The ambassador answered in a way I like to hear: “I don’t know,” he said. “I might suppose something, but I don’t know if it’s true. The people of Japan believed they had only one way of moving up: to have their children educated more than they were; that it was very important for them to move out of their peasantry to become educated. So there has been a great energy in the family to encourage the children to do well in school, and to be pushed forward. Because of this tendency to learn things all the time, new ideas from the outside would spread through the educational system very easily.
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