With Friends Like These; or, Changing Hiring Practices in Japan

Two Harvard-graduate friends of this blogger have sent their joint op-ed Why can’t Japanese kids get into Harvard? and made me green with envy with the news that they have received what would be a princely sum if that figure had been paid in dollars, not yen for their efforts, for I am still waiting for the $100 owed me by a certain conservative monthly for two short pieces since a couple of years ago. (And you wondered why they say, “Never trust a Republican”.) In any case, I decided to write a thorough rebuttal as part of my anger-management exercise.

Read the op-ed, please, then read on.

All you say may be true, Drs. Honjo and Dujarric, but snotty little ex-pats matriculating at Hahvahd, resentful Todai-graduate soldier-ants running Japan Inc., and tongue-tied semi-literates enduring slow times at Azabu High are far from the only elements preventing Japanese high school students from swarming the hallowed halls of Ivy League colleges. First, Japanese courts have made it highly difficult to fire employees. Second, the Japanese school year ends in March. Third, many of the best Japanese universities are national universities

The other side of the first coin is that reputable businesses exercise enormous care in hiring. It is not unusual for such businesses to make an undergraduate go through ten, twenty interviews by different employees at a variety of levels before they actually take him/her on. It is hard enough to do this with the thousands of, say, Kyushu U. undergraduates; imagine what it’s like with the smattering of Japanese national Ivy Leaguers scattered around the boondocks of New England and the Tri-State area. Many Japanese companies now do make an effort to reach out to overseas undergraduates, but it’s still a huge chore, on both sides.

The second point combines with the first to magnify the difficulties. New Zealand apples and Chilean salmon make sense in Japan because we want them fresh year-round. Not so wide-eyed graduates; it takes time and effort to draw, quarter and cure them before they are ready to be ingested. If you’re a human resources director, you don’t want to have to run an additional counter-cyclical orientation-assignment-training program for what is likely a handful of newbies three months after the main group has scattered to the four corners of the corporate empire.

The third point is significant because it means that many top Japanese schools are exceedingly cheap. They have become increasingly expensive in recent years, but I would be surprised to hear that they have reached the level of the in-state costs of an education at the cheapest state universities. Yes, Ivy League schools have generous scholarships, but how many of the best and brightest Japanese students are likely to meet the need requirements?

These are structural factors that have nothing to do with the human and cultural factors cited in the op-ed. They would have the same effect for a gang of teenage mutant ninja turtles.

All this begs the question though: (actually paraphrasing the thoughts of another friend, a Japanese ex-pat) Why would a guy graduating from an Ivy League school who is not short, shy, or Japan otaku want to go back to Japan to find work?

*psst, Wall Street imploded*

Oh.

Jun Okumura is an indigent blogger living on the wrong side of the Tama River. He is willing to divulge his plans to remedy the three flaws for the price of a nice lunch, preferably warm. He says that you can expense it as “structural impediment talks.” Trust him. He is an unlicensed lawyer*.

* ADD: Disclosure: The blogger spent two years at Harvard Law School.

Bullying in Japan on the Rise?

A quick note on a depressing piece of news from TIME. Depressing, yes, because of the seriousness of the issue, but also because it reveals the depths to which the Japan desk has to stoop these days to be noticed. To wit:

(TOKYO) — The number of bullying cases reported in schools across Japan has risen sharply after officials broadened the term's definition following a series of student suicides linked to bullying.

A total of 124,898 cases of bullying were reported at elementary, junior high and high schools in the year ending in March 2007, up from 20,143 cases a year earlier, the ministry said.

A ministry official attributed the sharp rise to the wider definition of bullying and to the inclusion of private and national government-run schools in the total. Previous surveys only included schools run by local governments.

That’s like saying the chimpanzee population is on the rise if you include humans in the count. I don’t think that my 5th Grade elementary school teacher would have let me get away with that. I think that she would have wondered whether the authorities were hiding something and told me to go and ask the Ministry of Education, Sports, Culture, Science and Technology to come up with the corresponding data for FY2006 (2006 Apr. – 2007 Mar.), or the portion of the FY2006 data under FY2005 reporting requirements. In fact, in one area where there was continuity (i.e. the statistic already included national and private schools), the number of suicides rose dramatically from 103 (down, by the way from 126 in FY2004) to 171. But that’s about as profound as you can get from the data available here and here. To go beyond that, you have to actually do some searching, ask questions, demand answers.

To ask that a wire service do that may be a little too much. But somebody slapped that headline on that article, and TIME allowed it to go on its web site.

Publisher Drops New History Textbook; A Victory for China and South Korea? Not So Fast

Yomiuri and Asahi tell more or less the same story: Fusosha, the publishing arm of the conservative media conglomerate Fuji-Sankei Group, has decided to drop the controversial New History Textbook written by the members of the Japanese Society for History Textbook Reform and publish a new textbook that "receives broader support from all layers of society". After ten years, only 5,000 students, or less than 1% of the national total, use the textbook , and Fusosha could not take it any more, it seems. JSHTR is going to seek a new publisher. The JSHTR named Nobumasa Fujioka to replace the previous chairman, who had opposed the attempt to continue to publish the New History Textbook.

So, a victory for China, South Korea, and Japanese liberals?

No. Mainichi adds some crucial details. Fusosha is going to cooperate with the Nihon Kyouiku Saisei Kikou, or Japan Education Rebuilding Organization (my translation; its website does not display an English name) to produce the new one. Sankei goes even further and gives the name of the new Fusosha partner as the soon-to-be-established Kaisei Kyouiki Kihonhou ni Motozuku Kyoukasho Kaizen wo Susumeru Yuushikisha no Kai (Committee of Learned People Promoting the Improvement of Textbooks Based on the Revised Education Basic Law; my translation again) and the name of its head as Taro Yayama.

If Nihon Kyouiku Saisei Kikou, or Japan Education Rebuilding Organization, sounds familiar, take note that it was established on 22 October 2006, twelve days after the Abe administration's Kyouiku Saisei Kaigi or Education Rebuilding Council (official translation), and one of the six JERO advisors is Taro Yayama, a writer who is reputedly a close confidante of Shinzo Abe. Terumasa Nakanishi, the conservative historian, is a JERO advisor as well, and also has the prime minister's ear. However, neither the NKSK chairman, nor any of its six advisors nor 112 elders serves on the ERC.

Incidentally, one of the 112 elders is Tadashi Kobayashi, the deposed JSHTR chairman, and would be one of the three advisors to the new textbook committee. (The others would be Taro Yayama and Shuji Yagi, the JERO chairman.) There should be other overlaps in membership, which will likely be unwound in JERO's favor.

What does all this mean? I think Mr. Abe or his friends have engineered a masterful coup within the conservative ranks. Or, more gently stated, they put an old workhorse to pasture. Without financial support from the Fuji-Sankei Group, the money losing New History Textbook will surely wither away.

JERO, of course, has a much broader agenda (education rebuilding) than JSHTR; and a distinctly conservative one too, unlike the high profile and sometimes-unpredictable ERC. Mr. Abe may or may not long outlast the July Upper House election, and public acceptance of the conservative agenda becomes highly suspect, once you begin trying, for example, to define "patriotism". Yet, at worst, he will leave a legacy of an institutionalized advocacy in education for the conservative cause with the backing of a powerful national media group.