Just an aside, I watched a documentary once about a Japanese high school baseball team and my American bias led me to believe that they would also be genius students since you know they’re Japanese. It didn’t seem to be the case at all, they were much like the stereotypical jocks you think of in America.
They had poorer grades than their peers, complained about math, and academics in general. They certainly didn’t appear very pressured about making good grades despite a culture that I always believed demanded it, I think most of them were just concerned about keeping just good enough grades to stay on the team. I can’t really remember how good the team was, maybe a lot of them really thought they had a good chance at a professional baseball career or something.
To add on Mijin’s post. My experience was 12 years in Shanghai working for multinational corporations with a Shanghaiese wife who is intimately dialed into the system. And we have a gazillion relatives and their experiences as well. My wife’s middle and high school (市三女中）boasts an alumni group that could be in Harvard (the Soong Sister, Mrs Wang of Wang Computers to name a few), and that does not include University.
It’s an up or out system that starts from pre-school. Ok, I lived in Japan for a couple of years without kids, so no special insight there. I do however have a child that did pre-school through 2nd grade in the Chinese public school system, which is arguably much tougher. I still remember going home, finding daughter is not home from school, going to the school 1-2 hours after class, with a couple of not-front-row kids getting brow beaten by the teacher to study harder, and the teacher only letting her go “early” because the foreign father showed up. So much for *that *experiment and I yanked her out and into a private bi-lingual school for 3rd and 4th grade before moving back to the US in large part so should be have a creative childhood instead of an indentured hellish decade (Proud Papa note: she just got accepted in the Loyola Marymount School of Film digital arts program. )
Kids with good reading and writing skills when they START first grade, sit in the front row of class and get special attention from the teachers. Those that don’t have this language mastery sit behind and get less attention. You either stay in the front row or someone displaces you. Getting into middle schools have exams, and if you were not a front row kid with the teachers attention, you are behind on the standardized test. Gets much worse to get into high school, with the majority of kids getting shunted to trade school or a mediocre high school. Amp that up about 100x to pass the standardized test for University. It is an extremely Hobbsian brutal filtering system where only the strongest of the strong standardized test takers survive.
You go up or out. And if you don’t go up, you’re shot at making it is really small.
Smart survivors for sure. Only 10-20% IMHExperience were valuable people to hire. Far too many were book smart but not a good hire if you know what I mean.
I worked in business in Japan for about 25 years, and in the industries where I worked there weren’t any of the super elites who graduated from the top ranked universities. My clients included Sony, Panasonic and other famous manufacturers, but the people I worked with on a daily basis didn’t go to Tokyo University or any of the other top schools. This just isn’t a requirement for the vast majority of the solid middle class.
However, it is correct that traditionally the choice of universities really matters much more than in the US. Government agencies, for example, will have a certain number of slots for elites. If you want to become a top “career” official (not a political appointment) in one of the ministries then you’ve got to do exceptionally damn well on one test on one day when you’re 17. Similarly, if you are set on becoming a CEO for Sony or Panasonic, or one of the top doctors in the country, forget about it if you had an off day when you were still a youth.
There are other factors contributing to the pressure. As has been noted, only the test result matters, and GPA does not. This increases the importance of the exam.
Not really for the first part. Japanese high school graduates have memorized a great deal of information, but it does not equate to the knowledge obtained at a university. There is more to it than networking, although that is one key component. The top universities have a prestige which does translate into a higher status for the person.
You also have to be admitted into the particular undergrad program at a university. You don’t get accepted into a university and then spend a couple of years deciding what to major in. You are accepted into particular departments and have to reapply if you want to switch.
This is a very common misconception about Japan. It does not glorify suicide and such deaths are considered tragic. There are even higher rates of suicide by students who have been bullied, and the government is taking active measures to attempt to reduce those.
My wife was an instructor at a university which excelled at sports. This attitude was quite common.
Not all Japanese kids are good at school and a lot simply don’t care about grades or tests.
To riff slightly on what TokyoBayer said, I never found Japanese people to be particularly well-educated, and I interacted a lot with junior high and high school kids when I was teaching English for one year. They tend to study for the test and then forget it thereafter. The knowledge is not integrated into a comprehensive understanding of the world. For example, I think Japanese people’s understanding of history tends to be really poor.
They don’t seem particularly stupid either, however. But I think the return on all the time they put into their educations doesn’t seem very good. Especially with respect to languages. Japanese people study the hell out of English and end up with very little to show for it, on average.
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