Hey everyone! I’m an elementary school teacher from Texas, and I’ve always loved the concept of “o-soji” (please correct me if that’s not the correct word!) in Japanese schools. I find it fascinating and would like to propose implementing a similar practice at my school. However, I’d like to learn more about how it works in Japanese schools and gather insights from educators who have experience with this cleaning time.
I’m particularly interested in understanding:
1. How o-soji is organized and scheduled in Japanese schools.
2. The specific tasks and responsibilities assigned to students during o-soji.
3. The benefits and impact of implementing o-soji on the school community and student development.
4. Any challenges or considerations to keep in mind when starting o-soji at an elementary school.
If any Japanese teachers or educators familiar with the practice could share their experiences, tips, or any relevant resources, I would greatly appreciate it. Your insights will help me propose this idea to my school administration and make a positive change in our learning environment.
Thank you in advance for your support and guidance!
12 comments
Typical tasks:
Sweeping
Wiping the floor with wet rags
Wiping the chalkboard with wet rags
Cleaning the chalkboard erasers
In theory, it’s great that the kids are cleaning. In practice nothing gets truly clean because the kids tend to not be very efficient at using brooms, and the rags don’t get cleaned that often
Unfortunately the tasks are mostly performative, and very commonly schools don’t hire janitorial staff so the teachers have to come in behind the kids and do the actual cleaning.
The west likes to see the Facebook videos about how collectively responsible the kids are, and how it builds character and respect for shared spaces and comment things like “see that’s why kids here are so bad, we need to do that”. The reality is that kids are kids, and a 7 year old is about as good and responsible about cleaning their classroom as you’d predict a 7 year old to be.
Won’t you be prevented or at least limited with liability laws? If a kid or injures themself whilst cleaning, who is liable. I think this is what prevents this type of activity in many western countries. Also it’s a religious ritual that has remain in much of Asia so that might also be an issue. I’m a teacher here and I notice when the kids are doing it, they aren’t doing it because they like it, they’re doing it because it’s part of the curriculum, sure it has benefits but don’t think the schools are spotlessly clean by any means. Where you can visibly see, appear clean because the same spot has been cleans for decades by 100s of kids, look in the other places and it’s pretty grim. In all honesty the kids learn the least amount of effort by and individual in a group action is fine as long as you appear to be participating, you are even though the participation level is unequal. Companies do it as well, factories will stop production, staff will clean the building inside and out at a huge cost, more than a cleaner but that’s irrelevant, it’s the collective group think and sharing the burden that they are after. School is like that too, drumming into the kids, duty, obligation, societal norms, conforming, being Japanese. Junior high and high school is where Japanese kids learn to be Japanese, education is second to that. It is changing as kids are rejecting the system and group thinking mentality of Japan. America is more focused on individuality and individual pursuits.
Soji and o-soji are different things. Soji is daily cleaning, usually sweeping up dust, picking up things from the floor, and cleaning the white board/chalk board. O-soji (“big cleaning”) is once a semester, usually on the last day, cleaning everything that doesn’t get done in daily soji. At schools I’ve been at this can include scrubbing/waxing the floors, mopping, washing windows, dusting out of the way surfaces, scraping up chewing gum students secretly stashed where they thought no one would look because it’s against the rules, etc.
Its effectiveness varies wildly from school to school and student cohort to cohort. Commentators like to propose that diligent cleaning magically comes with Japanese culture, but that’s a rookie mistake. Often I see classrooms where the teachers don’t put a lot of time into teaching students how to clean and what minimum standard of cleaning is acceptable quickly wind up with pigsties for classrooms the moment their backs are turned. It’s not like any pre-adolescent in the world wants to spend time cleaning, especially when they are used to adults doing it for them.
So good luck implementing it. I respect your idea, but please know that if you aren’t planning to dedicate a lot of teacher time to making students do it right, you’re not going to actually save any adults any time. One way or another, maintaining clean classrooms requires paid, skilled, adult labor.
For daily soji, my experience is that it’s mostly kids pushing dirt around with a broom on the floors and playing in the halls for 10-20 minutes after classes. I worked at a private school with elementary-high school, and after the elementary school kids went home, their teachers spent an hour or so cleaning up the mess.
O-soji was once per term, and was stuff like waxing the floor, cleaning AC filters, wiping windows, etc.
What it instills is better than what it accomplishes.
– To instill a sense of pride in your space, in your school. That’s good.
– To expect meaningful cleaning to get done in fifteen minutes increments of daily routine. . . not so much.
Teams are assigned to different sections of the school where they sweep, dust, and wipe. The team is usually a mix of one or two students per grade level and the section is usually a single room and adjacent hall space.
Efficiency has less to do with the children, and more to do with Japan using straw brooms and old rags with water. If your school has vacums? If older students are allowed to use cleaning products? If there’s a sense of genuine direction from staff? You could actually probably pretty up the place at least a little in that window.
I taught in a junior high school for about 5 years over here.
1. Cleaning takes places either after lunch time or at the end of the day after the last period ends but before students are officially dismissed for the day. As for organization, within each class, some students are assigned cleaning tasks within the classroom while others are assigned to clean outside. Outside cleaning includes the hallway, bathrooms, and even the garden areas.
2. Classroom cleaning involves pushing all of the desks into one half of the classroom, sweeping and wiping the floors, then pushing all of the desks onto the other side and sweeping and wiping again. Students will also erase and wipe the blackboards and clean the blackboard erasers. Cleaning outside of the classroom involves sweeping and wiping down the hallway, some of the windows, the bathroom area (just the sink, not the toilets), and the outdoor/garden areas (picking up dead leaves, sweeping).
