Education in Japan

• 1. Japan's Educational Ambition

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  Education in Japan touches every corner of life in ways that few outsiders expect. In fiscal 2019, schools across Japan recorded 612,496 bullying cases, a record number that rattled the country even as its students ranked eighth in the world on the 2018 PISA assessment. Those two facts sit side by side in Japan's education story: extraordinary achievement and extraordinary pressure, each inseparable from the other.

  The Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology, known as MEXT, oversees a system built on nine years of compulsory schooling at the elementary and lower secondary levels. As of 2023, around 65% of Japanese aged 25 to 34 hold some form of tertiary education, and 80.6% of 18-year-olds pursue higher education. Japanese women now surpass men in university attainment, with 59% holding degrees compared to 52% of men.

  What drove a country from near-zero modern infrastructure in the mid-19th century to those numbers? The answer begins not in a classroom but in a political crisis that changed everything about how Japan saw itself.

• 2. From Samurai to Schoolroom

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  Formal education in Japan began in the 6th century AD, when Japan adopted Chinese culture and Buddhist and Confucian teachings were transmitted at the courts of Asuka, Nara, and Heian. Unlike in China, Japan never fully implemented a meritocratic examination system for court positions; those roles remained hereditary.

  By the Edo period, two parallel systems had taken shape. Samurai schools called hankō educated the warrior-turned-bureaucrat elite in Confucian values, military strategy, literature, agriculture, and accounting. For merchants and commoners, terakoya taught basic reading, writing, and arithmetic. Baigan Ishida, a great orator and writer, ran communal gatherings that brought learning to the merchant class. Youth groups called wakashu-gumi gathered young men aged fourteen to seventeen to learn ceremonies, cooperative living, language, manners, and practical skills like straw weaving.

  Even under sakoku, Japan's strict limits on foreign contact, books from China and Europe filtered in. Rangaku, or "Dutch studies," became popular, particularly in the natural sciences. By the end of the Edo period, literacy had climbed to roughly 50% among men and 20% among women, a foundation that would matter enormously when the Meiji era began.

• 3. The Meiji Transformation

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  After the Meiji Restoration of 1868, Japan sent students and even high-ranking government officials abroad to study through missions like the Iwakura mission. Compulsory education was introduced, modelled primarily after the Prussian system.

  In 1877, the University of Tokyo was founded by merging Edo-era institutions including the Yushima Seidō in Edo, which had been the chief educational institution of the Tokugawa period. Foreign scholars known as o-yatoi gaikokujin were hired to teach at the new university and at military academies. They were gradually replaced by Japanese scholars trained domestically or abroad. Kyoto Imperial University followed in 1897 as the second university, with Keio, Waseda, and other private universities expanding the system after the 1920s.

  The Meiji government also established Japan's first modern public library in 1872, considered the origin of today's National Diet Library. During the 1890s, reformers, magazine editors, and educated mothers introduced upper-middle-class families to a concept of childhood built around dedicated children's spaces, educational toys, and children's books. Those ideas spread rapidly across all social classes, reshaping how Japanese families understood learning outside school.

• 4. Postwar Redesign

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  Japan's defeat in the Second World War brought the Allied occupation and a sweeping redesign of the education system. The stated goals were promoting democracy and pacifism, decentralising control, weakening class structure, and encouraging teacher initiative.

  The Fundamental Law of Education and the School Education Law, both enacted in 1947, restructured schooling along American lines: six years of elementary school, three of lower secondary, three of upper secondary, and four of university. Compulsory education was extended to nine years, and coeducation became more common.

  After the occupation ended in 1951, the 1950s brought efforts to re-centralise curriculum and textbook standards under the Ministry of Education. Moral education returned. During the 1960s and 1970s, Japan's rapid economic growth pushed university admissions into intense competition, and the government invested heavily in universities and vocational schools to support industrial development. By the 1980s, the pressure of entrance examinations had grown severe enough that the government introduced reforms aimed at reducing academic burden and fostering more creative thinking, a policy called Yutori education. Concerns that it reduced academic skill led to its complete abolition by 2011, after which Japanese students showed significant improvement in math and science scores on the 2011 TIMSS survey compared to 2007.

• 5. Shadow Education and Juku

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  Over 86% of Japanese students with college plans participate in at least one form of shadow education, and 60% participate in two or more forms. Shadow education refers to any educational activity outside formal schooling, and in Japan it has become a parallel system as significant as the schools themselves.

  The most visible form is juku, private after-school classes that prepare students for university entrance examinations such as the National University Entrance Qualification Examination. Juku classes are typically held in the evenings after regular school. Students who fail to enter their preferred university after high school can become ronin, spending a full year on exam preparation before trying again. Practice exams called mogi shiken, offered by private companies, help students gauge their university admission chances.

  The financial scale is substantial. Juku costs range between 600,000 and 1.5 million yen depending on the student's age and family resources, and over 48,000 juku schools operate across Japan today. Participation starts as early as elementary school and reaches roughly 60% of all students by the end of junior high. Despite this investment of time, data from the OECD's PISA 2015 showed that Japanese students' after-school study time ranked fourth lowest among 55 surveyed countries, behind Germany, Finland, and Switzerland.

• 6. Pressure, Violence, and Reform

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  In 1991, it was reported that 1,333 people in the 15-to-24 age group had died by suicide, much of it attributed to academic pressure. Some students experienced nervous breakdowns requiring hospitalisation as young as twelve. School violence also rose: in 2007, public school students were involved in 52,756 violent incidents, an increase of about 8,000 from the previous year, with teachers as victims in nearly 7,000 of those cases.

  Children with disabilities faced a different kind of exclusion. Before the 1990s, students with disabilities were often labelled "slow learners" or "difficult to blend in." The first major reform introduced a Resource Room System, a supplemental program within traditional school settings. In 2006, a broader push for inclusive education followed, driven by three factors: an international movement for school inclusion, welfare reform, and a general overhaul of the education system. The Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities was ratified by Japan in 2014 under the framework of the Basic Act on Education enacted in 2007.

  Textbook content remains a point of international friction. School textbooks have been criticised for minimising or obscuring war crimes committed by the Imperial Japanese Army in World War II, including the Nanjing Massacre, human experimentation by Unit 731, and the use of Okinawa's civilian population as human shields. The Japan Exchange and Teaching Programme, which began with 848 participants in 1987 and peaked at 6,273 in 2002, now employs 5,831 language teachers as of July 2023, a sign that Japan has chosen to address at least one form of international gap by importing fluency directly into classrooms.