日本人不了解自己的软实力

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。