Big in Japan

Source: members.tripod.com

It is no secret anymore that Japan has achieved world status in education. Indeed, some of Japan’s contemporary accomplishments in education –as in economic development– are literally in a class by themselves. Japanese education provides all children with a high quality, well-balanced basic education in science, music, and art through 9 years of compulsory schooling. The average level of student achievement is high by international standards. So is the retention rate: virtually everyone completes the 9 compulsory years and almost 90 percent of the students graduate from high school.
Japan has also succeeded in:
• Motivating students to learn and teaching them effective study habits.
• Creating and maintaining a productive learning environment, which includes effective school discipline.
• Using time productively for educational purposes in and out of school.
• Sustaining attention to developing character and desirable attitudes and behavior (according to Japanese norms) throughout the elementary and secondary years.
• Developing a professional teaching force that is competent and committed, well respected and well remunerated.
• Providing effective employment services for secondary school leavers and graduates.



These accomplishments result from several interwoven factors, including:
• A preschool experience (much of it parent financed) for more than 90 percent of children.
• An effective public school system, particularly during the compulsory attendance period, supplemented at elementary and secondary levels by an informal, but symbiotic set of private (parent financed) education programs responsive to the needs of individual students.

All of the foregoing are undergirded by parental commitment to and sustained support for the education of the child during the entire time they are in school. Education is reinforced at every turn by the historical and cultural heritage, community consensus, government policy, the needs and employment practices of business, industry, and government. Japanese education has produced multiple benefits for the nation as well as for its individual students. These benefits include a well-educated citizenry, which strengthens national democracy; an adaptable work force capable of high productivity in a competitive world economy; the opportunity for individual social and economic mobility; and an improved general quality of life. In trying to understand how the Japanese accomplish what they do in education, how and why the system works, and some of its dynamics, one finds that more than the school system is involved. The home environment for the student, home-school relation, unofficial education programs outside the school (particularly the juku), the relationship between industry and education, especially at the postsecondary level, all have to be taken into account along with history and culture.

For Westerners, Japanese education is fascinating and complex. Its achievements appear to be as much a product of the nation’s unique historical and cultural foundations and parental commitment as of pedagogical policies and practices. Indeed, several specific factors that contribute to educational achievement may not be readily exportable, so tied are they to the Japanese context. Not all of Japanese education is homegrown. Japan is unusual in its long record of interest and initiative in learning from other countries. Most modern nations, including the United States, have been the beneficiaries of education ideas from other countries, but Japan has been more active in deliberately seeking ideas from abroad to help solve its education problems as it perceives them and less self-conscious in adapting those which seem useful. While contemporary Japanese education has been widely praised, especially because of outstanding results demonstrated in international comparative studies of school achievement in science and mathematics, it is not well known that Japan’s record of distinction in education has roots that go back over a hundred years. Indeed, in some important respects education in Japan today is heir to a legacy of ideas whose origins long predate the century of modern Japanese history.

Source: Japan Times, October 18, 2013

Tormented by the difficulty of landing a position and unfair practices by prospective employers, 1 in 5 college students contemplate suicide during the job-hunting process, a poll of 122 students conducted in July by the nonprofit group Lifelink found. The Tokyo-based group conducted two surveys, on 121 students in March and 122 in July, on the stress associated with the job hunt, spurred by recent government statistics pointing to a marked increase in suicides among people in their 20s. Only the students in July were asked about suicide. According to National Police Agency statistics on suicides in 2012, the total number of suicides in Japan has shown a downward trend over the last 15 years, dipping below the 30,000 mark for the first time last year to stand at 27,858. However, the number among people in their 20s has gone up since the late 1990s, numbering 3,000 in 2012. “Failures in job hunting” accounted for 149 suicides among people in their 20s last year, 2½ times the rate in 2007.

Released Friday, the Lifelink poll, which covered people in four-year universities, graduate schools and vocational colleges, found that students have a strong distrust of firms in Japan and of Japanese society overall, yet have a burning desire to get fulltime employment after college.

