Image in the original: Grave of the Fireflies (1988)
Imagine being sixteen and finding “logic” and “literature” presented as separate subjects.
It sounds reasonable at first. Essays and reports belong to logic. Novels and poems belong to literature.
But the distinction raises an awkward question.
Does literature contain no logic?
And is logical writing really free of interpretation, voice and imagination?
Japan has spent the past few years testing this division in its high schools.
The results suggest that the two may not be so easy to separate.
A curious experiment in Japanese education
In 2022, Japan reorganised the elective subjects in upper-secondary Japanese-language education.
One of the new courses was ronri kokugo, or “Logical Japanese.” It focuses mainly on argumentative, explanatory and practical texts.
Another was bungaku kokugo, or “Literary Japanese.” It centres on novels, poetry and other literary works.
Students do not make these choices in a vacuum. University entrance examinations strongly influence which subjects schools offer and which courses students take.
In 2025, the estimated enrolment rate for Logical Japanese was 77 per cent. For Literary Japanese, it was only 49 per cent. A separate course in classical Japanese and Chinese texts reached 87 per cent.
This does not necessarily mean that half of Japanese students dislike literature. It may simply mean that when examinations reward some forms of study more predictably than others, students and schools respond rationally.
What is optional is often the first thing to disappear.
The government is now reconsidering the structure. In May 2026, a Ministry of Education working group proposed a new course, provisionally called “Language and Culture II,” which would bring together much of what is currently divided between literary and classical study.
The experiment is already being revised.
Yet changing the names of the subjects will not solve the deeper problem. Before asking how much literature schools should teach, we need to ask what kind of reading they have been teaching.
When reading becomes a guessing game
In 2002, the Japanese literary magazine Bungakukai asked writers and scholars what they thought of the country’s Japanese-language textbooks.
Some of the answers were surprisingly critical. Several respondents wanted more emphasis on logical expression. Others said they would not oppose reducing the amount of literature in textbooks.
But their real target was not literature itself.
It was the familiar style of classroom instruction in which an apparently open question leads towards one authorised answer.
What is the protagonist feeling here?
Why did the character make this decision?
What did the author intend to say?
Students learn that somewhere behind the story sits a correct interpretation, already known to the teacher and probably printed in an instructional manual.
At that point, reading becomes less an encounter with a text than a game of guessing what the examiner wants.
There is a wonderful story about Akiyuki Nosaka, the author of Grave of the Fireflies.
His daughter once brought him a school assignment asking what the author had been feeling when he wrote the work. Here was a rare chance to obtain the answer directly from the source.
Nosaka reportedly explained that he had been under deadline pressure and had written it in a frenzy.
It was an honest answer.
It was probably not the answer the school expected.
The story exposes the problem with treating an author’s intention as a hidden code. Writers do not always fully understand what their work contains. Readers may notice patterns, tensions and implications that the writer did not consciously plan.
A novel becomes lifeless when students are taught that it contains one message and that the teacher possesses the key.
But not every interpretation is equally good
Rejecting a single correct interpretation does not mean that anything goes.
If I describe a character as cruel, I should be able to point to the words, actions or silences that led me there. I should ask whether another scene complicates that judgment. I should consider whether my own experience has caused me to notice one detail and overlook another.
A serious reading requires at least three things:
Say what you see.
Show where you see it.
Be willing to revise your reading.
That is not simply personal response. It is criticism.
A literary interpretation may not be provable in the same way as a mathematical answer. But it can still be stronger or weaker, more attentive or less attentive, well supported or poorly supported.
A reading can be personal without being arbitrary.
This is close to the definition of reading literacy used by the OECD’s PISA assessments. Reading involves more than understanding the literal meaning of a text. It also includes evaluating credibility, recognising the writer’s point of view, comparing conflicting accounts and revising one’s understanding.
Literature and logic were never natural enemies.
Perhaps literature teaches us to pause
Literature is often defended on the grounds that it develops empathy or sensitivity.
Perhaps it does. But that is not the only reason to read it.
Literature gives us practice in staying with a question before settling on an answer. It asks us to look again at a character we judged too quickly. It allows two readers to disagree and then return to the same page to examine why.
It does not tell us what to think.
It makes us more aware of how we arrived there.
That ability matters beyond literature, particularly now that artificial intelligence can summarise a long document in seconds and produce an answer that sounds orderly and complete.
A summary can tell us what a text says. It cannot decide, on our behalf, what deserves attention, what has been left out, or whether another reading would change the picture.
Those remain acts of judgment.
Japan’s curriculum debate therefore raises a question larger than the future of one school subject.
Do we want students to become good at identifying the expected answer?
Or do we want them to explain what they see, support it with evidence, listen to another reading and change their minds when necessary?
To read literature is not to guess the correct meaning.
It is to learn how to be responsible for an interpretation.
A society without literature does not necessarily become more logical.
It may simply become more easily satisfied by the first answer that sounds complete. ■
Sources
- Akihiko Wakayama, “What Does ‘Literature’ Mean for Japanese-Language Education?” (Nikkei, 24 August 2026; Japanese)
- Japan’s Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology, “Commentary on the Upper Secondary School Curriculum Guidelines” (Japanese)
- Japan’s Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology, “National Language Working Group: Ninth Meeting Materials” (11 May 2026; Japanese)
- OECD, “PISA 2018 Reading Framework”
First published on Substack on Sep 2, 2026 (JST). Archived here as part of the Fabio Caipirinha permanent archive (published on this site: Oct 15, 2026). Images from the original are omitted here pending rights clearance. Original: https://fabiocaipirinha.substack.com/p/why-did-japan-separate-literature
Cover image: Edo-period print of children learning to read and write (1790) (CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons — source)
