I’ve heard that Japanese high school students have a lot of pressure on them to do well and get into a good university. Like, even more pressure than American high school students. Supposedly, it’s not uncommon for students to commit suicide if they underperform.
Why do Japanese high school students have so much pressure on them?
I think of something like this as a bit like the founder effect in genetics. A trait appears “accidentally” in a population and stays there through inertia (this goes for many other questions I see here, like the recent one about why are there so many Baptists in the American South.) Japanese culture puts lots of pressure on success because at some point Japanese people who placed pressure on success outnumbered Japanese people who place little pressure on success, and that trait stuck around because culture has inertia.
More specifically, Japanese colleges/universities are tougher to get into than American ones. You don’t just send out applications to multiple schools, you have to take individual tests from each university. So, for instance, if you took the exam for “Japanese Harvard” and failed, you would be SOL for “Harvard MIT” because you hadn’t taken their entrance exam. So if all of your eggs are in one basket, you are going to take carrying that basket of eggs more seriously, because if you don’t pass the egg exam you have to wait until next year to pick up a backup basket. (Also, don’t test me on elegant metaphors.) See this and this.
Ever more screwed up, similar tests are involved in going from middle school to high school (depending on the type/quality/reputation of school you want.)
We had to do the same thing to get scholarships to UK Public Schools (that is, the really good private secondary schools) without which admission would have been meaningless, but none of us killed ourselves.
It’s not just Japan, it’s all of East Asia, including China, Taiwan, and South Korea.
Entire books could be written on the subject (and probably have been), but the answer really comes down to something circular; there’s intense pressure on students because the culture, and everyone else around them, prioritizes high performance on tests. Why? Because, well, they do. They just emphasize it.
It’s my understanding that at least the perception is that the college you get into has a dramatic and irrevocable impact on your life. If you don’t get into a “good” school, you’re locked into a lower tier of opportunity and there’s no second chance.
In the US, the perception is the opposite: even if you end up at a less-than-selective institution, you have lots of opportunities to make up for it: there’s successful paths that don’t go through top schools at all, and even people who go to weaker undergraduate programs have shots at the same grad schools.
Now, I don’t know what the reality is in East Asia. In America, I do think undergrad institution closes more doors than some people realize until it is too late: there are some stupidly lucrative and/or interesting careers (like BCG or Goldman Sachs or Foreign Service or Research Scientist in some hot fields) that are vastly less accessible to someone who doesn’t go to the right school for that field even as an undergraduate. But there are lots of very, very affluent and prestigious careers that don’t depend on it.
This goes back a ways. The Imperial Examinations were institutionalized in China by the 7th century A.D. The entire ancient middle class of China was created and perpetuated by their system of government examinations for bureaucratic jobs, as I recall.
Japanese universities are notoriously easy though, at least in relative terms, once you get in.
So is Harvard, but it still works: when you can be that selective, you can pick a pool of kids that will basically educate themselves. Harvard kids aren’t spending a ton of time on classwork, relatively speaking, but, in my experience, they are stupid busy all the time: they go to guest lectures, they participate in academic conferences in the area, they do research, they make music and movies, they work on start-ups and polish their stand-up routines. It’s really hard to flunk out of Harvard–if you want to go live in a hole in the ground and raise goats, they will try to find you a way to get college credit for that. But the vast majority of kids coming out of Harvard has spent 4 years doing a lot of interesting and enriching things, and they’ve learned a hell of a lot about something.
The way I heard it was the average Japanese high school graduate knows as much as the average US college graduate. So does the average Japanese college graduate. Most of the advantage comes from networking - the graduates of Tokyo University tend to hire each other, promote each other, and network with each other.
Regards,
Shodan
There’s a traditional view* that restricts advancement for people in a lot of ways.
If you do well enough on your exams, you get into a top school, you get a good job with a major company that you work for until you retire.
If you don’t do well forget all that.
People don’t think in terms of jumping around from company to company, even switching careers a time or two.
While in the US, going to an Ivy League college can help, it doesn’t define your lifelong career prospects. We all know people from humble backgrounds who went to state colleges (or even had little or no college) and ended up doing quite well.
It’s not the same perceived chain of life determining events.
