Learning from Ms. Shihioka Urushi about empowering women

According to Atusushi Kodera in Japan Today newspaper of 6^th October, 2014, history was created when Evernote Corp. CEO Phil Libin, a successful Silicon Valley entrepreneur visited Tokyo’s Shinagawa Joshi Gakuin in May and addressed around 100 students. The combined junior and senior high school for girls came under the media spotlight - not only because it was unusual for a successful Silicon Valley entrepreneur to visit a girls’ school, but also because of the progressive nature of the school. However, it was not the first time the school had drawn media attention. Earlier coverage focused on Urushi’s achievement of dramatically turning around the 89-year-old school, which at one point had come close to collapse.

Starting from the current school year, all of the roughly 200 second-year students in high school are provided with an iPad miniature tablet computer loaded with Evernote software, which the school introduced in October 2013. With the use of the Evernote “cloud” they are able to share text, graphics and videos from classes. A question posed by a student is answered by classmates or the teacher. Students even discuss social issues with their counterparts at cooperating schools in Australia and Singapore.

Principal Shihoko Urushi felt that she should had in mind about the world and the future of her students, who will as adults play important roles for Japan in 20-30 years from now. She admitted that she is not particularly technology minded thought. In the changing demographics and social environment in the future, her thoughts are on the kind of people required to carry out the information technology at that point that will be as basic as reading, writing and arithmetic.”

The great-grand daughter of Masako Urushi, founder of what is now Shinagawa Joshi Gakuin and a pioneer of women’s education, chose to teach Japanese in Tokyo in another school rather than managing Shinagawa Joshi Gakuin after graduating from college. Things took an unexpected turn when she learned that the girls’ school, which then operated separate junior and senior highs, was suffering a serious decline in enrollment that was so bad one year its junior high school had only five students. In the late 1980s, Urushi heard her mother had terminal cancer. That helped persuade her to jump ship and join the schools where her parents worked, with a new determination to save it. She launched sweeping reforms that turned the school around in seven years, raising applications 60-fold and the school’s “deviation value,” which indicates the degree of difficulty in entering the school, by 20 points.

The reforms included ditching the old-fashioned uniform, a middy blouse, in favor of a stylish plaid shirt. The junior high and senior high schools were then combined and renamed Shinagawa Joshi Gakuin. The premises were then rebuilt to give the school a more modern look. She feels the change was more philosophical than institutional.

Simply put, the success of the turnaround revolved on a return to their first principles and they were aimed at giving women an education that would enable them to play a significant role in society. It is best understood in the ethos introduced in 2003 known as ‘28 Project’ brought the school back is a restatement of this mission in a modern context: It declares that graduates should become significant players in society by the time they are 28 years old. Urushi said., “That founding spirit had kept the school alive even through the war, and this made us view it with respect. Another important factor may be that we didn't give up and kept trying.”

This is the age, says Urushi, when women typically become capable of putting what they have learned to more effective use at work, but it also represents the age at which women typically give birth for the first time — or become aware of their biological clock. In either case, it is the time when women start trying to balance work with their private lives.

“As many as 60 percent of working women quit work (after giving birth), and only 20 to 30 percent resume it at their former career level,” Urushi said. “I think women should aim for a specialist job or a job that needs a qualification, because that helps ensure they can go back to the same work.”

She mentioned a former student who became a certified public accountant upon graduation and started working for an accounting company. She gave birth in her first year on the job without worrying about her career because she was eminently qualified.

Today, a strong investment in Internet technology is just one thing that sets Shinagawa Joshi Gakuin apart from its rivals. For example, the school is also known for assigning projects where students work directly with business people.

In 2013, for example, groups of students worked with Itoham Foods Inc. to develop three ready-to-serve packaged products for the company, including Karatamacchi, a unique fried chicken stuffed with egg filling. The products went on sale nationwide in March.

In 2008, a group of 42 students from both schools learned about media promotion in a lecture from Kadokawa Pictures Inc. and took on the promotion and public relations activities for the film “Dive!” and the novel it was based on.

For Urushi, the knowledge and cooperation provided by businesses complements for teachers’ lack of experience outside the education world. It forms part of what she thinks is one of the school’s most important functions: connecting with society.

Despite the fact that students embark on various careers, teachers themselves typically remain confined to their jobs because they start teaching classes right after college. This, Urushi says, makes them ineffective at teaching business, which is where many of their students end up.

Nurturing women who can continue their careers after childbirth is just what is needed to achieve Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s goal of bringing more women into the shrinking workforce as the population grays. Urushi, however, thinks that goal won’t be achieved unless day care services are expanded.

Some women’s empowerment this! And with a new vision to compliment Prime Minster Shinzo Abe's vision of ‘Abenomics’ in Japan!  This is what is required in India too, to be taken up by all of us. Mahatma Gandhi had shown us the way with his experiments of Nai Taleem /Basic Education, that is skill oriented education, which India never adopted. It is high time to understand and Act according to Gandhiji  instructions.