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165 tracking within schools, and offers no individually paced learning. The typical tutoring establishment in-
volves instruction for a couple of hours a few days a week, but the more aggressive and fast-paced cram
schools hold classes more regularly, even on weekends and during vacations. Juku, like tactical weapons in
170 an escalating educational arms race, have become a booming growth industry complete with franchising
and educational conglomerates. Private entrepreneur-ship, parental anxiety, and exam pressures combine to
create an unprecedented phenomenon that critics feel threatens to make Japanese childhood nothing but a
175 tightly scheduled existence shuttling from home to school to juku, with no time for friends or play.
12.Is the effort to enter a top university worth it? Clearly, the extraordinary thirst for educational
180 success is based on the knowledge that good jobs and adult success hinge greatly on one's alma mater.
What is crucial is getting in. In fact, most humanities and social science students, upon gaining entry to a
university, take a one- or two-year holiday from serious study as a reward for completing the entrance
exam ordeal. No one flunks out.
185 13. Just how dominant the top schools have been in supplying the country's managerial elite can be seen
from a few notable statistics. Tokyo University, which accounts for less than 3 percent of all university
graduates, alone pro duces nearly a quarter of the presidents of Japan's leading companies. The picture of
190 elite dominance is even more pronounced in the upper level of the national bureaucracy, where Tokyo
graduates have occupied the majority of jobs and nearly all the top positions during the last century. Much
the same picture emerges from the nation's elected representatives. In the Lower House of the national Diet,
195 one in four is a Tokyo graduate. The point should be clear that success on entrance exams is associated
with career success, and ultimately with power and status. Even if it takes a few extra years as ronin to
finally enter a top school, the opportunities and ultimate rewards make the sacrifices worth the effort.
200 14.The powerful engine of exam preparation is fueled by this rather tight calibration between academic
and career success. Those wishing to reform Japanese education realize that they must ease the tight
relationship with employment before the exam system's hold will be weakened. Many privately fear,
205 however, that without future employment as the driving motive of entrance exam competition, students,
parents, and schools would slacken their efforts, and the present high standards in basic subjects would
begin to fall.
15. Competition requires equal opportunity to be inclusive. Up to high school, the Japanese system
210 offers a greater basic equality than American reformers have dreamed possible. This is accomplished
primarily by a system of prefectural and national financing that equalizes salaries and facilities. Schools are
not tracked by ability, and the number of private schools is small. At the point of high-school entrance,
215 however, the separation of students by ability begins in earnest. High schools, like universities, are entered
by examinations. This produces and perpetuates a system of school ranking that is more thorough than
anything in American public education. The question of where the ablest students go, where the least able
220 go, and all of the fine shadings in between can be recounted by any student or parent of the region, for each
city or prefecture has a single totem pole. In a number of areas, private schools have risen to the top as a
result of the greater latitude they enjoy in collecting the best students and gearing singlemindedly to
225 success on the university exams, yet in most areas public schools remain very strong. Successful applicants
to Tokyo University are now equally divided between public and private schools. After nine years of equal
230 opportunity, the system is differentiated and competition produces an elaborate hierarchy. The system has
the character of a true meritocracy.
16.The ranking of schools becomes a sensitive yardstick to measure the degree to which family
235 background factors influence educational outcomes. My own studies reveal a trend toward a greater role
for family factors in educational out-235 comes. Entrants to the elite national Japanese universities in the
early sixties came from a broad cross section of the population with little relationship between income and
success. Private universities (more expensive and easier to enter), on the other hand, were filled primarily
240 by students from families in the upper half of the income scale. By the mid-1970s, a significant shift was
perceptible, with fewer and fewer students from poor families entering the elite universities. A major rea-
son, I think, is the rising significance of privately purchased advantages in the preparation process
245 namely, juku and elite private high schools.
17. I recently investigated five Kobe high schools chosen as representative of five distinct levels in that
city's hierarchy of secondary schools. So that the reader can better appreciate the quality represented by
250 each of the five schools, let me add that the private elite school I studied sends more than one hundred of
its two hundred and fifty graduates to Tokyo University each year, whereas the second and third-rank
public academic high schools (each considered quite good locally) send but a handful of their students to