Autumn is upon us, and in Japan that means one thing: School Sports Festival, a special event held at all elementary schools where kids run relays, do tug-of war, have egg toss competitions, perform dances that they’ve been practicing for months, and so on.

Known as undo-kai in Japanese, the Japanese tradition of a special day when kids can show off their athletic abilities to their parents began in 1874 when an English teacher named Frederick William Strange organized the first “outdoor games” as a way for Japanese to learn about Western sports.

Today, Sports Festivals are held across Japan, which turns out to be quite profitable for companies like Panasonic and Sony, who are all too happy to sell this year’s hot new video cameras to all the oya-baka (“parent-fool”), the word for parents who go ga-ga filming their own kids.

The other day my daughter’s elementary school had her last Sports Festival, and we dutifully gathered to cheer her on during the various events she was in.

It’s an annual tradition at the school that the sixth graders treat everyone to a brass band performance of the theme to Space Battleship Yamato, aka Star Blazers, and everyone did a great job.

I remember back in the 1980s, when Japan’s educational system was held up as a success story for other nations to follow.

While there certainly are some good elements the country’s approach to education — like the idea of using competition to get students to become goal-oriented and apply themselves in ways I could never have dreamed of when I was that age — not every aspect of schools here would be appreciated in other countries.

The primary goal of education in Japan seems to be to help create happy members of society through inclusion in groups, and there are several mechanisms for promoting this appreciation of your own place as a member of the larger group, for example the complex system of sports and other character-building clubs that students are compelled to join in Junior High School.

Whereas American Junior High and High School kids will each have random schedules, Japanese classes are fixed, with all 40 students of class 3-A staying in the same classroom for every hour of every day, as different teachers come and go depending on what the next subject is. One side effect of this is that all classes in Elementary and Junior High learn the exact same material, no matter what their individual level might be.

My daughter was taking some lessons with a private tutor in the U.S. over the summer, and I was discussing the possibility that she might be borderline dyslexic with her teacher, since I am myself. The tutor asked me, “Well, if that’s the case, they must have some kind of special class for her in Japan, right?” The answer is no — unless a child is so different they’re not able to go to their normal school, everyone will be treated exactly the same no matter what, the better for the harmony of the group.

One of the cardinal rules for gaijin coming to Japan is, try your best to make it over here as a university student.

College life in Japan is a kind of magical time between childhood and adulthood, mercifully free of the stress that normally comes with studying at university, where you can make lifelong friends and see Japan from a viewpoint you won’t ever get to enjoy again.

I was too poor to come to Japan when I was in college, so I had to come here as a shakai-jin, a “society person” or full-time worker, which colored my experiences in a different way, but I’d have given anything to be able to visit Japan during school.

Many universities offer study abroad programs that allow students to spend a semester or a year living in Japan, so if you or a Japan-focused young person you know would like to come to Japan for a year, start looking into what’s available.

Remember my theory that every young American should be made to live for a year outside their home country, which would do wonders for the way we view our own country and the rest of the world.

One interesting aspect of education in Japan is how students face competition in many forms which helps make them better students.

Starting with junior high school, many students are ranked according to their test scores, with a board hung outside the class that lists each student’s rank is in relation to everyone else. If you’re the #1 student in your class, you can bet your classmates will be gunning for your slot, so you’d better study hard.

The system of having to take an entrance exam to get into high school also provides a reason for students to be more serious about their own education, since you have to hit the books if you want to get into one of the best high schools. (My 13-year-old son is already preparing for a high school that’s known for its engineering and robotics courses.)

Although I often wonder if it’s really a good idea to put pressure on kids to study at such a young age, I can see benefits from creating a more vigorous study environment for teenagers. Growing up in the public school system in Maryland and California, I can honestly say I don’t have a single memory of studying hard or being challenged until I got to college, and getting kids to apply themselves at a younger age can’t be a bad thing.

So what do you think? There is the obvious question of sad outcomes that can happen when young people have more pressure than they can handle, but on the other hand, there is no gang violence or drug problems or other terrors that prey on kids in the U.S. I wonder which approach is better.

