As I witnessed 7-year-old Ayame shed tears after not being selected as the drummer for a musical performance at her Tokyo public school, I remembered my own time as an elementary student in Osaka, Japan. As a young girl, I was timid and didn't quite fit in. In the Japanese public school system, I regularly faced challenges I was expected to overcome. Eventually, I became addicted to the satisfaction of accomplishment — whether it was through music performances or sports. I learned what it meant to be responsible and do my part for my community and a greater group, sometimes through empathetic support and other times through peer pressure. When I came to New York City to attend university and start my career, colleagues would frequently compliment me on my work ethic and teamwork skills. But I couldn't help but think that this was nothing special; it came naturally from my childhood in the Japanese elementary school system. That inspired my decade-long effort to share with the world what might be Japan's best-kept secret. My short documentary for Op-Docs, "Instruments of a Beating Heart," follows Ayame and her peers as they are tasked with a challenge at the end of the school year: to form an orchestra and perform "Ode to Joy" for the incoming class of first graders. On the last day of filming, we captured a remarkably profound conversation among Ayame and her peers. "What are we? Part of a beating heart?" she asks, moments before their big performance, which they have trained rigorously for. "We're each a piece of a heart. If one of us is unbalanced," a classmate answers, "we are no longer a heart." Ayame replies, "What unforgiving instruments we are." In that, we see the beauty and pressures of what this experience has taught them and, perhaps, a clue into why Japanese society is the way it is.
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