As one might expect, theJapanese are not known for their creative thinking. Schools have a heavy emphasison getting the right students to college and they are extremely focused towardsmemorization instead of actual learning. The top tier universities, like theTodai (Tokyo University) are the preferred ones that the majority of men wishto go to (in Japan female education is seen as a novelty, a way to find ahusband. Differently from the West, the majority of four-year college graduatesor higher are men.) Once inside the colleges, with an extremely stressfulcompetition for admittance that leads many Japanese to commit suicide, it isastonishing to foreigners how the atmosphere completely changes: the professorsbarely do any teaching, many times do not show up and have some senior studentteaching in his place and barely anyone ever fails to graduate. The big namesin the university universe are just that: names that help to open doors to you,however, actual knowledge is something the students have to look for themselvesor simply do an in-job training. It might be astonishing to saythis, but the educational system resembles a lot the Brazilian one: there isstiff competition to enter public universities of prestige, with a mafia ofhigh-schools and supplementary courses with heavy focus on memorization to helppeople to enter those universities. As soon as a student enters the universitythe environment completely changes, being very relaxed with near automaticpromotions and professors that do not really care for teaching. In Japan what is actually taughtin college does not really matter. It is a mere symbol, because the bigcompanies do not really care for any specifics of education. They have a veryrigid hiring system where they only hire for entry-level positions with in job-training.Not only that, the only ones hired are fresh high school or universitygraduates with at maximum a second chance: either the worker gets hired theyear they are expected to graduate or the very next year. The amount ofinvestment, both financial and emotional that Japanese companies, at least thebigger ones invest in their employees is immense, so anyone who might fail tobe perfectly molded by having unusual experiences is too risky and too much ofan oddity to be hired. This strongly conformist andseniority minded mentality leads to a worship of titles, authority andtrademarks. This is actually very similar to America, only differing in thedegree that that Americans are more polarized than the Japanese. While whitesand blacks, Republicans and Democrats, suburbs and city dwellers in the UnitedStates live almost in different but parallel worlds and therefore worshipdifferent titles, authorities and trademarks, the Japanese are a veryhomogenous and coherent nation so they tend all to agree to a certain extent inwhich figures should be venerated. That might be seen as strangefor Americans because they like to think that they are more open-minded orskeptical about the authorities, but that is many times not actually the case,at least from the outsider perspective. Americans are very pragmatic andusually know everything about two or three main topics that they absolutelydominate while neglecting the rest. In those subjects or areas of life thatthey do not dominate, they are extremely humble and generally believe