CONTEMPORARY JAPAN: EDUCATION & WORK College and University Education |
| Much attention has been given to the rigor of the Japanese education system and workplace, both of which have certainly contributed to the country’s economic and technological growth. Japanese are expected from a young age to work hard and succeed in a highly competitive environment. In this video series, Harvard University professors Theodore Bestor and Helen Hardacre explain the educational system and path to postgraduate employment in Japan. |
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Theodore Bestor :: One of the really interesting paradoxes about Japanese education is that you have a very rigorous, very intense educational system up to getting into college, and these very difficult entrance exams. And once students get into college, oftentimes people joke that college is the four-year vacation in a long and hard educational life. Once you’ve made it into college, you’ve made it to wherever you’re going to get educationally. And so, if you look at the lives of Japanese college students, they’re very relaxed, they pursue their hobbies, they go skiing, they play mahjong, they go out drinking with their friends — they very rarely study. And many Japanese college students that I’ve talked to justify this by saying: “Look, for the last 16 years I’ve been studying for exams, and now finally I’ve made it to the university. I don’t have to study anymore!” — unlike American students. If you compare American universities and Japanese universities, they play really different kinds of social functions. An American college student chooses a major, develops a set of skills, and uses that four years in college to create the base for some kind of professional career. And so Americans look at what you do in college as being what’s going to determine what kind of a career you’re likely to follow, in terms of the skills you acquire, in terms of your level of competence and so forth. Japanese, on the other hand, tend to regard university education as a kind of pre-determined pathway to particular kinds of careers, so that, for example, graduates of Tokyo University are typically recruited by the national bureaucracy to work in government. And it’s less a matter of what they have learned in the university, and more a matter that they have proven themselves through the exam process to get into Tokyo University. So by arriving in a particular university, they don’t have to study, because their future career path is already, not certain by any means, but open, possible, welcoming. |
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