculum in those days was primarily taught in Japanese, English was an important component from the start. Ms. Matsukata was Ms. Kato’s English teacher both years that she attended Nishimachi. After that, she continued to study English privately with Yaye Hirooka, who was one of Nishimachi’s first teachers.
“I have come to take it for granted, but Nishimachi gave me the foundation to master English,” says Ms. Kato. “In just two years I went from knowing very little to reading a fourth-grade textbook. If I didn’t have that, all the years after would have been so much harder.”
Two years later, Ms. Kato graduated from Nishimachi and entered another international-minded, progressive Japanese school, where she stayed through junior high, high school, and two years of junior college.
Ms. Kato’s interest in teaching grew out of the fact that she always “enjoyed being with kids,” she says. Living with her grandparents, Ms. Kato and her sister were the oldest grandchildren, often visited by a number of younger cousins. Whenever they came, she would look after them. After she left Nishimachi, she would return regularly to help in Ms. Hirooka’s first grade class.
Years later, after receiving her B.A. degree from Principia College in Illinois, Ms. Kato moved to Saratoga, California, where a college friend’s parents were living. Their son’s fifth grade teacher happened to be Virginia Kerr, a public school teacher who, upon retiring, went to teach at Nishimachi from 1969-1971. “She was like my mom, here,” says Ms. Kato. The Katos rented the Kerr’s house while she was away, and they went on to be lifelong friends.
Ms. Kato started as a school teacher in the Saratoga Union School District in 1966 and worked there almost every year until she retired in 2002. She taught third and fourth grade for a few years, but spent most of her years teaching second grade, which she liked the best.
Over her thirty-six-year career, Ms. Kato has seen many changes in her local school and in American education overall. First of all, the ethnic and international diversity of the community has expanded, which has influenced the culture. “When I first started in 1966, there was only one Chinese-American student in a class of twenty-four,” Ms. Kato says. “Now, if there are four or five Caucasians in a class, that would be a lot.”
Some of the changes are good, says Ms. Kato—for example, it is normal now for the school to celebrate many international festivals. But on the other hand, non-Asian parents can feel pushed aside. Some Caucasian families are choosing to leave the district for schools where they feel more comfortable.
“America has a lot of various immeasurable qualities that other nations don’t,” says Ms. Kato. For example, not long ago Ms. Kato read an article in a college alumni magazine describing how much time kids spend on homework in other countries instead of sports or after-school jobs or socializing. “One person said, ‘While my kids have their face in the water, these kids in Asia have their face in a book, so I pulled my kid out of swimming,’” Ms. Kato recounts. “If you just want to count the number of engineers graduating from university, then he’s right, kids need to spend more time with books. I was puzzled: Numbers-wise we’re not Number One, but isn’t there something American education offers?”
There is a lot to be learned, she continues, by participating in sports, having a social life, and “managing to do it all.” Another strength is the diversity of American school communities—children learning to work with other children from different cultures. “Other countries that do so well are homogeneous,” Ms, Kato says. “A lot of things are unique in American education—perhaps people aren’t giving it enough credit.”
With only five students in the school,… Ms. Matsukata’s charge to her students to be “independent thinkers” came through loud and clear.
Ms. Kato embodies the values of Nishimachi and the bicultural experience of many of its students. She switched schools several times, the way many students at NIS have over the years, learning how to be the “new kid” in different settings.
“It was harder to go from Nishimachi to regular Japanese school than the other way,” she says. “I was kind of oddball—speaking English. My grandmother warned me not to show off. I pretended to study also when the other kids studied English so as not to stick out.”
Later, when Ms. Kato moved to the United States, she found herself confronting her identity in other—unexpected—ways. The memories of those days flooded back when Barack Obama was inaugurated president in Washington, D.C., in January.
President Obama’s inaugural speech triggered Ms. Kato’s memory of when she first came to the U.S. It was in 1960, and she arrived in Los Angeles by boat, where she was met by her penpal’s family. After ten days with them, she boarded a bus headed for Jacksonville State College in Alabama, where she had been admitted to the International House program with a handful of students from around the world. The bus trip took her from Los Angeles to Birmingham, Alabama, and then the smaller town of Anniston, crossing six state lines from the West into the Deep South.
“Everything was fine until Texas,” she recalls. “Then everything got segregated. It was the first time I had ever seen restrooms for ‘Coloreds’ and ‘Whites,’ cafeterias for ‘Coloreds’ and ‘Whites.’ I had never seen so many black people. And nobody had told me about it.”
