On 5 Hours’ Sleep : In Japan, a Quick Lesson in Cramming

For sixth-grader Noritaka Ochiai, the highlight of the summer vacation was a weeklong outing to this mountain resort northwest of Tokyo.

But neither Noritaka nor any of the other 2,500 youngsters from elementary and junior high schools got to see much of the scenery. They spent the week learning how to study on five hours of sleep a night.

“They need to study with only five hours’ sleep for their entrance exams; we train them to do that,” Yasuo Satono said. He is the education director of Yamada Gijuku, one of Japan’s largest “cram” schools and sponsor of the outing.

Noritaka, the son of a banker, has already learned a great deal about studying. He is only 12 years old, but since the age of 10 he has been attending the juku, or cram school, for three hours a day. All of this comes on top of regular attendance at elementary school--seven hours on weekdays and four on Saturdays--as well as “three to four hours of study on my own at home.”

‘I Think I’ll Be Tired’

He does plan to take some time off after the summer vacation. The cram school will close its doors for a week, one of the three weeks that it closes during the year.

“I think I’ll be tired after this outing,” Noritaka said. “So I’ll rest for a day or so before going back to studying.”

Noritaka’s commitment to learning underscores the strengths as well as the weaknesses of Japan’s all-consuming educational system. The importance that the Japanese attach to education--more than 90% of all Japanese are high school graduates, compared to 75% of Americans, and the elementary school year is 246 days, compared to 180 in America--has helped to make this country an economic powerhouse.

But it has also made life a kind of “examination hell” from kindergarten to college. Ability is judged not on the basis of what one learns in college but on one’s capacity for memorizing the mountains of facts needed to pass college entrance exams.

College Determines Career

Because the top companies recruit among graduates of top universities, the difference between elite and commonplace, between leader and follower, is determined for the rest of one’s life on the day of admission to a university--or by failure to get into a university. Once admitted to college, graduation is all but guaranteed. In adult life, talent and knowledge acquired on the job rarely make a difference.

Prime Minister Yasuhiro Nakasone has blamed the school system for producing too much juvenile delinquency and not enough creativity, and he is urging overall reform. He is also trying to change adult work attitudes that the system nurtures in childhood.

Young Noritaka, for example, said he never considered doing anything but studying this summer.

“I face the entrance exam,” he said by way of explanation.

The exam that Noritaka must take to get into the junior high school of his choice will be given next February. The school is one of the nation’s best, with a record of sending graduates on to an affiliated high school and then to elite universities.

Satono, the cram school director, said that only those youngsters who have crammed for half a year on a mere five hours of sleep a night can be assured of “succeeding magnificently.”

“Even for the most brilliant student,” he said, “one month of cramming with only five hours of sleep a night is the minimum needed to pass an entrance exam.”

Noritaka will have plenty of competition. More than half of his fellow sixth graders, throughout the country, are attending cram schools.

According to the Ministry of Education, 16.5% of Japan’s elementary school pupils, 44.5% of its junior high school pupils, and 18.6% of its high school students attend cram schools. About 178,000 high school graduates who failed at least once to pass a university entrance examination are attending yobiko, or preparatory schools, full-time and cramming for a second or third try.

Kindergarten Cram Schools

There are even cram schools to help students get into a cram school. And there are cram schools for children ages 1 to 5 planning to enter kindergarten and elementary school.

Competition has become so intense because of Japan’s increasing affluence and because college capacity has not kept pace with a surge in the college-age population. Nearly 46% of the high school seniors tried to get into college last April, the beginning of the school year in Japan, but only 34.7% succeeded because of space limitations.

An egalitarian insistence that no one should be allowed to fall behind in compulsory education, which ends with the ninth grade, has induced public schools to tailor instruction to the lowest common denominator--too low to meet the rigorous standards of the best schools at the next level.

As a result, the brighter students turn to the cram schools. But so do many of the slower students, who enroll in cram schools to keep up with their regular classes. Of all junior high school pupils, 94% go on to high school, even though they must pay tuition at this level.

Need ‘Spiritual Stimulus’

Cram school Yamada Gijuku has been offering its summer outing for 18 years, at a cost of $767 for each participant. Keisuke Yamada, the school’s founder and president, said: “Because they are children, if left to themselves they would go and out play. So we have to constantly apply spiritual stimulus to persuade them to study.”

The youngsters bring their workbooks and texts to camp, where they study in groups, in formal classes and in “free study” periods during which instructor-specialists in all the exam subjects answer questions.

