Jade’s Guide to Japanese Education

Having worked as an English teacher in Tokyo for three years now, I have taught all ages. From babies to children to adults. I have also witnessed the transformation from Japanese children, struggling to keep their heads above water in the education system, to relieved university students bathing in freedom, to wavery adults, who more often than not become salarymen and drown at their companies.

To be frank, one of the main reasons I don’t want to live in Japan forever is because of this. I don’t want to imagine raising children in the tough Japanese education system.

What am I blathering on about?

From the moment Japanese children are born, they are shoved from one club to another. This is in an attempt to cram their brains full of extracurricular information.

Babies at nursery are disciplined and taught how to read, write, sing, dance and create “perfect” artwork. I watched how the Japanese staff at one nursery created the majority of the artwork. They only let the children do a minor part of it in order to give the parents “beautiful” art. The actual artwork that the children produced (typical scribbles) was never handed back to the parents. Apparently, it just didn’t meet the nursery’s standards.

From my point of view, there seems to be a lack of creative freedom here in Japan. The Japanese education system programs children to be polite, aware of the needs of others and able to regurgitate any information they are fed. This is because Japan focuses more on “the group” than “the individual”. Children are taught how to pass exams, act correctly and be subservient to people at a “higher status” than them. They are not taught how to act and think independently or how to express their own personal opinion.

As well as teaching at traditional Japanese nursery schools, I was lucky enough to work for a Japanese nursery that cared for children in the same vein as British nurseries do (with lots of playtime). The owner wanted to show Japanese parents “another way” of raising their children by allowing them to be just that – children. The very idea that this is seen as progressive shows just how different the Japanese approach to raising children really is.

Primary schools

Several friends of mine have worked at different primary and secondary schools in Japan over the past few years. One of the positive things they noted was that the children were taught to do everything.

One of my friends had to eat lunch with the children every day. He told me how the children eat their lunch in their classrooms. The meals are transported to the classrooms by the cafeteria staff, who usually arrive ten minutes before the end of the fourth period. On a rotation basis, four or five children would be on dishing-out duty every week. They set up the food trolley while the other children get into lunch groups and then hand out everyone’s meals. The others line up in front of the trolley to get their meal and start eating. One child is also responsible for making sure the teacher gets fed too.

Where playing is concerned, they usually go out to play in the playground. However, after cleaning everything up, they are generally only left with about fifteen minutes of playtime. It’s interesting how Japanese children both study and eat together in their classrooms. In Europe (or at least the UK) there is a big cafeteria where we all eat our lunch together.

Another positive point is that one of the schools my friend worked at also had nutrition classes. They took place in a special lunch room with the head dinner lady (the UK name for cafeteria lunch servers).

Japanese delinquents

Another friend of mine said that two of the schools he’d taught at had no behavioural problems. However, the final secondary school had been a hideous place to work. He said that the Japanese teachers refused to discipline the children, and would simply ask “are you okay?” This was asked to children if they arrived hours late for class, slept or threw things.

My friend is (luckily) a very tall, muscular guy. He once had to physically restrain a child who was trying to attack the poor teacher during class time. Apparently many of the teachers at this school took time off work for stress and mental health-related problems.

My friend reported that some of the children would freely roam the school grounds during class time and kick or burn school property. Smeg me. But anyway, it is probably that the management at that school was terrible rather than all Japanese schools have dodgy disciplinary systems. In my friend’s case, it was only one school out of the three he had worked at that had this problem.

My experience

The children I taught English to came to me after they had finished school. If they hadn’t done their homework, they said it was because they had been too busy. They had had school work or been practising something else for a different club or sport that they participated in. Most children had a different activity planned for every day of the week. Sadly, this meant had no opportunities or free time to play with their friends.

An alarming number of children also complained about rarely seeing their fathers. I presume this was because they were constantly at work or out drinking with coworkers (or perhaps lovers?). Unfortunately, this is often prioritised over spending time at home with their wives and children.

The number of children I saw already suffering with anxiety by the age of 11 or 12 is pretty shocking. Alas, they only take this stress and pressure with them into their adult lives.

Japanese cram schools

These are after-school centres that the majority of children in Japan attend for extra tutoring. There just aren’t enough hours in the day for the children to learn, digest and memorise everything in time for tests and formal exams. So, they go to cram school for an extra push (mostly against their own will, however).

Most cram schools (known as “juku” 塾 in Japanese) run until about 9/10pm, and are open on weekends too. Upon conducting further research, I just found a school branch of one particular juku that was called “Robot Academy”. Speaks for itself really, doesn’t it?

Why so much stress and pressure?

Japanese children have to study for hours every day in order to pass extremely difficult exams to get into good schools. And from good schools, get into good universities.

My friend’s child had to attend interviews just to get into nursery school. Err…

“Hello, two-year-old boy, what’s your favourite colour?”

I wonder what criteria they have to meet to be accepted…

University life

Once they have battled hard to reach university, they all relax and stop studying.

I’m not joking.

Apparently in Japan they call going to university the “summer holidays of your life”. This is because it is the one time where it doesn’t really matter what you do or what grade you get! Eventually, whichever company you end up joining will train you on the job.

Related post: Company Dormitories in Japan – The Secret Life of Salarymen

A Spanish university teacher spoke out about how the university asked him to tweak the grades of those who were failing his class “because they had paid the tuition fees”. In the eyes of the Japanese education system, this means they deserved a degree for it…?

This is a slight worry for those studying dentistry and medicine (many foreigners complain of the poor treatment they receive in Japan). But again, I’m sure they get a lot of training on the job in those fields too… we hope.

And there you have it. The wonderful Japanese education system. The creator of a population of robots moulded to serve everyone but themselves!

I do not wonder why a large number of Japanese people suffer from anxiety and depression. Unfortunately, there is very little awareness or help available in Japan for mental health issues, as a friend of mine discovered.

またね！

Jade xxx