Donggui Xishi
Working and Living in Japan Translation

Remembering How I Learned to Swim While Thinking About Swimming Classes in Japanese Schools

Japanese elementary and junior high schools may not always have a soccer field or a basketball court, but they often seem to have a swimming pool. Every year, there is usually a period set aside for swimming classes. My child has already taken swimming for a year but still has not quite learned it, which makes me a little anxious. Now that the school swimming season has come around again, I find myself thinking back to the days when water was part of our childhood.

When I was little, once summer arrived, we children were basically in the river every day. In our area, most people could swim before they turned ten.

There is a path to learning how to swim quickly. If you start with freestyle right away, you will probably learn slowly, choke on water more often, and swallow plenty of it. Why? The reason is simple: learning to swim is like learning anything else. There is a process. If you skip the process and try to copy the finished result from the beginning, it will naturally feel difficult.

The Path We Took

Back then, almost nobody taught us how to swim. Most of us figured it out on our own. In a way, we learned through instinct. The process usually looked something like this:

  1. Learn something close to breaststroke

    We did not call it “breaststroke” at the time, but apart from some differences in the leg movement, the posture was quite similar to modern breaststroke. It is easy to pick up. Once you overcome the psychological fear, you can usually learn it in half a day. Because half of your head is in the water, the body instinctively starts using buoyancy to find balance.

  2. Dog paddle

    After a few days of breaststroke, it usually starts to feel a bit boring. You begin wanting to swim freely like other people. Then, almost by instinct, you start dog paddling. This stage is tiring, because each time you have to paddle with all your strength.

  3. Freestyle practice

    After dog paddling for a while, you realize your arms have become stronger. Then freestyle comes naturally, though at first you can only swim a short distance. After a few more days of practice, most children can swim smoothly and flexibly within about twenty meters.

  4. Backstroke

    Once freestyle feels comfortable, backstroke tends to follow naturally. Eventually, you can lie still on the surface of the water without sinking. At that point, even as small children, we could swim one or two hundred meters fairly easily by switching between freestyle, backstroke, and floating.

  5. Diving and underwater play

    Once we felt completely at home in the water, we became braver and braver. At first we jumped from boats into the river. Later, some children dared to jump from high bridges. We also dived down and swam along the riverbed. Reaching nearly two meters underwater was still difficult, but after a few years, quite a few children could do it.

Why Swimming Can Be Forgotten, and Why Some People Struggle to Learn

After all, humans live on land. Even if you learned to swim as a child, the skill can fade after a long time without practice. For example, if you have not swum at all for three to five years, you may basically no longer be able to swim freestyle. So do not assume that because you once knew how to swim, you will automatically know it for life. This is important to remember, because overconfidence at a critical moment can lead to poor judgment.

That said, people who once learned to swim usually regain the skill quickly. In many cases, after swimming for two or three days, the feeling comes back.

Nowadays, quite a few people spend a lot of money on swimming lessons but still do not learn well, or even fail to learn at all. I think there are three main reasons: