Back when I was a kid growing up in Liverpool, we studied only the subjects that were essential for daily life: namely Numbers, Words, Throwing, and of course a selection of moves from the 1983 romantic drama Flashdance. There was no time for art or creativity, and we were only ever allowed outdoors to collect firewood or when the time came to offer up a sacrifice to The Beast.
So it’s great to see that school kids in Japan are given a chance to learn the things that really matter, like identifying a Japanese rhinoceros beetle from a lineup of frightening, hopefully imaginary, creatures.
A photo shared on Twitter by user @aya_vln yesterday shows what appears to be a page from a child’s school exercise book. Judging by the fact that most of the words are written entirely in phonetic script and that the single kanji character present comes with furigana (the phonetic reading written above it), we’re guessing that this book is intended for kids of around age five or six.
The question photographed asks kids to draw a circle (the Japanese equivalent of a check mark) inside the box below the correct insect, asking them to identify the kabuto mushi, or Japanese rhinoscerous beetle. What is startling – besides the fact that, as the Twitter user points out, no kid is ever going to get it wrong – is that rather than using two other types of real beetle for the two wrong answers, the creator of the learning materials has thrown in what can only be described as two utterly nightmarish creatures, including one with horse legs and another looking like an Ohmu from the Studio Ghibli animation Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind.
Clearly someone wanted to be a manga artist and ended up knocking up creepy doodles for kids’ textbooks… <shudder>
