25/11/21 20.

41 Japan's 'Examination Hell' - The New York Times

https://www.nytimes.com/1988/04/10/education/japan-s-examination-
hell.html

Japan's 'Examination Hell'

By Clyde Haberman
April 10, 1988

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25/11/21 20.41 Japan's 'Examination Hell' - The New York Times

LIKE MANY 18-year-olds in Japan, Mayumi Yamamoto has long been immersed in
serious training for her college-entrance examinations. But she went into high gear in
early February, two weeks before the first in a series of exams.

Most of her six targeted schools were in Tokyo, so she flew there from her home in
Kanazawa, on the Sea of Japan, and moved in with a family friend. Her life became a
relentless grind of study, followed by mock exams, followed by more study. This dragged
on, as it already had for months, from 8 A.M. to 10:30 P.M., seven days a week.

Late winter in Japan is known as a period of ''examination hell.'' For hundreds of

thousands of Japanese students like Miss Yamamoto, it is make-or-break time. Admission
to the right school, like Tokyo University, means they can accept on faith that they will
find jobs with top-ranked corporations and Government ministries.

This January, a record 377,400 students took the first round of tests; another occurred
last month. But despite hard study and equally hard prayer at popular Shinto shrines,
two-thirds of them were doomed to fail. While the winners got to breathe easy for the
next four years - Japanese colleges are not noted for taxing their students -many of the
losers will try again next year.

Not that they couldn't get into a school at all this year. Most were accepted somewhere.
But they did not land in their schools of preference, and so they decided to become ronin.
In Japan's feudal past, ronin were masterless samurai who wandered the countryside.
Today's ronin attend full-time cram schools, looking for an edge that may bring success
the next time. Some will subject themselves to this for two or three years.

''Examination hell'' is a well-known, much-condemned phenomenon. Critics charge that

the system emphasizes rote memorization and stifles creative thinking. Japanese
children, they say, emerge as worker bees with stunted personalities.

Every year some students crack under the strain. In February, a 23-year-old man who
had tried six times to get into Kyoto's Ritsumeikan University hanged himself after
having looked at the wrong list and concluded that he had failed again. His body was
found just after the telegram arrived informing him that he had passed.

Former Prime Minister Yasuhiro Nakasone encouraged reform before he left office last
November. Indeed, revisions will go into effect next year, giving universities more leeway
in weighing test results. But this is mainly change at the edges, not enough to satisfy
critics such as Ikuo Amano, an education professor at Tokyo University. ''Just as the
Japanese adults are supposed to be workaholics,'' he said, ''the kids have become
testaholics.'' If anything, Professor Amano added, the situation is growing worse.

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25/11/21 20.41 Japan's 'Examination Hell' - The New York Times

Pressure to get into the ''right'' colleges is so intense that an increasing number of
parents enroll their children in private preparatory schools that ride a steady track to the
top. So many of the brighter youngsters are in private schools now that public-school
students find themselves virtually locked out of the more prestigious colleges. But
instead of easing anxieties for many youngsters, the tough competition for prep schools
has simply advanced the process by six years.

This disheartens Professor Amano. For about a century after the Meiji Restoration of
1868, the exam system acted as a quality-control system, he says, ''allowing Japan to
establish a broadly effective educational system and to develop a top-flight elite at the
same time.'' But today, he said, ''it is stifling student aspirations. They know that despite
their efforts they can only go so far, and they are losing the will to study hard.''

Clyde Haberman is chief of The Times's Tokyo bureau.

A version of this article appears in print on , Section 12, Page 18 of the National edition with the headline: Japan's 'Examination Hell'

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