The New York Times has an interesting article about the shortage of engineers in Japan. It’s really an astounding fact given how Japan is such a leader in science and technology. A big theme of the article is the Japanese attitude towards foreigners since allowing engineers to immigrate – as U.S. high-tech companies do to a large extent – would help ameliorate the shortage. 

By one ministry of internal affairs estimate, the digital technology industry here is already short almost half a million engineers. Some companies are moving research jobs to India and Vietnam because they say it is easier than bringing non-Japanese employees here.  

Since 1999, the number of undergraduates majoring in sciences and engineering has fallen 10 percent to 503,026, according to the education ministry. (Just 1.1 percent of those students were foreign students.) The number of students majoring in creative arts and health-related fields rose during that time, the ministry said.

Mr. Hikita and other engineering students say their dwindling numbers offer one benefit: they are a hot commodity among corporate recruiters. A labor ministry survey last year showed there were 4.5 job openings for every graduate specializing in fields like electronic machinery.

Do you know the story of the “homeless junior high school student”?

When Hiroshi Tamura was was just ten, his mother died of an illness, which was a terrible shock to his family. A bigger surprise was in store five years later, however, when Hiroshi and his older brother and sister arrived home to find their house repossessed.

Their father appeared soon after, explaining the situation: the family was penniless and had lost everything. “So we’ll all go our separate ways now. Family, dismissed!”

Determined not to drop out of school, he moved to a nearby park where he lived, sleeping on a sliding board for several months, eating rice when he could get it and cardboard boxes when he couldn’t and washing himself with rain water. Through hard work, he was eventually able to graduate from high school, and now he’s part of a successful Japanese comedian duo called Kirin.

When he mentioned his sad experiences on the air once, an editor saw it and suggested he write a book about it. Homuresu Chugakusei became a huge hit, selling more than 2 million copies in Japan and spawning a movie deal.

The story of a young person who’s able to be thankful for something that we all take for granted — the availability of hot water — really struck a chord with modern Japanese readers.

Everything you’ve ever wanted to know about Japanese school uniforms here.

Thanks to Len Cullum.

planning a trip with the kids? looking for something a little bit more original than disney? or maybe you want the kids to experience something educational while they’re having fun. well if your visiting japan, korea, china, or vietnam; you might consider the following amusement parks.

probably NSFW

It’s interesting, looking at Japan through some of the “firsts” in its history.

Like John Kendrick, the ship’s captain who participated in the Boston Tea Party and fought in the Revolutionary War then went on to be an explorer, eventually becoming the first American to visit Japan.

Or Horace Wilson, a teacher at the predecessor of Tokyo University, who thought it’d be fun to teach his students to play baseball back in 1873, which was the beginning of the long history of the sport here.

The first English teacher in Japan, if you’re curious, was a half-Chinook, half-Scottish man with the unlikely name of Ranald MacDonald. After hearing of the plight of three fishermen who washed ashore in Washington State but were unable to return to Japan because of their country’s sakoku (closed country) policy, he started to feel a strange kinship with the Japanese people, which is interesting since we now know that American Indian and Japanese are indeed connected by blood.

He decided to go to Japan, despite the fact that it was death for foreigners to enter the country, and booked passage on a whaling vessel that would take him close. Pretending to be a survivor from a shipwreck, he was rescued by the aboriginal Ainu and handed over to the local Samurai lord, who shipped him off to Nagasaki.

The Japanese had a long relationship with Dutch traders, but none of them could speak English, despite the recent rise in power of England and the United States, so the officials got the idea of having MacDonald teach English to a class of fourteen students. The studies paid off, and when Admiral Perry showed up in 1853, students trained by MacDonald were able to communicate.

Today there’s a commemorative statue in Nagasaki thanking Mr. MacDonald for his contribution, and if I know Japan, I’m pretty sure they sell little cakes or rice crackers with his face on them, too.

Here is a great idea from China that should be implemented in Japan, the U.S., and just about everywhere else.

In January, more than 8,000 high school teachers sat for the same end-of-term exam that their students did. A teachers scoring less than 80 out of 100 points are disqualified from receiving future rewards and bonuses.

Via Yein Jee, Photo: Shenyang Evening News