Sixty-nine percent said Japan is a society where honesty and hard work are not rewarded, while 97 percent said they want to become full-time employees after graduation. Eighty percent of those surveyed said they felt a strong sense of anxiety during their job search, with many citing the fear of not getting an offer from the firm of their first choice, and of “getting left behind” by their peers. Adding to their stress is the often unfair treatment by companies. Some firms, the students found, secretly gave more opportunities to students from certain high-ranking universities while officially touting a “no-college-name-asked” hiring policy. Students often rely on friends, social media and Internet bulletin boards for tips on job hunting, but they also suffer from a sense of exasperation and isolation when their job search doesn’t go smoothly in comparison with their peers, said Lifelink founder Yasuyuki Shimizu.

“These problems lead to greater issues after they get jobs,” Shimizu said. “They have a strong sense of distrust of society to begin with, which leads them to think they must have full-time employment to defend themselves. When they are able to become full-time employees (right out of college), they feel as if they must put up with anything to hold onto that job. And others who couldn’t get full-time employment are driven to think they are worthless.

By Masaomi Ise | Source: educationinjapan.wordpress.com from Japan Close-Up. © Masaomi Ise. All rights reserved.

Our story begins with the visit of Professor Tadanobu Tsunoda of Tokyo Medical & Dental University to Havana, Cuba, a few years ago, to attend the 1st international seminar titled “Central Nervous System Disease Physiology and Compensation.” Cuba was still under embargo and Prof. Tsunoda was the only participant from a western nation. There was a reception on the night before the seminar began, with many scientists in attendance. A Cuban man was delivering a fervent speech in powerful Spanish.

But Prof. Tsunoda was distracted by the extremely loud sound of insects that enveloped the meeting hall. Realizing that even in January Cuba was hot, he asked someone what kind of insect it might be, but no one could hear the insects, while to Prof. Tsunoda it sounded like a loud outburst of cicadas or crickets! When the reception finally ended at about 2 o’clock in the morning, Prof. Tsunoda made his way back with two young Cubans. On the quiet night streets, he could hear the same insect songs as before, but even louder now. Prof. Tsunoda pointed out many times the places in the bushes where he could hear the insects singing, but though the two would stand still to listen intently, they couldn’t hear anything. They just looked at him rather strangely. Prof. Tsunoda met with the two Cubans every day for some activity or another, but not until the third day did the man finally notice the insects’ noise.

He didn’t seem much interested, however. The woman never did hear the insects during the whole one week seminar. To the doctor it seemed that the hearing of Japanese people and hearing of foreigners had to be very different.

Based on this difference in the sense of hearing, Prof. Tsunoda set out to research the physiological difference between the brains of Japanese and of the other races. The results of his research led to a surprising discovery. The human brain is divided between the left and right spheres, with each having different functions. The right brain is called the music sphere, because it is where the sounds of music, machinery and noise is processed. The left brain is called the language sphere, because it processes sound logically and intellectually, namely being where the spoken word is comprehended. Up to this point Japanese are the same as Westerners. But Prof. Tsunoda found a difference in the location where the sound of insects is processed. His experiments revealed that while Westerners process insect sounds together with machinery and noise sounds in the music sphere, Japanese capture insect sounds in their language sphere, meaning that Japanese hear insect sounds as “insect voices.”

For the Cubans, if one were used to hearing the loud insect singing that filled the meeting hall as the ordinary background noise, they would not even be conscious of it. This is the same phenomenon as living for many years next to a railroad and growing so accustomed to the noise that we wouldn’t even notice a train passing by. But since Japanese hear insect sounds in the same language sphere as they hear human voices, we can’t let insect sounds just go by as part of the background noise. The fervent speech in Spanish and the loud insect singing were in direct competition in the left brain of Prof. Tsunoda. This unique characteristic is only found among Japanese and Polynesian people, while Chinese and Koreans exhibit the same pattern as Westerners.

What is even more interesting is the fact that Japanese whose mother tongue is a foreign language follow the Western pattern, while foreigners whose first language is Japanese follow the Japanese pattern. So this phenomenon is not a matter of hardware, (physical structure), but an issue of software, namely what language was learned first as a child.