“I really wondered where I should go,” she continues. “I didn’t feel quite comfortable going to the ‘Colored’ section—maybe it was prejudice because I didn’t know any blacks. But I wasn’t comfortable going to the ‘Whites’ section because they might kick me out.”
“So, I sat in the middle of the bus,” she says, between the ‘Colored’ section at the back and the seats for ‘White’ at the front. Rather than confront the rules at the road stop cafeterias along the way, “for three days, I bought my food from vending machines.”
When Ms. Kato arrived at Jacksonville State College, she found international students were accepted as white. “Maybe I was naïve, but I felt always accepted. I never felt prejudice against me, but it was still weird to see ‘Separate but Equal’ in action,” she says. “It wasn’t equal.”
Then she discovered another layer of surprise. When people in Alabama talked about life “during the war,” they weren’t referring to World War II, or even the Korean War; they were harking back to the American Civil War one hundred years earlier.
Now, fifty-nine years after she first entered Nishimachi and began her international education, Ms. Kato lives a bicultural life. She travels regularly from her California ranch-style home in Saratoga to Japan, where she still has many relatives and friends, but “my family in Japan tells me I think like an American,” she says. “I feel my roots are here,” she says, pouring tea from a Japanese teapot through a strainer to catch the loose leaves. “I consider here my home.”
SHORT BIOGRAPHY
Yukiko Ano Kato, 69
Husband: Isao Kato, 72, administrator at Japan Airlines in San Francisco
Children: One son, Yoshi, a freelance writer, and one daughter, Kimi, a first grade teacher
Years as a teacher: 36
Favorite grade to teach: Second grade
Graduated from Nishimachi: March 20, 1952
Questions & Answers:
Q: What qualities do you think were most unique about Nishimachi?
A: [Ms. Matsukata] taught us to be independent thinkers. When I was teaching, I’d try to teach that to the children. I’d say, “Find the solution.” I remember one time when I was teaching second grade, a kid was complaining. I said nothing, just gave her a “teacher look” and one of the other kids said, “Find the solution.” So I guess they got it.
Q: What are some particular memories from your days at Nishimachi?
A: I remember the field trip we took to Tsukiji in Ms. Matsukata’s jeep. She drove. And one Christmas, we performed Kaguyahime. Makiko was Kaguyahime, and Hiroshi and I were Ojiisan and Obaasan.
Q: What is your favorite grade to teach?
A: Second grade. Most can read, but they still believe everything you tell them. They’re eager to please, they’re sweet. I’d say, “Watch out, I have eyes in the back of my head,” and some would say, “Really?” That innocence is so sweet. My own children tell me I have their sense of humor—I think I’m at a second grade level!
Q: What similarities and differences do you see between education in Japan and in the U.S.?
A: Education here is getting to be more like Japanese education, more test-based. I don’t know if they’re being taught to think at home. They’re so goal-oriented. I don’t remember studying for tests, I remember basic ideas like Be Responsible, Think for Yourself, Think of the Consequences. Education now is so competitive. Competition isn’t bad in itself, but I don’t know if kids are taught to be considerate of others as much as they need to. Now there’s so much teaching-to-the-test. When your school is evaluated by test scores, the things that can’t be measured by numbers fade out.
Q: What areas need improvement in education today in the United States?
A: Now there is so much stress on math and science that we do need to do more with that. Americans are known for innovation, but I don’t know if we still have that. That was something strong in this country, and I want that to continue. Who knows what’s in store.
Q: What are the three most important pieces of advice you would offer to parents today?
A: Be a good listener. Give your kids choices to make with consequences that are clear. It’s OK to make mistakes. See mistakes as an opportunity to learn.
Q: And how about three pieces of advice for kids?
A: Be a good listener. Be an independent thinker. Learn from your mistakes. It’s OK to not succeed all the time if you learn from your mistakes.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Elisabeth Rubinfien (’71) spent most of her school years in Japan, first attending Seisen International School, then Nishimachi International School, and finally ASIJ, where she graduated in 1973. After attending Pomona College in California, she returned to Japan regularly in the early 1980s on business, and lived there again from 1984 to 1990, working as a reporter for Reuters and then the Wall Street Journal. Her journalism career then took her to Moscow and finally back to California, where she spent twelve years as an editor at the San Jose Mercury News. Today she continues to live in Palo Alto with her husband and three sons, works in her local elementary school, and freelances as an editor and writer.