1988. One of a 26-part series, “Faces of Japan,” produced for PBS by TeleJapan USA. 30 minutes.
Japanese education remains overwhelmingly public, but over the last thirty years, the private sector has come to supplement public schooling in a number of ways. Private universities have been allowed to proliferate in great measure to take pressure off the public universities. Certain private high schools, like Nada in Rohlen’s book, have gained a reputation for getting their students into top colleges. Daycare centers fill the many gaps in public preschool facilities.
However, the most controversial interface of public and private schooling are the supplemental exam-prep programs. These are of two general types. The after-school juku are attended by up to one-half of all junior high school students and college-bound high school students. The second type is the yobikô, the fulltime prep academies for those high-school graduates who have failed the entrance exams for their universities of choice. The yobikô offer an intensive yearlong instruction designed specifically for these so-called rônin (“masterless samurai”–which is to say, “school-less students”). Yobikô have become so popular and so competitive that the top ones have their own entrance exams and interviews.
As I have argued, both types of cram schools serve essential, if controversial, functions in the education system. This video documentary tracks two young would-be college aspirants in their very distinct encounters with yobikô prep courses in Tokyo. Manabu Ueda is a twenty-one-year-old who has come up to the capital from Hiroshima in western Japan. For three years he has tried to pass the entrance exams into a university that is sufficiently prestigious to fulfill his dream of becoming an architect. For this, his fourth annual try, he has come to Tokyo to prepare at the elite yobikô Yoyogi Seminar, then the largest chain in Japan. Although his father is presumably well-off as a veterinarian, Manabu must pay his way by joining the work-study program of a major newspaper. In return for room, board, and school fees, Manabu works about eight hours a day delivering morning and evening newspapers.
Sunao Sasaki, by contrast, is a nineteen-year-old who is only one year out of high school and living at home in Tokyo while attending the same Yoyogi Seminar program. His goal is the Faculty of Economics at of University of Tokyo, or barring that, the same Faculty at Keio University, one of the few elite private universities. Alternately goaded and guided by his badgering mother, Sunao too has a difficult year, but at least he does not have to work in addition to fulltime study. The differences in the two cases are less that of class (both are professional families) than of location; here too, Tokyo residents have the advantage.
The documentary offers some instructive footage on the prep school atmosphere, although the focus on the avuncular kindness of the nationally famous English teacher, Hiroshi Ikari, may be misleading. [The Hama Gakuen principal, Maeda Tetsurô, in last week’s documentary is more representative.] More accurate are the scenes of sessions with the guidance counselors at the yobikô. Manabu, rather foolishly, decides to sit for four different private university exams, including elite Waseda University, and to ignore the advice of adding a low-competition “safety” school. Sunao, on the other hand, decides to go for five different exams, including Tokyo University, Keio, Waseda, and a safety school.
Parenthetically, the reason they can sit for so many exams is that private universities generally schedule their entrance exams on several dates in advance of the public university dates. They charge a large fee for taking the exams; indeed, this is a major source of their income because many applicants who prefer the generally more competitive national universities will still take a couple of private university exams as back-ups.
The scenes in the exams themselves and at the results boards are quite common. Exam results are generally announced two weeks after the test and the registration numbers of successful applicants are posted on giant billboards on university grounds. Those who cannot bear the emotional tension send relatives or friends as surrogates, or even hire special reporting services that will send back the results by euphemistic telegram (e.g., “the flowers have not bloomed”).
Finally, note that both of these individuals are males. It is instructive to compare their cases with that of Noriko Otsuna, the subject of the other documentary, and with the students of Takasu Junior College that Brian McVeigh discusses.