”Many schools in Japan control every aspect of their pupils' appearance, forcing pupils to dye their brown hair black, or not allowing pupils to wear tights or coats, even in cold weather. In some cases they even decide on the colour of pupils' underwear.”
Why not just keep it fun? More playing, less homework.
More playing? How will this prepare them for the real world where they’re expected to work 16 hour days.
I cannot shake the moment my Japanese acquaintances expressed incredulity that kids would actually play after school (or rather, that there was such a thing as after school play).
While many will try to tell you in some Orientalist fiction that this is inherent to the Japanese people, it’s actually more the byproduct of the postwar, American-designed order that rehabilitated the former fascists as a “conservative” parliamentary party and invested them with near unilateral power (including over schooling). Prior to this period and through various forms of popular resistance (up until about the 1970s), Japan was a hotbed of radicalism, producing some of the greatest artists and thinkers about the problems of modernity.
So powerful in fact was the JCP, that the American occupation force used the threat of its rising power to coerce the defeated fascists into alliance with them and constitute what is now know as the Liberal Democratic Party. From here, it was a mere matter of providing them with massive subsidies and intelligence gathered on their opponents on the left-
https://www.nytimes.com/1994/10/09/world/cia-spent-millions-...
-and use the resulting power to produce a social, political, and economic order that was conducive to US interests.
I’m not certain what you’re getting at with regard to being “foreign” to American ideology, but authoritarianism is certainly not, if evidenced only by its long history and support of right-wing, authoritarian regimes.
Authoritarianism is hardly "completely foreign" to America.
But even if we ignore this, US government has a long established pattern of supporting any movement that opposes left wing politics across the globe to the point of funding coups.
The list is very long: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_involvement_in_r...