Where does a nation learn? Anthropologist John Singleton and a team of scholars went looking beyond Japan's schools — into Noh theaters, pottery workshops, a neighborhood garage, a public bathhouse, a baseball field and the boats of commercial shellfish divers.
Learning in Likely Places collects their field studies of apprenticeship in Japan. Singleton frames the book as a study of situated learning: knowledge acquired in the setting where it is used, among the people who use it.
The first part covers the traditional arts: the iemoto system that governs schools of the arts, Zeami's classic treatises on passing on Noh theater, the copybook method of the Kano painting school, and Gary DeCoker's seven characteristics of a traditional Japanese approach to learning.
The second part moves into artisanal apprenticeship — potters in Mashiko, mechanics in a neighborhood garage, physicians, and music teachers in the Suzuki tradition. The third looks at work and community: how women become commercial shellfish divers, what people learn at the public bathhouse, how children build their identities through local festivals. The final part includes baseball legend Oh Sadaharu learning to swing and Americans learning to work for a Japanese boss.
The epilogue, by David Plath, carries the book's theme in its title: "Calluses: When Culture Gets Under Your Skin."
Read a review of the book in The Journal of Asian Studies
Sources
Singleton, J. (Ed.). (1998). Learning in likely places: Varieties of apprenticeship in Japan. Cambridge University Press.
