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The more Japan's global relevance in economic, political and military terms seems to decline, the more it cares about projecting soft power. The government's "Cool Japan" project subsidizes "attractive products or services" that, according to the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry, "make full use of the unique characteristics of Japanese culture and lifestyle." These include decorative washi paper, a cosplay-inspired clothing brand and a bonsai plant grown with renewable energy.
日本在全球经济、政治和军事领域的重要性看似下滑得越厉害，它就越关心如何展示自己的软实力。政府推出了“酷日本”(Cool Japan)计划。经济产业省表示，该计划资助那些“充分利用了日本文化和生活方式独特性的诱人产品或服务”。其中包括装饰和纸、角色扮演风格的服装品牌，以及使用可再生能源的盆栽。
Despite this concern, both the Japanese government and the Japanese people seem unaware of the global impact of Japan's most successful cultural export to date: the so-called Suzuki Method of music instruction.
尽管存在这种担忧，但日本政府和公众似乎都不知道，迄今为止，日本最成功的文化输出——名为“铃木教学法”(Suzuki Method)的一种音乐教学方式——具有怎样的全球影响力。
Originally conceived in the 1930s by the violinist Shinichi Suzuki, the Suzuki Method proposes that all children can learn to play an instrument as naturally as they learn to speak their native language. According to the Talent Education Research Institute, an educational organization founded by Mr. Suzuki, about 400,000 children in 46 countries are now learning to play musical instruments the Suzuki way. But just 20,000 of them are Japanese. As the institute puts it, the method "has earned high acclaim overseas, more so than at home."
这个方法最初由小提琴家铃木镇一(Shinichi Suzuki)在20世纪30年代提出。它主张，所有小孩都能学会演奏乐器，就像他们学会讲自己的母语一样。铃木镇一创办了才能教育研究会(Talent Education Research Institute)。该教育机构的资料显示，目前在46个国家有40万儿童正在铃木教学法的帮助下学习演奏乐器，其中仅有2万儿童是日本人。研究会指出，和在日本国内相比，该方法“在海外赢得了很高的评价”。
It's not the first time the Japanese seem to miss what of theirs is worth celebrating and need to be told by outsiders. Ukiyo-e woodblock prints were used as wrapping paper for export wares when Japan began trading with the Western world in the second half of the 19th century. They were soon "discovered" by European Impressionist painters, who hailed them as a distinct art form. Modern Japan has repeatedly overlooked the merits of its own artistic and cultural production out of a blinding insecurity about its international standing.
日本似乎不知道自己的哪些方面值得珍视，反而需要外界来告知他们。这种情况已经不是第一次出现了。19世纪下半叶，日本开始与西方世界进行贸易往来时，浮世绘木版画被用来包装出口商品。欧洲的印象派画家很快就“发现”了它们，将其誉为一种独特的艺术形式。由于对自身的国际声誉存在一种盲目的不安全感，日本在近现代一再忽视自己的艺术和文化成就。
The Suzuki pedagogy was misunderstood from its very beginnings in the 1930s. Upon returning to Tokyo from Berlin, where he had spent most of his twenties, Mr. Suzuki found himself in high demand as a teacher. His first young pupils were conspicuously more skilled than others at the time — when classical musicians of any age were rare in Japan — and were soon heralded by the Japanese media as prodigies and geniuses.
从20世纪30年代诞生开始，铃木教学法就遭到误解。铃木镇一20到30岁之间的大部分时间都在柏林度过，返回东京之后，有很多人想聘请他为师。他最初培养的一批年轻学生，明显比其他人更娴熟——当时在日本，任何年龄段的古典音乐演奏者都很罕见——而且很快就被日本媒体誉为神童和天才。
Mr. Suzuki abhorred such terms. He believed that the sheer joy of making music or learning just about anything was accessible to all children. There was a pastoral element to his approach: Its main goal was not to mass-produce professional musicians but rather to mold individuals into sensitive and thoughtful human beings with "noble hearts."
铃木镇一讨厌这样的说法。他认为，搞音乐或学习任何东西都会带来纯粹的快乐感，也是所有孩子都可以享受到的。他的教学方式具有一种田园风格：主要目的不是为了批量培养专业音乐人，而是把个人塑造成敏感周到、有“高贵心灵”的人。
In "Powerful Education," published in September 1941, Mr. Suzuki called for reforming Japan's educational system; he argued that teachers were too quick to give up on children who lagged behind. He stressed the importance while, say, learning to play the violin of goal-setting, encouragement and repetition.
铃木镇一1941年9月发表《强大的教育》(Powerful Education)一文，呼吁改革日本的教育体系；他表示，老师们太急于放弃功课落后的孩子。他强调，在学习演奏小提琴等技能的过程中，设定目标、鼓励和反复练习很重要。
But this was too bold a proposal for the time. The Japanese empire had already embarked on its ill-conceived expansionist path, having started a war with China in 1937. Some of Mr. Suzuki's young students were called unpatriotic for playing music during a national emergency.
但是这个建议太超前了。当时日本帝国已经开始进行恶意扩张，在1937年与中国开了战。由于在国家处于非常时刻之际演奏音乐，铃木镇一的一些年轻学生被说成不爱国。
In this oppressive atmosphere, the kind of sweeping change Mr. Suzuki envisioned, which required re-educating the educators, did not go down well. As Japan was beginning to lose yet another war it had started, this one against the United States and its allies, he wrote another book urging elementary school reform. The authorities prevented its publication.
在这种压抑的氛围下，铃木镇一设想中需要对教育者进行再教育的彻底改革没有被众人接受。日本也对美国及其盟友开了战，当它在这场战争中露出败象时，铃木镇一写了另一本书，呼吁对小学进行改革。当局阻止了该书的出版。
The war eventually ended and then, in March 1955, less than 10 years after Japan's utter defeat, Mr. Suzuki gathered some 1,200 children in a gymnasium in Tokyo. Black-and-white footage shows the 56-year-old Suzuki doing some lithe footwork on a makeshift podium and waving his bow like a wizard's wand as he conducts the young violinists through difficult pieces, including Bach's Double Concerto.
战争终于结束了。在1955年3月，距离日本战败不到10年的时间，铃木镇一把1200名儿童聚集在东京的一座体育馆内。黑白画面显示，56岁的铃木站在一个临时搭建的讲台上，当年轻的小提琴学生演奏一个又一个困难曲目时，比如巴赫的二重协奏曲，他会一边步履轻盈地走动，一边挥舞着琴弓，就像挥舞魔杖一样，指导学生们演奏。
News of this group concert, the first Suzuki performance to attract national attention, reached the United States. American instructors traveled to Mr. Suzuki's music school in Matsumoto, a scenic mountain town, hoping to discover the secrets of this Japanese miracle.
通过这次团体演奏，铃木镇一首次吸引了全日本的关注，并让消息传到了美国。美国教师前往铃木镇一音乐学校的所在地——风景秀丽的山地城市松本——希望能发现这个日本奇迹的秘密。
That concert was deemed all the more remarkable in the United States for seeming incongruous, because it featured Japanese children playing Western instruments. What's more, had those young Japanese been born a few years earlier, they could easily have been among the soldiers American forces had fought. The Suzuki children represented the rebirth of a softer, gentler kind of Japan.
这场演奏会在美国引起的反响甚至比在日本更加强烈，因为它给人的感觉似乎不太协调，首先这是日本孩子在演奏西洋乐器，而更重要的是，如果这些年轻的日本人早几年出生，就很可能会和美国军队交火。铃木镇一学校的这些儿童，代表了更温和、更文雅的那部分日本精神的重生。
The rest of the world eventually took to the method because it worked. Starting in 1963, Mr. Suzuki regularly toured the United States with his Japanese students, stopping at the United Nations headquarters and Carnegie Hall. The Japanese government had little to do with this cross-cultural dissemination: Much of it was the work of Mr. Suzuki and his supporters, including Masaru Ibuka, Sony's co-founder and himself a great early-childhood education advocate. By the 1970s, the Suzuki Method had become a worldwide phenomenon. Even in remote areas of India and Indonesia, places with no properly trained music teachers, people were learning to play instruments on their own, thanks to Suzuki-compiled repertoires of incremental difficulty.
