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| Image from https://twitter.com/BFJNews/status/1026697347856838656 |
Even if you don’t usually follow Japanese news, you’ll have
no doubt read about the Tokyo Medical University scandal by now. In summary,
women were outperforming men on the entrance examination, so the university
began docking the scores of all female applicants in order to maintain a male majority
in both the program and in the profession. The sexism of all this has quite
rightly attracted indignation from around the world. However, I haven’t yet
seen anything insightful written about the further ramifications of entrance
exam tampering. Not only were all women’s scores reduced, but the scores of some
male candidates were inflated in exchange for (or the anticipation of) monetary
donations from their parents. Men who had failed the test and returned to try
again the following year had their scores decreased.
Sexism is par for the course in Japan, sadly. I think if the
case only involved women facing higher hurdles to enter medicine the outrage would
blow over fairly quickly. What will not blow over is the knowledge that
entrance examinations are not the objective measure the social contract
requires them to be. That is earth shattering.
In order to pass entrance examinations, children and young
people attend cram schools (juku) or other forms of tutoring. It’s a sector
worth tens of billions of US dollars. Families make enormous sacrifices to pay
for it. A teacher I worked with estimated that it cost her about US$400,000 to
get her son through the exams for a mid-level university (starting from
elementary school). When I went to register my pregnancy at city hall I was
given an information booklet about creating a savings plan for the foetus’s juku.
Family life (and size) is organised around juku. Most middle-class Japanese
kids don’t do chores. Their job is to study, and the family does what it has to
do in order to support that. It’s kind of the foundation of the later stages of
childhood.
Because if you pass the exam to get into a good school and
then a good university, you’re set for life.
That’s the deal. That’s the social contract.
Now we know that has been broken.
In some ways, it was the last really strong contract that
was left. It used to be, you got a job with a company and you’d be employed for
life. You spent all your time working, and moved all over the country away from
you family at a week’s notice, but you endured that because you were safe for
life. That deal is gone. The top end of the contract was broken and we’ve had
decades of upheaval and national soul searching about it.
The bottom end of the same ladder was still strong though,
we thought. You might not be employed for life, but if you study hard you can
pass the exam. Pass the exam and your status as a graduate from a good school
means you will get the best of the jobs that are out there.
The whole ladder is gone now.
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