Japan Butler Academy

The Japan Butler Academy is a school for people who wish to become butlers. Japan has many schools for hotel work and hospitality, but almost none that teach the butler's profession itself. That is why the association keeps a school: to end the age in which a butler learned by imitation in the field.

The campus is in Aomi, Odaiba, Tokyo, in the same building as the association's headquarters. Classes are on weekends, six hours a day: work during the week, and acquire the butler's forms at the weekend. Most students are working adults with their own fields in service, offices or medicine.

—Moving a craft into an institution

What I repeat in the classroom as principal is that the butler's is a profession of watching the other person. We teach how to make tea and how to polish silver, but those are means of watching. The moment technique becomes the goal, the butler slips back into being a server.

When it was decided to keep a school, the first thing I wrote was not a set of rules but a list of what we would not teach: the obliging smile, excessive honorifics, words that flatter. A hospitality school may teach those; a butler's school does not. The butler's profession is not to raise the other person up but to stand quietly before them.

—A notebook on the first day

There was another thing a school was meant to prevent: the craft closing up inside one person. However fine a butler may be, if he does not teach, the craft ends with him. Only once it takes the form of a classroom does deportment pass to the next generation. A school is the device by which a craft is moved from a person into an institution.

The first thing a student is given is not a tool but a notebook. Whatever was noticed in class is written down the same day. The following week those words are read back and the instructor answers them. A butler's work is also the work of keeping records, so the notebook begins on the first day of study.

Three things mark study here: classes kept small, practice with real silver and a real table, and teaching by working butlers. All three follow from the fact that the butler's is a profession acquired only by watching and copying from someone standing beside you.

Behind the three features stands a fourth: the classroom is inside the residence. In the next room, graduated butlers are actually serving a mistress, and between classes students glimpse the textbook's forms moving in reality across the corridor. There is no surer teaching material.

—Nowhere to hide in a small class

A small class also means there is nowhere for a student to hide. A hand that stops is seen; an interval misjudged is named on the spot. People call it severe, but being corrected in a classroom costs less than being corrected for the first time in someone's home. The classroom is the one place where failing is permitted.

Practise with real silver and it will be marked. We use it anyway, because no one becomes a butler with hands that fear marking the work. Handle a thing timidly and the movement stiffens, and a stiff movement is unsettling to watch from the guest's chair. The association budgets on the assumption that the practice silver is replaced each year. The marks are part of the tuition.

Courses from Advanced upward include practice in which students sit on the guest's side, receiving first-class service at hotels and restaurants and putting into words what felt right and what jarred. What cannot be seen while serving becomes plain at once when one is served.

This practice was added because the butler's work is the work of imagining the other person's point of view, and imagination needs material. The memory of being treated as a guest becomes the yardstick for watching a client in the field.

—Those unused to being served

After the practice, students write three things they noticed and three things that were good. Those who can write more of what they noticed than of what was good have already begun to acquire a butler's eye. Those who can only write what was good are given a different seat at the next practice: change the angle and what is seen changes.

Sitting on the guest's side has a second purpose. Someone unused to being served rarely serves well. A person who is excessively apologetic creates situations in which the other party feels apologetic too. The hours spent in the guest's chair are hours spent learning that measure in the body.

Most who complete a course and receive certification go on to the field of THE BUTLER, the butler service the association runs. Because the school that trains and the desk that sends out belong to the same association, the road does not break. The association is also preparing a scheme to pass butler-related vacancies to graduates.

Age and previous occupation are no bar. The judgement of those who have worked in service, offices or medicine carries straight over into a butler's work. In all my years in the classroom, the people who became good butlers were those who had watched the other person in their previous work.

—No need to make a name

Some graduates choose a path other than the butler's: back to a hotel, into the family business, back to a clinic. I count that a success too. The form of watching the other person works in whatever profession it is carried to. When people who studied at a butler's school behave like butlers elsewhere, butler culture is spreading.

Career consultations are taken by me directly, as principal. Whether to stand as a butler or carry the forms back to the present workplace, the school remembers every graduate's name. The association's training occasions are always open to graduates, and when they wish to raise their grade they may return to the classroom.

What I often say to graduates is that they need not try to make a name in the first year. A butler's work is not the kind that draws applause on the spot. Six months later the household notices that nothing has been going wrong. That is how good work by a butler shows itself.

Few graduates go straight to a resident post. Most begin with engagements of a few hours and move to full days after several seasons have passed. From the school's side it can look slow, but we do not hurry them. This is a profession whose real quality appears only on the second and third visit to the same house. Reaching that second visit is a graduate's first task.

Since the association handles openings, it does not pass them on by terms alone. We first ask how the household intends to treat a butler. There have been offers we declined because they seemed to count a butler as a pair of hands and nothing more. A school that sends its graduates out is responsible for what happens where they land.

Graduates sometimes come back to the classroom years later, to check a form that has run aground in the field. On those days I take the listener's seat rather than the instructor's. Someone who works in a household is stuck in far more concrete ways than I am, standing in a classroom, and I am usually the one learning. The school stays open to its graduates partly for our own sake.

Some say attentiveness is inborn. My answer as principal is the opposite: attentiveness comes to anyone who puts the form of watching the other person into the body. That is why a school is needed. If it were a gift, no school would be.

When I teach a form I always attach the reason. Why the cup is placed from the right; why one steps half a pace back before speaking. A form whose reason is known holds when the setting changes; a form whose reason is unknown breaks in the first unfamiliar setting. That is why the textbooks carry the reasons.

—Questions from the students

And one more thing. The last lesson I teach is the moment to abandon the form. When it is clear the other person does not want to be received by the book, the butler leaves the form and follows the person. Only when that is possible can the form truly be said to have been learned.

When I teach a form I always perform it myself. What can be explained in words is in the textbook; what the instructor must do in the classroom is show the body moving exactly as the words say. A form the instructor cannot show is not taught. That is the promise of this school's instructors.

Putting a form into the body is tedious for everyone: the same movement dozens of times over. Those who can bear that tedium become butlers who can wait quietly through the dull hours in the field. What the school teaches is conduct, and at the same time the strength to wait.

Teach a form together with its reason and unexpected questions come back. If that is the reason, a student will say, would this other order of steps not be more natural? I welcome such questions. The association's articles have been revised by two forces: voices from the field, and questions of exactly this kind from the classroom.

The hardest thing to teach is what to do with the hours in which nothing is done. A student whose hands fall idle looks for something to do. Yet most of a butler's day is made of waiting: holding the posture, not letting the gaze drop, being able to move in a single step when called. This state, which looks like doing nothing at all, is the form that takes the most training.