[steven]

I haven't heard of a 2 hour day before Nyororin. I know lessons are definitely geared towards the slowest students though, which is quite frustrating to deal with. I think in some cases this causes what would be bright students to simply lose interest altogether.

Even still though, around here kids might get home at 5 or 6 on average. Sometimes they do have half days, but that would be for Class Sankan purposes or something like that. Most of the time kids get to school before 8 and don't get home until 7 or so though. Of course a lot of time is spent on "club activities" or whatever. Not only that, most kids are in school on the weekends, again for their clubs. It will usually be a half day though.

On top of that some kids still have juku or even club teams outside of their school clubs. Plus they have tests outside of school that they might take on a regular basis (like the Eiken or Kanken or something like that). And then there are games or club events which can take up a weekend.

I have a feeling what I see might be a little extreme. Still though, I find it hard to believe that kids have a life outside of school a lot of the time around here.

I wonder what the result of all this is. Are Japanese people smarter as a result? Do they get better jobs with more pay? Are they happier because of this? The amount of time people spend at work here is a bit depressing from my point of view. The schools around here seem to keep kids in forever which makes me wonder if they aren't just getting people prepared to give their lives away to their work (with "volunteer overtime"). Don't people get burned out causing the quality of their work to falter?

I'll admit that I haven't read the article yet. I just wanted to make a comment and ask some questions that I've been thinking about lately.