The Ceremony of Leaving

In Sacramento I graduated in May, outdoors, in a gown the colour of a traffic cone. There was a stage and a man reading four hundred names into a microphone, and at the end we threw our caps into the air and they came down somewhere we never bothered to retrieve them. Commencement, the programme called it. A beginning. We were facing forward, towards whatever came next, and nobody cried because crying would have been off-key.

The first March graduation I watched back in Japan was nothing like that. The gym was cold. Names were read one at a time, each student crossing the floor to receive a folder with both hands and a bow. Parents sat at the back in coats. And the whole thing pointed backward, not at what was beginning but at what was ending.

Two Words for One Day

English calls it commencement. The word means a start. You complete one thing so you can begin the next, and the ceremony is built around that hinge, the turning towards.

Japanese calls it sotsugyō. The characters mean finishing the course, leaving it behind. The emotional centre of the day is wakare - parting. Not "look what you've achieved" but "this is the last time we will all be in this room." Same milestone, opposite grammar. A door opening, a door closing. I didn't notice the gap until I'd stood on both sides of it.

Is the Japanese version sadder? I used to think so, and maybe it is. But there's something honest about a ceremony that admits the thing it is actually about. My Sacramento graduation pretended the future was the point. The March one knows the point is the people you're losing.

The Second Button

You may have heard about the second button. On a boy's gakuran - the black standing-collar uniform, all military lines, descended from a Prussian tunic - the buttons run in a column down the front. The second from the top sits nearest the heart. The story is that after the ceremony, a girl asks the boy she loves for that button, and giving it is a quiet confession without words.

It's a lovely image. It's also mostly gone.

A 2013 survey found that only about 6.5 per cent of teenage girls had ever received a second button, against roughly 21 per cent of women in their twenties and thirties. More than a third of teens said the custom didn't exist in their world at all^[1]. The decline has a practical cause. The gakuran itself is disappearing. In one set of Kyoto municipal junior highs, only four out of seventy-five still used the standing-collar uniform the button depends on; the rest had switched to blazers^[1]. No standing collar, no second button. You can't hand over what you aren't wearing.

There's a quieter cause too. Teachers in the same reporting pointed at smartphones. When nobody is ever really out of reach, the feeling that graduation means "we'll never meet again" loses its edge^[1]. The button only meant something when parting was final. It was a way of saying something you couldn't say to someone you might not see again.

Now you'll see them on a group chat by dinner.

So treat the second button as a thing people know about more than do. A custom that survives mainly in television dramas and the memory of older relatives, the way a particular song can outlast the occasion it belonged to.

Does that make it less real, a tradition kept alive on screen more than in school corridors? I'm not sure it does. It just makes it a different kind of real, the kind you inherit secondhand.

A Borrowed Tune

Which brings me to the song.

For most of the twentieth century the sound of a Japanese graduation was Hotaru no Hikari - "Glow of a Firefly." If you've heard it, you already know the melody, because it isn't Japanese. It's Auld Lang Syne, the Scottish farewell tune. Japanese lyrics were written over it and published in 1881, in a collection of school songs assembled during the Meiji rush to build a modern education system^[2]. Not a translation. A new song wearing a borrowed melody.

The lyrics open with light from fireflies and the glow off snow, an old image of poor students reading by whatever light they could find, studying through the night towards a parting. A Scottish drinking song about old friends, refitted as a Japanese hymn about leaving school.

It absorbed so completely that for generations nobody thought of it as foreign.

The companion song, Aogeba Tōtoshi, thanks the teachers. Its melody, it turns out, was traced in 2011 to an American tune printed in 1871^[3]. So both of the songs that felt most deeply, traditionally Japanese about a graduation were Western imports, naturalised so thoroughly the seams vanished.

And now they're going the same way the second button went. A survey found that while most people over fifty had sung Hotaru no Hikari and Aogeba Tōtoshi, people in their twenties overwhelmingly sang neither. Around ninety per cent of them had instead sung Tabidachi no Hi ni, a song written in 1991 by a principal and a music teacher at a junior high in Saitama as a surprise for their graduating class^[4]. The borrowed tune that displaced the native songs has itself been displaced, by a homegrown one barely older than I am.

Where the Song Survives

Hotaru no Hikari hasn't vanished, though. It's just moved.

You hear it now at closing time. Supermarkets, department stores, pachinko parlours. When they want to move you towards the exit without saying so, they pipe Hotaru no Hikari through the ceiling speakers. The song that once meant the end of school now means the shop is shutting and you should take your basket to the till. It's the last song on NHK's Kōhaku broadcast every New Year's Eve as well, the country's collective sign-off before midnight.

I find this perfect, in a bleak way. A farewell tune from Scotland, dressed as a Japanese graduation hymn, ending up as the polite noise that ushers you out of a konbini at eleven at night. The sound of an ending, kept on as the sound of leaving in general. You stand in the bright aisle, the music starts, and some part of you that learned this song at school understands before your brain does that it's time to go.

The Last Homeroom

The ceremony itself is formal and not especially moving: the cold gym, the names, the bows, the folder held in two hands.

The part people actually remember happens afterward, in the classroom. The saigo no homeroom, the last homeroom, when a class sits together one final time before it dissolves for good.

That's where the crying happens, if it happens. Not at the throwing of caps, because nobody throws caps. At the desks, in the room they've shared for three years, with the teacher saying whatever a teacher says when there's nothing left to teach.

I think about my own Sacramento graduation differently now. We were so busy facing forward that we never marked the loss. And there was a loss; I just didn't have a word for it yet. The Japanese ceremony gives you the word. Wakare. It sits you down in the cold gym and makes you say it out loud, one name at a time, before it lets you leave.

In a couple of weeks the same students will put on different uniforms and start somewhere new, and the calendar will call that a beginning. But March is for the leaving. The arriving can wait until April.