Quote:
Originally Posted by samurai007
The ones that do the things you mentioned are an extremely small minority. Remember, most Japanese teens live somewhere besides Tokyo.
In my experience, here are some common activities:
Study. Many of them go to "juku", which is a cram school they attend after regular school. These cram schools help them study for tests, especially entrance exams. Tests are everything in Japan, and literally 1 bad test can ruin your life. Schools in Japan are segregated according to how well students did on their entrance exams... if you do well, you'll get a place in an academic high school, and be taught the things you'll need to learn to go to university (which is pretty much a necessity for a salaryman in Japan). If you do poorly, you'll be sent to a technical high school or agricultural school, where they'll teach you manual labor such as auto mechanic or appliance repair or how to plant and harvest crops. You are not expected to ever be smart enough to enter a good university if you are sent to one of those schools, even though many of the kids there actually are very smart, they just did poorly on a test after leaving Jr High. I taught at both an Academic school and a Technical school while I was there.
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Ah, that is sort of like our old Tripartite system, in the UK [They stopped that ages ago, though.] Now there are no entrance exams in the UK for normal schools. Everyone is put into groups according to ability inside the school itself since we changed to Comprehensive schools. It sucks that so many things rely on exams, and apparantly we are the most tested country in Europe which is fun too. I wonder how the UK and Japan compare in terms of exams >.< How many exams and levels are there in Japan?