Ichiro Yamaguchi, founder of Fuji Gakuin School, is fast becoming the Colonel Sanders of “cram schools” in Tokyo. At these “after-school schools,” an elite corps of teachers delivers fast-paced instruction to prepare students for college entrance exams.
I toured the Fuji Gakuin School facility in 1988 during my visit to 15 modern Japanese schools, as the guest of the overseas Japanese School Board of Portland, Oregon. As Yamaguchi escorted me around the gleaming flagship facility, he told me that branches of the school are located near every subway station in Tokyo, for the convenience of students who use the system to and from school. There are an awful lot of subway stations in Tokyo.
Endless Reteaching and Drill
On the fourth floor of Fuji Gakuin School, half the space was taken up by scores of tiny soundproof cubicles. In each unit a young teacher helped a high school student cram for college entrance exams. Yamaguchi explained that the jobiko cram school curriculum is not an extension of the state-mandated scope and sequence but, rather, an endless reteaching and drill of what students have already studied in high school. Every student in the room was paying 7,000 yen an hour six days a week (about $56 at the time), not an inconsiderable sum for a relatively young teacher's attentions.
Thirty percent of all Japanese students attend jobiko or cram schools. In upwardly mobile Tokyo, with all their “bean sprout kids,” Yamaguchi informed me that the figure was probably double that—and growing. Japanese families pay an average of $240 per month per child for supplementary instruction five days a week and half days on Sunday. Depending on class size and price the traffic will bear, anyone from well-educated housewives to MIT Ph.D.s serve as jobiko instructors.
The first college entrance test students must take is the kyotsu ichiju. A score in the 600–700 range (out of a possible 700) entitles a student to take the more advanced nitji test, which can lead to admittance to prestigious schools like the University of Tokyo, Waseda, or Keio. Only a handful of Japan's 475 universities are considered first-rate by employers, who are more concerned about the school attended than actual grades received.
The Lucrative Business of After-School Schools
If Yamaguchi is the Colonel Sanders of the jobiko business, then Surugadal Educational Institution (called “Sudai”) and the Yoyogi Company are the McDonald's and the Burger King, respectively. These larger companies, with schools distributed nationally, minister to the thousands of ronin—students who have failed the college entrance exam—who litter the pedagogical battlefield of this spartan educational system.
Ronin—an archaic word meaning “Samurai without the support of a patron or Shogun”—excellently describes the bleak prospects of a failing student in this demanding meritocracy. Many cram schools segregate ronin from students making their first attempt at college exams—a brutally accurate comment on their status. Many of these students will attend jobiko supplementary classes for two or three years past graduation before either passing the exam or giving up. In 1990, Yoyogi alone had 78,000 ronin taking full-year courses from its outlets nationwide. Throughout Japan, 300,000 ronin attended other jobiko schools that year.
While inexperienced or less-eminent teachers are consigned to the ronin or to junior high students preparing for high school exams, company superstars are reserved for students preparing for college entrance tests. Such a teacher is Gin Akiyama, who lectures to classes as large as 500 students at the central Sudai complex in Tokyo. Only 2 percent of Japanese college graduates pursue advanced degrees, and those who do usually go overseas. Akiyama is no exception, for this sensei (teacher) is in reality a true-blue Wolverine with a Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of Michigan.
During Akiyama's rapid-paced instruction, students hang on his every word, but never ask questions. Some in the back use opera glasses to get a clear view of the chalkboard. In an effort to please backbenchers, Akiyama has learned to write words 10 to 12 inches high. Before erasing a full board, he pauses and briefly steps aside so that students, in surreal parody of themselves, jump up to photograph the contents before his wisdom becomes chalkdust.
Yoyogi supplementary schools claim to serve more than 8 million students a year—an operation even larger than Sudai. At the facility in suburban Tokyo, the breadth of the types of classes and the investment in technology is impressive. Yoyogi even has a cram school for musicians, which utilizes the best possible instructors and equipment that rivals that of the recording industry. Yoyogi is famed for its computerized matrices of past college entrances exams and its uncanny ability to anticipate questions on the annual national exams—which is after all the whole ballgame in Japan.
While examination preparation is clearly the heart of the jobiko business, the companies continue to diversify as they track the insatiable needs of Japan's expanding industrial might. Just as the Ministry of Education has brought in thousands of English-speaking foreigners to help Japanese students learn to speak English as well as they read the language, so has industry reacted to the need for more employees fluent in English. With more than 250,000 Japanese executives now living overseas, one of the great educational needs is adult classes in English for executives.
