Nine Years of Cleaning My Own Classroom

I did not want to clean.

For nine years, the bell at the end of the school day did not send us home. It sent us to our brooms and our buckets. Six years of elementary school, three years of junior high. Every child raised in Japan goes through this. If you know someone who grew up here, ask them whether they cleaned their own classroom for nine years. They will say yes, and they will not find the question strange.

What I hated most came in winter. On wiping duty, you carried a bucket to the tap, filled it, wet a rag in the cold water, wrung it out, and went over the shelves and the desks. Not your own desk only. Everyone’s. You wiped a classmate’s desk as carefully as your own, the cold rag pressed flat, since a desk half wiped was worse than a desk not touched. In winter the water was so cold that your hands felt as if they might come apart at the knuckles, and I wrung that rag with my fingers already aching, resenting every second of it.

And then I would look down into the bucket. The water had gone brown. I had been certain the desks were clean, and the proof that they were not sat right there, clouding the water I had carried in clear a few minutes before. It happened with the broom, too. You swept a floor you were sure held nothing, tipped the dustpan, and there was far more than nothing in it, a grey drift of dust. That is how I learned the room was dirty. Looking had assured me it was clean. My cold hands and the browning water taught me otherwise, and they did it by making me do the thing I did not want to do.

You might ask why I kept at something I hated. No one punished us for skipping it. There was no detention, no mark set against your name. We did it because we had done it together since the first week of elementary school, every child in the room, year after year, until it stopped being a thing you could question and became simply what you did when the lessons ended.

Something else came with the cold water, though I only understood it much later. On the days I was not on duty, my desk was already clean when I sat down, because someone else had wiped it. It was always clean. And because I knew the cold of that water from my own turns at the bucket, I could not take the clean desk as my due. Somebody’s hands had been in the cold for it. That left a small gratitude in me where I might otherwise have felt nothing.

I grew up hearing that this custom came down from the temple schools of the Edo period, an unbroken thread from some older and wiser Japan. That story is comfortable, and mostly untrue. The deeper root is the Zen idea of samu（作務) physical labour – sweeping, cooking, and repair, treated as the practice itself rather than as chores to clear out of the way before the real practice begins. What I performed as a boy was not ancient. It was written into the national curriculum after the war by planners assembling a new country. By the time it reached me, it had stopped looking like a rule at all. It was only what you did when the lessons ended, as ordinary as taking your shoes off at the door.

That ordinariness shaped me more than any lesson I sat through. Because I cleaned, dropping rubbish came to feel like a small shame, close to how a lie feels like a small shame. No rule produced that. Litter on the ground is simply work left undone, and the work was always ours. Cleaning was never a thing a paid stranger did after we went home. That single fact, set early and repeated for nine years, follows a person onto every train platform and into every borrowed room for the rest of their life.

There was another floor I wiped in those years, and no one ever forced me to.

From the age of six, I trained in kendo at a police dojo in Kobe. Some mornings, I would arrive early, certain I was the first, and find the boards already occupied, three or four others down on all fours, pushing wrung-out rags from one end of the hall to the other at a half-sprint. We had no mops then. You folded yourself over the cloth, pressed it flat with both hands, and ran.

No one assigned this. No teacher checked, and skipping it carried no penalty at all. But the dojo was a place we held as sacred, and wiping its floor was simply part of being there, no different from the bow at the threshold. It never once arrived as a choice. I cleaned, and two feelings grew in me while I did.

The first was plain: everyone else was down on the boards, so I could hardly be the one boy who stood and watched. The second was slower, and it has stayed with me longer. The work was cold and unpleasant, and because it was unpleasant, it felt right to be among the ones who took it up rather than the ones who waited to be told. You do not leave the thing people dislike for someone else to carry.

At school, I had been made to clean, and something in me pulled against it the whole time. At the dojo, no one made me, and I knelt to the cold boards willingly. The sacred floor gave the same cold labour a weight the classroom never troubled to give it. And so I had to give up an idea I had carried for years without examining it, that people clean only when they are forced to. Take the force away and the cleaning does not stop. Someone begins, unbidden, and the rest fold down beside him.

I have turned this over for a long time and cannot make it come out clean. I cannot even pretend the dojo was a fair test. Every boy on those boards had already spent years with a school rag in his hand. Perhaps the reverence I felt was real, and perhaps it was only the school reflex in better clothes, showing itself where no one was made to do anything. I have never been able to decide which.

Once a month, I take a bag around the Momozono garden at Osaka Castle with my neighbours, on our own time, though the city keeps a cleaning department that does the same job. When I watch them bent over it, none of them ever asking why they are giving up a Sunday morning to this, I feel the two things I felt as a boy.

There is the pride, which is real and which I will not pretend away. And under it, there is something colder. From a step back it can look like conditioning. It can look like a mouth full of teeth straightened in childhood, even and faintly unnatural, corrected long before the child was asked whether straight teeth were wanted.

Then I remember the dojo, where no one straightened anything, and the boys went down onto the boards anyway. Both pictures are true. I cannot lay one over the other and make them agree.

I am glad I was made to clean. I will say that without softening it. And I have stopped waiting for the gladness to answer the harder thing, which is whether it was right to require this of every child in the country, the ones it suited and the ones it did not, before a single one of us was old enough to be asked.

And I have no way to check the answer. There is no Japanese my age who was spared this, no unswept version of me or of anyone raised here to set beside the swept one. Ask whoever you like: they cleaned for nine years, which leaves me nothing to weigh the nine years against. A whole country, and not one of us was left out of it. Seen from outside, that may be stranger than the cleaning itself.

What I am left with is smaller than a verdict. The resentment and the habit did not arrive one after the other, the hating first and the gratitude later, the way these stories are supposed to go. They came together, two sides of one motion, and they have never come apart.

I am sixty-one now. I have forgotten the faces of most of the teachers from those years, and I have not forgotten the cold. Bring my hands near cold water in winter and the whole of it returns, the ache in the knuckles, the brown clouding the bucket, as near as yesterday. The room was dirtier than I thought. I found that out only because someone stood over me until I wiped it, and I still do not know whether I needed them there. I only know that I never stopped being the boy they stood over, and that whoever I am now was built around him.

Takeshi Kitagawa heads the SHIBUMIWORKS PROJECT, which aims to introduce Japanese culture. Rooted in his years of Kendo, Zen, and Shinto practice, the project explores whether these traditions have anything real to offer modern life―without pretending they have all the answers.
English is not my first language; I use AI as a linguistic tool to bridge that gap. The thinking is mine. The words are a collaboration.