世界上的其他地方最终采用了铃木教学法，因为它效果很好。从1963年开始，铃木镇一多次带着日本学生到美国交流，还去过联合国总部和卡内基音乐厅。对于这种跨文化传播活动，日本政府几乎没有参与，大部分工作都是铃木镇一及其支持者开展的。其中包括索尼公司联合创始人井深大(Masaru Ibuka)，他本人就是著名的儿童早期教育倡导者。到了20世纪70年代，铃木教学法已经在全球遍地开花。就连在印度和印度尼西亚的一些偏远地区，虽然缺乏训练有素的音乐教师，人们也可以使用铃木镇一编排的难度递增的曲谱，自学乐器演奏。
In June 1979, when President Jimmy Carter visited Japan with his family, his daughter Amy had a group lesson with Mr. Suzuki's niece, Hiroko Suzuki (the current president of the Talent Education Research Institute). At a time of heightening U.S.-Japanese trade friction, the episode marked a diplomatic success. Yet Mr. Suzuki was unsuccessful in his attempts to convince successive Japanese prime ministers to incorporate his approach in public education. In Japan, his method continued to be seen as a program for the exceptionally gifted.
1979年6月，时任美国总统吉米·卡特(Jimmy Carter)携家人访问日本。他的女儿埃米(Amy)和铃木镇一的侄女铃木裕子（Hiroko Suzuki，才能教育研究会的现任会长）一起参加了一堂集体课。在美日贸易摩擦不断加剧的时期，这件事标志着一个外交胜利。然而，铃木镇一却未能说服日本历届首相，把自己的方法纳入公共教育。日本人仍然认为，铃木教学法适合培养天赋秉异的学生。
Japan's long failure to claim as its own a globally attractive philosophy like Mr. Suzuki's reveals its chronic inability to see what is “cool” about itself.
长久以来，日本都未能宣扬本国具有全球吸引力的理念，铃木镇一的教学法就是一个例子。这暴露了日本在看清自己究竟哪些地方“酷”方面的长期无能。
This stands in stark contrast to Venezuela's publicly funded music education program El Sistema. That method also celebrates the idea that music can change the lives of children from diverse backgrounds. The parallel is not surprising since Takeshi Kobayashi brought the Suzuki Method to Venezuela in the late 1970s, teaching a group of underprivileged children to play in an orchestra. But unlike the Japanese government, the Venezuelan government has consistently funded this cultural endeavor since the mid-1970s.
这与委内瑞拉政府资助的音乐教育计划“El Sistema”形成了鲜明的对比。该方法也主张，音乐可以改变孩子们的生活，无论他们的背景如何。它与铃木镇一的理念相类似。这并不奇怪，因为上世纪70年代末，小林武史(Takeshi Kobayashi)把铃木教学法带到了委内瑞拉，帮助那里的弱势儿童组成乐队，演奏音乐。但与日本政府不同的是，委内瑞拉政府自70年代中期开始，就一直在为这种文化事业提供资助。
The El Sistema movement is even making inroads in Japan. The Soma Children's Orchestra and Chorus was established after the 2011 earthquake and tsunami ravaged the northeastern part of Japan, to encourage children there to make music communally. Now Japanese are taking up El Sistema: They recognize the merits of the method because it is dressed in exotic garb, unaware that it has long been in their midst.
El Sistema运动甚至开始进驻日本了。2011年日本东北部遭遇地震和海啸灾难之后，为了鼓励孩子们一起演奏音乐，El Sistema推动成立了相马市儿童管弦乐与合唱团(Soma Children's Orchestra and Chorus)。现在，日本正在拥抱El Sistema的理念：他们之所以认识到这个方法的优点，是因为它具有异域风情，却不知道它早就在自己身边。
