The Japanese educational system gets a lot of bad press about overworked teachers burning out or bullied students dropping out. Films set in schools here also typically portray the educational process as a boring grind full of disengaged students and droning teachers.
In her documentary “The Making of a Japanese,” Ema Ryan Yamazaki presents a more positive view of the country’s schools taken from hundreds of hours of footage shot in an elementary school in Tokyo’s Setagaya Ward from April 2021 to March 2022.
The teachers face challenges — one confesses on camera that he may not be cut out for the job — but are all dedicated and caring. And the first and sixth graders the film profiles have their struggles, from a first-grade girl who bursts into tears after being scolded by a teacher for a botched cymbal performance to a worried sixth grade boy on the cusp of adolescence who says he would rather remain a child.
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