You would have been aged about 10-11, which is a much lower suicide risk in general than age 17-18. Plus, if you hadn’t passed, you would still be going to school, if a different one, with the possibility to shop round and transfer to another schools later if it wasn’t good enough or new options showed up later.
Suicide over exam results and failing to get into the University of choice is hardly unknown in the UK either, sadly.
As was mentioned, it is all of east asia, not just Japan.
Also this pressure starts young. I don’t know how young, but in grade school kids are pressure into cram schools to get good grades.
As to why? I don’t know.
Supposedly college is like a vacation and once they get there, they feel way less pressure.
It’s been answered. They feel pressured because there is an overwhelming perception that if you get into the right college, you’re set for life, and if you don’t, you’ve got an absolute ceiling on your future potential.
In the US, we NEVER accept a door is closed. We are all Joe the Plumber, wanting tax breaks for the rich because we figure we will be among them one day. Nothing is irrevocable: fuck up high school? Get a GED, go to community college, straight shot from there to a position at a top law firm. Never mind that it hardly ever happens, it COULD. And it makes us more resilient but lessens our sense of urgency.
Is the pressure equally applied to boys and girls? I do know that it is very unusual for Japanese women to have careers, especially after they marry whether they have children or not.
Which is why the entrance exam matters so much. People are not judged by which college they received their education from. People are judged by which college they were accepted to.
Another thing is, college admission is almost entirely determined by the entrance exam. Extra-curricular activities, letters of recommendations, essays, sports, volunteer work, interviews, etc don’t really matter for getting into the right college. That adds a lot to the stress.
If you don’t get into the college of your choice, it is acceptable and fairly common to take a year off and try again rather than go to the college you did get accep to. They are referred to as ronin (yes, as in a samurai without a master).
p.s. Some people are under extra stress if there are family/social expectations for them to get into a certain profession. If you are the only son of a doctor who has his own practice, you may face a lot of pressure to get into a medical school and inherit the practice. And a medical school in Japan is an undergrad+graduate track. You can’t go to a non-medical college and THEN go to medical school.
Taiwan was the same. I taught at Fu Jen Catholic University for several years. I always heard how difficult it was to be admitted, but my students much of the time were like, “What, you’re asking us to study hard for this class?”
My answer was always, “You’re damn right I’ll telling you to work hard”.
The Chinese professors were much easier on their students. I never got the memo.
Hey, lived in Japan 8 years. Some points:
• Yeah, it’s really stupid system (i.e., trying hard in school and “juku” just to take a test, etc.), but Japanese people are fully aware that it is. I’ve never heard someone say that it’s really great, the way things should be. But nevertheless, not much changes.
• Keep in mind that there are tests to get into high schools as well. It’s not just college. (And I think junior highs as well… not sure.)
• Education in Japan is only compulsory through 8th grade. It wasn’t that long ago that being a high school graduate was by itself an accomplishment of sorts. Even today, not all Japanese people go to college. Plenty of people take blue collar jobs and have decent careers based on a high school education or less.
• Some people skip the college exams altogether by attending high school affiliated with higher education. I heard about this when I taught English in Hiyoshi, Yokohama, the location of Keio University. A student was saying he didn’t have to worry about tests because he attended Keio High School, or something like that (I am extrapolating from this one case, but I doubt it’s unique).
• Plenty of people put moderate effort into the tests, get into an OK college, and it’s not the end of the world.
•BTW, no one in Japan ever gave a shit about my specific universities (for undergrad and MBA). It was like, “You have a degree, cool.” But that was me as a foreigner.
• Japanese society is nevertheless changing, and the old way of looking at things in, say, the 1980s may not be the way things are now. I haven’t lived in Japan since 2004, so my knowledge isn’t current either.
TL;DR: Yeah, the whole testing system in Japan is a joke and is hell for a lot of people, but for others it’s not really a part of their reality.
I want to add Japan has a high suicide rate period. And I think the culture tend glorify suicide as honorable death. That influence how people deal with pressure.
I see a comprehensive answer for Japan above, so now i can add about China (shanghai more specifically).
Of course the short answer is culture, and from their POV they’d ask why we care so little about exams, when they determine so much. A few more specific observations: