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An emphasis on high-stakes school entrance examinations as a gauge of human “Berserk”: Manga Artist Miura
ability and worth is a common feature of education throughout East Asia. Since the Kentarō‘s Endearing Dark Fantasy
results of such exams determine the takers’ future educational, economic, and Tale
social opportunities, the school system tailors curriculum and instruction to the Nov. 23, 2021
tests, and as a result has a tendency (like the tests themselves) to stress
“Berserk”: Manga
memorization rather than the development of thinking skills. (A corollary to this Artist Miura

1
tendency is the widespread assumption that the state should determine what Kentarō‘s Endearing
needs to be memorized.) Dark Fantasy Tale

Nov. 23, 2021

In this respect, Japan is no exception. What distinguishes the development of
Japan’s entrance exams and school curriculum—particularly since World War II—is
Princess Mako
a uniquely narrow focus on names, dates, facts, and figures rather than the verbal

1
Becomes Komuro
communication of concepts. With the exception of a few elite institutions, both Mako: Japan’s

2
high schools and universities strenuously avoid exam questions that call on Imperial Family Now
students to construct a written response or even to read a passage of any Has 17 Members

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25/11/21 20.42 Exam Hell and the Crisis in History Education | Nippon.com

significant length. This neglect of the written word would be unthinkable in

societies like China, Korea, and Vietnam, with their long tradition of written civil
Oct. 27, 2021
2
service examinations centered on the Confucian classics. Japan Introduces
New Criteria for

3
Assessing Spread of
The Mass-Production of Educated Citizens COVID-19

Nov. 10, 2021

What has caused Japan to move in this direction? One factor was the
unprecedented number of young people testing for high school and university
New Film “Whole”
admissions in the postwar years. Easily graded short-answer and multiple-choice
Looks at Daily

4
exams (predecessors to today’s machine-scanned fill-in-the-bubble test sheets) Struggles of Mixed-
met the needs of a developmental state for mass-education of its citizens at Race Japanese
minimum cost. Nov. 24, 2021

That said, short-answer and multiple-choice standardized exams have been

The Making of
adopted in other parts of the world as well. Yet in China, South Korea, and Vietnam
Haiku: An
—not to mention the United States and other Western countries—the schools Introduction to

5
continue to stress such communication skills as expository writing and debate. Japan’s Poetry of
Why has such instruction all but disappeared from Japanese classrooms? Concision

Nov. 17, 2021

One important factor underlying this trend was a peculiar emphasis on
egalitarianism, fairness, and political neutrality. Many Japanese educators felt that
Mushrooms: A

6
it was impossible to guarantee fair scoring of essay questions. Many also believed
Staple of the
that essay questions and interviews conferred an unfair advantage on children Japanese Table
from economically and culturally privileged families. Interpretive essays and test
Nov. 19, 2021
questions were considered especially problematic in the area of history, where
political bias could influence grading.
Poll Shows Rise to
Over 60% of Chinese

7
From a broader historical perspective, such reliance on short-answer and multiple-
Viewing Japan
choice assessments might be seen as the product of a society run by hard-headed
Unfavorably
warriors, merchants, and farmers, who had little time to pore over the classics—
Nov. 16, 2021
unlike the gentry-scholar class that sustained the civil-service system in China and
other East Asian countries.
Local Government
Employees Top Ideal

8
Marriage Partner
Nurturing a Nation of History Haters
Poll in Japan
From the 1960s on, as the fruits of rapid economic growth spread through Nov. 18, 2021
Japanese society, high school education became virtually universal, and the
percentage of high school graduates going on to college rose dramatically. Thanks Miyazaki Hayao
to the approach to instruction and testing described above, the schools succeeded Exhibit Opens New
in transmitting a relatively fixed, consistent, and dense body of academic Academy Museum

9
of Motion Pictures in
knowledge not only to the social elite but to the majority of the populace.
Los Angeles

This included fairly demanding courses of study in both Japanese and world Nov. 11, 2021
history. The truth is that in the area of history, Japanese postwar scholarship ranks

10
high internationally, both in its meticulous archival research and in its geographical Sketches of Edo
scope, and this expertise contributed substantially to the breadth and depth of Women
Japan’s history curriculum. Nov. 21, 2021

Owing to the focus on events, names, and dates, however, Japanese students came Display more
under mounting pressure to memorize more and more detail as competition for
the top high schools and universities heated up near the end of the twentieth
Tags to Watch
century. The basics of history were submerged under a deluge of factoids, and
instruction in reading comprehension, writing, and debate was marginalized even culture society
further.
manga art

miura kentarō

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25/11/21 20.42 Exam Hell and the Crisis in History Education | Nippon.com

The history curriculum suffered from its own special problems. The thematic international marriage
framework remained basically unchanged: Japanese history was approached more
cinema diversity
or less in isolation, with much attention to the attributes that distinguish Japan
ethnicity movie
from the rest of the region, almost as if the nation had developed in a vacuum.
World history, meanwhile, preserved the overwhelmingly Euro-centric viewpoint of
the nineteenth century. Without revamping these underlying frameworks,
curriculum designers simply tacked on more and more names, dates, and events,
regardless of relevance or coherence. As the volume of information in the high
school textbooks ballooned—reflecting the requirements of the university entrance
exams—young people became understandably disgusted with the subject.

The problem was particularly pronounced in world history, an optional subject area
in many universities' admissions exams. When the need for information about
regions of the world other than Europe and the United States became evident, the
curriculum incorporated more and more random facts about the Middle East,
Southeast Asia, and Africa, without ever scaling back its requirements vis-à-vis
Western history. These fragmented bits of information about other areas added
almost nothing to students’ understanding. Instead, the growing burden of
memorization made students less apt to sit for exams with a world history
component. Students who have no intention of taking such an exam are less
inclined to apply themselves to the subject. This is the irony of Japan’s fact-heavy
world history curriculum. The upshot is that Japanese high school students’ grasp
of world history has declined even while the curriculum has become increasingly
bloated.

Of those undergraduates who do wish to major in history, the vast majority choose
Japanese history, having little interest in countries other than their own. Those with
a more international bent choose the West for its “progressive” and “elegant”
image. Asian history remains profoundly unpopular among Japan’s university
students, who persist in regarding other countries in the region as backward, anti-
Japanese, and generally unpleasant places to study. Our postwar education system,
instead of mitigating Japan’s twin tendencies toward insularity on the one hand
and adulation of the West on the other, appears actually to have exacerbated those
proclivities.

Sterile Book Learning

Is this the way to go about nurturing young people with a cosmopolitan outlook,
who can understand, argue, and act on the complex issues surrounding Japan and
the rest of the world and make informed democratic choices after weighing the
merits of different political positions and campaign promises? Is this how we would
train leaders and citizens capable of reducing friction between Japan and its
neighbors on the basis of a deep understanding of the differences and similarities
between various peoples and countries of East Asia?

Osaka University, where I teach, is exceptional in its focus on writing in the history
component of its entrance examinations. Essay questions account for most of the
problems in world history and all of those in Japanese history. What strikes one
most of all in reading applicants’ essays—apart from their abysmal writing skills—is
their inability to apply the knowledge they have accumulated. For example, asked
why the so-called red-seal ships of the early Edo period traded mostly with
Southeast Asia instead of China, few of them recall that official ties between Japan
and China were suspended as a result of Toyotomi Hideyoshi’s invasion of Korea—
something Japanese children are taught in middle school. Confronted with a graph
showing a dramatic increase in China’s gross domestic product during the

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25/11/21 20.42 Exam Hell and the Crisis in History Education | Nippon.com

eighteenth century, they assume a jump in productivity, forgetting that rapid

population growth can have the same effect.

Trained merely to swallow and regurgitate countless names, dates, and events, the
applicants to Japan’s most selective universities have never learned to draw
meaningful connections and comparisons or even to contemplate the definition
and significance of concepts like GDP, let alone communicate such ideas in written
Japanese. It takes enormous effort to develop their skills to the point where they
can identify the main points of a discussion and explain them logically. And
without the ability to summarize and explain one’s knowledge, how can people
formulate coherent opinions and debate them with others?

When it comes time to embark on specialized studies, these students have no idea
how to choose a research topic and approach it systematically. It is no simple
matter to teach them how to ask a meaningful question and draw up a plan for
answering it—as opposed to simply declaring, “I want do research on X because I
like X,” or “I’m going to write a thesis on Y because no one has explained it.”

Supposing we just gave up on history as a subject irrelevant to our present-day

concerns and left it to other disciplines to foster international understanding and
develop international competencies? The error of such thinking is obvious to
anyone with even a basic understanding of international relations in East Asia,
where history is a far more common source of conflict than religious differences, for
example. History also explains key attributes common to the region as a whole,
including the tendency to become overly focused on economic growth and the
unusual number of successful communist revolutions outside the orbit of Soviet
influence. There is new research on these themes that many high school students
would find both accessible and intellectually stimulating. Why not scrap some of
the outdated topics in our high school curriculum and teach these instead?

Universities and the Failure of Education Reform

The education reforms of the 1990s, collectively known as yutori kyōiku (“education
that gives children room to grow”) were designed in large part to lighten the
burden of rote memorization on elementary and secondary school students and
offer more latitude for creativity and independent thinking. Unfortunately, most of
these reforms were abandoned before they could bear fruit in the face of
widespread criticism that they were causing a decline in academic achievement.
The program’s failure stemmed from a number of closely intertwined factors, but
one of the most important ones, I believe, was its failure to enlist the cooperation of
the universities. Put another way, it was the failure of the universities to understand
and adapt to the reforms.

Asked why they persist in drafting entrance-exam questions that test applicants’
ability to memorize countless names and dates, university faculty members have
two excuses at the ready. The first is the need to grade a large number of exams in
a short amount of time. The second is the need to satisfy the demands of the high
schools and the exam-prep industry for tests that reflect their curriculum and
teaching methods. It is certainly possible to sympathize with the first explanation;
thanks to Japan’s paltry education budget (the lowest in the advanced industrial
world), teachers in Japanese schools and universities are so swamped with work
that they barely have time to think. But when it comes to the second excuse,
universities must accept responsibility for failing to update their entrance exams,
reform their general-education curriculum, or train educators capable of teaching
anything but rote memorization.

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25/11/21 20.42 Exam Hell and the Crisis in History Education | Nippon.com

Of course, university professors themselves are exemplary products of Japan’s

entrance-exam system. In this sense, it is small wonder that they have continued to
pose questions that gauge the takers’ capacity to memorize huge quantities of
trivia, instead of stepping back to look at the big picture and ask, What are the
basics that an expert in the field needs to know and understand? Ironically, a
growing number of Japanese adults outside the academic community—having
found nothing of meaning, interest, or relevance in the study of history or literature
or philosophy—are questioning the very raison d’être of university humanities and
social science departments. In a sense, it is a crisis higher education has brought
on itself.

There are more than a few high school and university educators who recognize the
urgent need to change the way we teach history and related fields. In 2011, the
Science Council of Japan published proposals for reforming the high school
geography and history curriculum. In the summer of 2015, a group of high school
and university educators founded a national organization—the High School–
University Partnership for the Study of History Education—devoted to the
compilation of recommendations for integrated reform of history education,
including the content of university entrance exams and the undergraduate
general-education curriculum.

At Osaka University, we have been conducting research on history education issues

for about a decade now in collaboration with high school and university teachers
nationwide and have implemented internal reforms of our own, including the
establishment of lecture courses for undergraduates who have never had the
benefit of a systematic world history education. One concrete outcome of this work
is the college textbook Shimin no tame no sekai shi (A World History for Citizens),
published in 2014 by Osaka University Press.

We must now move quickly to link such efforts and translate our findings into
concrete practice in the classroom. The Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports,
Science, and Technology has issued a policy promoting a new focus on
autonomous “active learning” at the primary and secondary levels to replace the
current emphasis on spoon-fed information and has called for new university
entrance exams reflecting this shift. But unless we accelerate the pace of change,
with the universities playing a proactive role, such lofty goals—like yutori kyōiku—
are destined to remain an unfulfilled promise.

(Originally written in Japanese and published on January 20, 2016. Banner photo:
Japan’s best and brightest gather for the grueling University of Tokyo entrance
examination on February 25, 2015; ©Jiji)

Related Tags

entrance exams
yutori kyōiku
History education

high school–university partnership

exam hell
Japan education

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Momoki Shirō View article list 

Professor of Asian history, Osaka University, specializing in Vietnamese

history, history of maritime Asia, and history education. Born in Yokohama
in 1955. Earned his master’s degree from Kyoto University and PhD from
Hiroshima University. Chairs the steering committee of the High School–
University Partnership for the Study of History Education, a national
organization dedicated to the reform of history and geography education.
Author of Chūsei Daietsu kokka no seiritsu to hen’yō (The Formation and
Transformation of the Medieval State of Dai Viet) and other works.

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