High School Applications

Behind my desk are drawers, which hold information on about 90 high schools in the Kansai region. Twenty drawers are dedicated to co-ed public high schools. They are marked in white. Boys schools are in blue; girls in pink and tech schools in yellow. Most of the schools are private and all of them have special foci, ranging from international business to English language to various trades. Entrance into the correct high school paves the way for entrance into the correct college. Picking the right school should enhance your chances for entering the college of choice in three years. Entrance into the right college stamps your ticket for your career. When Japanese are hired for their careers they must provide a copy of their diploma. Transcripts, grades and majors don’t matter. What matters is what college you attended.

Entrance into the schools is based on student performance in the junior high school, school recommendations, test scores and interviews. None of the schools are free. The ‘public’ schools have a lower tuition, but they also have more rigid entrance requirements. Yesterday, most of the 9th grade students took admission tests for the school of their choice. Some of them will take their tests in March.

January and February have been busy months. Three days this past week, I have been working with students practicing for their interviews. One boy, who hasn’t performed well in my class, has an inside track into a school with a focus on English. I spent two days with him going over questions, which will be on the interview. His uncle, who works at the school, apparently fed him the questions. The second day I worked with him, he still couldn’t answer several simple questions. I will be interested to find out if he actually makes it into the school.

I also interviewed three girls. They were very good. Coming into the interview, I had basic questions covering their biographies and why they wanted to go to that particular high school. I took all of them away from their scripts. Most of the Japanese speak only pre-scripted English, but cannot speak English outside of a narrow scope. My goal was to get them away from areas where they were comfortable and ask real questions. One girl had read all of the ‘Harry Potter’ books so I began asking her questions about the books, which characters she liked and what she thought of the books. She sailed through.

One of the girls had lived in Düsseldorf, Germany for nine years. Even so, she was very Japanese. She understood most everything I said, but she wouldn’t make eye contact. She stared at the table in front of me. What I found remarkable was that she doesn’t speak any German. I have been trying to figure out how she lived somewhere for most of her life and never assimilated into the culture or learned the language. She must have an interesting story.