“If you get tired,” an instructor tells the children, “just look at the person next to you, or the person in front of you. You’ll see them putting up with it, and you’ll say to yourself, ‘I can do it, too.’ ”

The children wear headbands that display the rising sun and characters that mean “inevitable victory.”

In previous years, study sessions were broken up by hikes through the mountains, but parents complained, Satono said, and added, “They said they wanted their children to spend all their time associating with other pupils through studying.”

Discipline Strict

Spartan education is a selling point with the Yamada Gijuku school. A promotion pamphlet quotes a mother as saying, “I was worried that the camp might be too hard on my child, but he now seems to be enduring hardships he had never experienced before.” Strict discipline is enforced from wake-up at 6 a.m. until lights out at 1 a.m.

Yamada, the founder, started working as a tutor in 1966, when he was a freshman at Waseda University. At first he taught elementary pupils at his home. Then, as the number of his pupils grew, his parents put up a prefabricated building near their home. By the time of his graduation, Yamada had 310 pupils; tutoring had become a full-time job. Yamada had studied law, but he decided to make teaching his life work.

Now Yamada Gijuku operates at 24 locations in and around Tokyo, employs 500 teachers and instructs 10,000 pupils from the fourth grade through the 12th. It also runs cram schools for Japanese children in New York, London and Paris.

It takes in $23.3 million a year, a figure that puts it among the top three of the estimated 36,000 juku in Japan. Fees range from $2,000 for fourth graders to $4,000 for sixth graders. Ninth graders pay $3,333.

“The longest hours of study are provided for sixth graders because they face more difficult tests than the ninth graders,” Yamada said.

Now a Major Industry

Japan’s cram schools have become a major industry. Last February, the Fair Trade Commission became concerned about a rash of exaggerated advertising claims, and it had the industry surveyed. It found that its revenues come to $5.8 billion a year.

A third of the schools have been established in the past nine years, a period during which total income more than doubled and enrollment increased by 38% for elementary school pupils and 17% for junior high school pupils.

Young Noritaka and other pupils agree that public school instruction seems impersonal and sluggish. The average class has more than 40 pupils.

Another boy, Shohei Okumura, 14, a ninth grader whose father is a white-collar worker at a machinery company, said that “classes at Yamada have only 20 pupils, so we can ask twice the number of questions.”

Noritaka said: “It’s easier to understand lessons. Explanations the teachers give here are better than those given at school.”

Yukako Shiroki, 12, a sixth grader whose father is a lawyer, said: “Many students in school don’t understand the lessons and ask lots of questions, eating up class time. We don’t move forward very fast.”

Learned Twice as Fast

Koichi Miyagawa, 14, another ninth grader, whose father is a television producer and whose mother is a schoolteacher, estimated that only about 20% of the pupils in his ninth grade class could keep up with the pace at Yamada Gijuku. He said he learned twice as much twice as fast.

Shohei, the white-collar worker’s son, showed his awareness of Japan’s social structure when he explained why he was aiming to get into Tokyo University, the Harvard of Japan.

“If I go to Tokyo University,” he said, “I can choose a job I want from a broad field of occupations.”

All four youngsters said they would like to go to Tokyo University, but none expressed any preference as to career.

According to Yamada, the cram schools tailor their instruction to passing entrance exams. Yamada Gijuku keeps copies of the entrance exams given by about 70 schools over the past five years, including all the high schools and junior high schools that any youngster hoping to join the elite is likely to want to attend.

“How much data a juku has gathered and how it uses it determines the quality of the juku,” Yamada said.

Focus on Memorization

Juku instruction, he acknowledged, focuses on memorization. In English classes--English is a required subject in junior high school and one of the three main subjects on high school entrance exams--pupils spend far more time studying grammatical forms than content.

Japanese, Satono said, is the most difficult subject on high school exams. He said it is also the most difficult subject for which to find good instructors.

Mothers often take the initiative in sending a child to a juku, he said, but recently children have started urging their parents to let them attend.

“Even as elementary school pupils,” he said, “children pick up the feelings of their parents, their brothers and their sisters. They see that families with fathers with degrees from top universities live a better life than others. At 10 or 12, there is not a child in Japan who does not know the name of Tokyo, Waseda or Keio (universities) and their importance.”

Yamada predicted that the reforms Prime Minister Nakasone has proposed will not undermine the cram schools’ fundamental prop.

“Tokyo University won’t disappear,” he said. “Therefore, juku won’t be affected. As long as Japanese society remains one in which educational background is emphasized above all other factors, the examination hell won’t end.”