Competition for the “Right” College
While Yoyogi, Sudai, Fuji Gakuin, and other large corporate cram schools owe their huge size and profits to the so-called “education fever” that swept Japan in the early 1970s, the jobiko—or juku—had its beginnings in rural Japan at the turn of the century. Citizens not living in Tokyo—the penultimate unitary state—were at a disadvantage, the more remote the setting, the greater the disadvantage. To compensate, progressive and wealthy families engaged tutors to prepare their children to compete for slots in the most prestigious universities.
Cram schools still exist in these remote locations, usually as a single-teacher cottage industry. One teacher I observed in the city of Hita, on the southern most island of Kyushu, had all of Akiyama's intensity and pace, even though her “facility” was an unpretentious shed about the size of a one-car garage. Her students were just as riveted and her efforts every bit as ardent as those in the skyscrapers in Tokyo—for the objective is always the same.
In this cold meritocracy, a student's entire future depends not just on getting into college, but into the right college. It is no coincidence that “education fever” started when college enrollment became much more competitive in the mid-1970s. In 1985, 31 percent of all high school graduates went on to college, down from 34 percent in 1975. In Japan, industrial need, not intellectual curiosity, determines the number of university openings, thus the escalation in burgeoning cram schools, attentive “education mothers,” the suicides, and the countless “exam prayer candles” burning in the temples. While only 17 percent of Japanese profess to be religious, there are clearly no atheists in these deep academic trenches.
Investing Time and Money in Education
Pay and security for jobiko teachers vary widely and are in marked contrast to the situation for public school teachers. While public school teachers start at the equivalent of $30,000 at year and receive a raise every year until mandatory retirement at age 60, the cram school teacher can receive much more or much less. True market forces control the jobiko, and remuneration ranges from a part-time pittance to well over $400,000. Track records and popularity of teachers are constantly monitored, and when tuition falls off, a career can quickly deteriorate.
To an American, it sounds more like the precarious, but profitable, life of a professional athlete, with many a flash-in-the-pan Mark Fidrych for every career player like Nolan Ryan. As principal of a high school during its only state football championship, I know the extent to which athletics, and the athletic scholarship, can overshadow everything else. Millions of Americans glory in the after-school sports of their children and shell out large sums for athletic camps run by famous coaches. How many would make the same investment of money and time if the topics were academic?
For youngsters of Japan, it's “after-school school.” When they enter the world of work, it is “after-work school.” The approach is a rather more practical, nearly fanatic view of what our universities refer to as “lifelong learning.” In Japan, lifelong education means just that—an entire nation going to school long after schooling would typically be over for members of our society. All major corporations run their own in-house training colleges and constantly upgrade the skills of employees at all levels. Legions of executives attend language schools at the end of their 12-hour work day. This is no more uncommon than a grade school student going off to elementary juku on a Sunday afternoon, or secondary students filling their one-month August vacation with a four-week jobiko supplementary course. An entire nation marching off to schools, public and private, technical and language—this is truly the time-honored Japanese national pastime.
“Cram Schools” in the U.S.?
Flying back from Fukuoko on a packed A-300 airbus and remembering Fuji Gakuin's little cubicles, I thought about all of the American teachers I had known who were worth far more that $56 an hour, but weren't getting it. I ruminated about the fact that 10 percent of all high school seniors pay an average of $500 each on short crash courses for the SAT, despite the fact that the Educational Testing Service's office in Berkeley assures us the best that students can expect from tutoring is about a 30-point increase. As Yamaguchi contends, only an intense yearlong course provides the kind of review that results in higher scores on students' college boards. That only makes sense when you think about it.
In our increasingly competitive economy, could we successfully open “CRAM SCHOOLS-R-US” in shopping malls? Would kids enroll, or just walk by on their way to Nordstrom? I remember concluding at the time that they would be more likely to go shopping. Since then, however, Benno Schmidt gave up the very prestigious presidency of Yale University to help Whittle Communications build and staff 1,000 private high schools in the United States by the year 2000.
Evidently someone thinks there is a market out there. Could the same effect be achieved by supplementing the efforts of public high school with cram schools? I'm not sure.