3. Creates a sense of community and team work, I guess? A sense of independence that they can do something on their own?
4. This will depend on your school environment. It’s just a new routine your students will have to get accustomed to doing. How are you gonna sell this to parents? That’s what I’d worry about. I can imagine some parents flipping out at the thought of their kid being told to clean.
Like others have mentioned, this is mostly performative. Students here aren’t allowed to use detergents or any type of chemical. It’s better to think of this as “tidying up” as opposed to “serious cleaning”.
Good luck!
I think that kids taking part in cleaning is great. Any cleaning on their part is better than none. With that said, having been teaching here for almost two years, I also think every day is a bit excessive if the goal is to develop a sense of responsibility and a pride in work well done.
Cleaning time is every day after lunch and, though every kid is different, it’s very much a chore for them. The ordeal only takes about 15 minutes and they often half-arse it, so nothing ever gets properly cleaned. They’re expected to report on what they each did (even as elementary students) and to hold little debriefing meetings. If they don,t do all these things, they’ll be reprimanded. It’s a lot of fuss for a shit job and I think it misses the mark.
Instead of properly cleaning the place, they just dust and fluff.
Instead of taking responsibility, they suffer obligation or coercion.
Instead of being proud of their work, they just breeze through it to “pass the test”.
It’s symptomatic of Japan’s main concern being appearances, conformity and hierarchy.
I think it would be much better if the kids took a full period or two once every other week or once a month to actually scrub their classrooms. I remember that doing so when I was a kid in Québec always felt like a bit of an event and it really allowed us to see the difference our work made. We worked together and gave it the best we could alongside our teachers. Instead of being assigned tasks, we’d often take turns volunteering with what we preferred and we’d support each other regardless. We certainly could’ve cleaned more often and it might’ve been good for us to do so a little outside our classrooms, but still it achieved the goal in my case.
I was a primary school teacher in the UK before coming to Japan. I always scheduled a 10-minute tidy before the end of every day and the kids knew what to get on with. Same with a bigger cleaning session at the end of each term. I never picked up after my class, our room was our collective responsibility.
I do think the cleaning system works well in Japan. None of my schools here have carpet, so it’s easier to sweep and mop. My UK schools (with very little budget) all paid for a cleaning company to vacuum and clean the bathrooms.
Kids here start cleaning from 1st grade, so they know what’s expected of them. Obviously it’s not as good as a professional clean, but little and often adds up and encourages them to keep the school tidy. It’s impressive how everyone (including adults) drops everything to clean for 10 minutes.
Our 1st to 6th graders wipe the tables and sinks with damp rags (no cleaning solution, just water), sweep the outside stairs, entrance, etc with brooms, use the vaccuum cleaner, straighten up games on the games shelf, straighten the books on the bookshelf, use a Swiffer style mop on the floors, pick up trash and put it in trash cans, tie-up trash bags and bring them to the teacher in charge of trash on trash day, etc.
If kids make a mess, they always clean it by themselves. Erasers crumbs on a desk? They clean it up. Crayon on a desk? They wipe it themselves. Art supplies? They clean it by themselves. Spilled some food at lunch? They clean it up.
I don’t let my students go to their next class until their space has been approved as cleaned properly by me. Including the 5 year olds. I don’t expect age-inappropriate levels of cleaning, but K-6 kids are fully capable of picking up after themselves mostly.
Lots of US kids don’t clean up after themselves, and this is a big part of why janitors have to clean up so much IME.
I work at a private jhs. My students do use some milder chemicals, I guess because they are well behaved enough they won’t go spraying them at each other. I am in charge of toilets (woo) which everyone hates. Some kids do it properly and others try to cut corners. They empty the trash, wipe the toilet bowl, wipe the toilet seat etc
Private schools generally have cleaning companies come in on top of the kids though. This is probably because when I worked in public schools they were varying levels of gross. The public school buildings are not great to begin with for the most part (old), the kids don’t clean properly and the teachers are too tired/overworked to do any more. There is a maintenance person but they don’t clean.
Hi!
Firstly, just to clarify as some other comments have, there is a difference between Ōsōji (大掃除), Osōji (お掃除) and Sōji (掃除). Ōsōji is done at the end of semester or end of year (it differs by each school). Osōji and sōji are just cleaning (they mean the same thing).
Secondly, the main tasks are: 1. Cleaning the floor (brooms or wet rags), 2. Cleaning the tables (wet rags), 3. Cleaning the chalkboard/whiteboard with the erasers, 4. Cleaning the erasers, 5, Wiping the windows with wet rags, 6. Throwing away trash.
In my school, the teacher assigned 7 people to each day (e.g. I cleaned on Thursdays). Out of the seven, we all had a silent agreement as to who did what (I did the windows).
The main reasons why Osoji is implemented at Japanese schools are this: it creates a sense of responsibility, it ingrains hard work at an early age, it creates thoughtfulness, and it helps kids with their teamwork abilities.
However, it may be extremely hard to implement this system in an American school, or just any other schools in a different country. The reason why this works in Japan is because it’s been so normalized that kids don’t know any different. They don’t complain because the thought of not doing it never crossed their minds. Many schools make 6th graders clean with 1st graders to teach how normal it is. Considering many of your students are flabbergasted with the mere thought of cleaning up after themselves, it could be very difficult.
My suggestion is to slowly create a sense of cleanliness. Take baby steps. One day, when cleaning doesn’t seem like a foreign concept, implement the Osoji system. If you implement it too fast, it would rather create negative feelings within the students to clean in general.