Kristin Grade 12 Georgia A. Kristin, I'm fascinated by Japanese schools, and I sent my eldest son to a local elementary school in Tokyo, but the more I know about them the more difficult I find it to reach any conclusions about them. What probably makes people think the opposite is that there are periodically kids who are bullied into suicide in Japan, and then the national media give the event intense coverage and bemoan the pressures in the schools. When American kids kill themselves, there's much less attention paid. One reason why it's hard to generalize is that schools try to stifle competition in some ways. In P.E., they don't have a system of having team captains pick players alternately, because that would be traumatic to the last-picked.
Dress codes are so strict that it's hard to compete very effectively in clothing.
The rest of your life is determined largely by how you do on your college entrance exam. In the States, you can do well in a second-tier college and go on to a great grad school, or you can hop from job to job, until you have a great position, but in Japan that is very rare. All that tends to create a huge amount of pressure, especially from parents and families, as exams approach. So, all in all, Kristin, be glad that you're in an American high school. The current economic crisis in Japan has been widely reported in the media, but the emphasis has been on the dropping stock market, the devalued yen, and the effect on large industry.