Japan Schooling

3 Pages 746 Words

Japan's school system, once the envy of the west and model of the east,
is falling apart. International headlines focus on Japan's tumbling
shares, rising unemployment and currency deflation. However, it is the
country's education crisis that threatens to keep Japan's economic woes
on the world's front pages for years to come.

On any high street, any day of the week, children in school uniform can
be seen chatting in Starbucks or giggling outside clothes shops. They
are not on some freestyle field trip, but are contributing to
statistics that, in 1999/2000, recorded about 128,000 pupils skipping
school for more than 30 days. Meanwhile, the unemployment rate has
risen to 4.9 per cent of the population, with 10 per cent of young men
out of work.

Fingers of blame point in all directions: at parents, at mondai kyoshi
(problem teachers), at undermotivated students and uncommitted young
workers. The line-up of suspects was completed on 2 February, when the
education minister, Nobutaka Machimura, accused the favourite
whipping-boy of Japan's conservatives, America. The US-devised postwar
education system, he alleged, encouraged Japanese students to cut
classes through its "misplaced respect for individuality and misplaced
freedom".

In his influential Parasite Single no Jidai (The Era of Parasite
Singles), widely covered by the media last year, Masahiro Yamada laid
the blame firmly on feckless young things--ten million of them,
according to one census--content to live at home, sponging off mummy
and daddy. By indulging in "luxury unemployment" and job switching, he
claimed, they "cast a long shadow over the Japanese labour market".

A study since published by the Japanese Institute of Labour, however,
contends that the shadow falls in the opposite direction. Professor
Yuji Genda argues that the emergence of the "parasite single"
phenomenon is "not a cause but rather a consequence of the rise in the
unemploym...