Student life in Japan

There is a well-known saying in Japan that goes: ‘Pass with four, fail with five’, referring to nightly hours of sleep in the run-up to the National University Entrance Exams, a gruelling process necessitating long hours of after-school study at special ‘cram schools’ (juku) and sees a certain percentage of Japan’s high-school graduates being accepted for places at their colleges of choice, and the rest either accepting a less prestigious place, ditching higher education altogether, or as is most often the case, waiting to take the examinations again the following year as a Ronin (a word used in the past to refer to master-less wandering samurai.) In any case, five years later the vast majority of these candidates will find themselves newly employed at the corporation at which they will spend the rest of their working lives under the country’s ‘lifetime employment’ system, working long hours and frequently being obliged to contribute unpaid overtime. Unsurprising then, that in Japan it is often said that the university years will, for the average Japanese person, be the most exciting years of their life.

College is, for those lucky undergraduates who have managed to read, memorize, and expertly regurgitate their way into higher education, a chance to discover an identity, engage in new and exciting experiences, and, generally speaking, to try and have as much fun as humanly possible before the day they finally enter the workforce, and trade it all in for an unexceptional business suit and an early-morning commuting rush that would undoubtedly make Darwin beam with haughty vindication. Consequently, the university experience in Japan comes hand-in-hand with a vigorous and buzzing social life, occasional foreign travel, and active participation in one or more extracurricular student societies or ‘circles’, which are given equal, and sometimes preferential importance to academic affairs. Where the latter are concerned, attendance is prioritised, with the average course requiring an 80-90% attendance rate (a figure that reduces the 50-60% we have become accustomed to in SOAS to outright leniency by comparison) and consequently, is a lot more important in determining your final grade, even in the absence of actual participation.  It is only in coming to these many realisations that the naive and culturally uninformed exchange student will eventually be able to rationalise as to why almost every native Japanese student in the lecture hall is either unresponsive or asleep – it is because these times may well be the only ones in which they can afford to be so.

Of course, as cultural differences go, this is hardly the most staggering one out there, but most exchange students will tell you that the process of adjusting to Japanese society and its many conventions and mindsets is chin-crunchingly taxing, to say the least. For starters, there are the niggling little things, like not being allowed to consume food out in public, or having to stay dead quiet on the trains – none of these rules are enforced, mind you, but it should be acknowledged that the Japanese as a race have spent the last two millennia perfecting the silent, withering look to the level of art form, and as such you will soon find yourself obeying them for fear of being patronised into submission. Then there is the constant feeling of ‘outsider-ness’ one feels when interacting with most Japanese people. Fundamentally polite and hospitable though they are, one often cannot shake the feeling one is receiving either inferior, or worse yet, exaggeratedly preferential treatment just for being a ‘gaijin’, or foreigner; It’s hard to further elaborate upon this attitude without lapsing into broader social commentary, but suffice it to say every exchange student or foreign worker in Japan will be able to describe at least one occasion on which they have encountered it. Most are perfectly innocent – for example, being approached by young children asking to have a picture taken with you, but friends of mine have been death-stared out of noodle shops, approached in the street for starring roles in adult film, and in one particularly shining example, told viciously to “go home” by an irate old woman at a zebra crossing. These are of course extreme examples, and it is absurd to condemn Japanese society as universally racist, as many of its detractors do, but the fact remains that it is still a society in which the practice of driving around in large black vans loudly clamouring for the expulsion of all foreigners from Japan through mounted megaphones is casually acknowledged as a simple everyday occurrence.

Having said all this, there is a lot that Japanese society does manage to do very well – for one thing, it all runs like clockwork: Public transport runs efficiently, regularly and seldom with delay, to the extent that you can literally know the precise minute at which you will arrive at your final destination (yes, even with changes…) and a dense, country-spanning network of competing 24-hour convenience stores ensures that everyday necessities, hot food, and of course the yin and yang of studently existence – Alcohol & Caffeine – are never more than half a kilometre away. Japan’s urban areas also play host to a bustling leisure culture – if the pressures of academic or working life are becoming too intense, one is always able to drop away into the buzzing neon-lit world of ‘commercialised escapism’ Japan’s retail and entertainment industries provide. Even the smallest of suburban districts will play host to all of the following: movie theatres, games arcades, bowling alleys or other recreational sports venues, themed restaurants, multi-level karaoke complexes, novelty goods/variety stores, and of course the ubiquitous pachinko parlours: Japan’s sinister yet somehow disarmingly cutesy answer to the nation’s policy of illegal gambling. Rarely is it, then, that visitors are ever heard complaining that they are deprived of things to do outside of work and college – rather, quite the opposite: that after the first few wildly hedonistic weeks of reconnecting again and again with one’s inner child, one begins to feel quite understandably aged and worn-out by it all. Of course it also goes without saying that all of these things cost money, and between them and the high cost of living and buying food, money can disappear very quickly, and the vast majority of exchange students will end up taking one or more part-time jobs teaching English or posing as a movie extra in order to fund their new-found work-hard, play-harder lifestyle.

In contrast to the relaxed nature of courses taken by home students, Japanese Universities do in general tend to be fairly demanding academically of their exchange students, as they would need to be – the language is by nature a more demanding one to learn than most Western languages, and necessitates a great deal of study outside of class to keep up with the fast pace of teaching, particularly if you are fortunate (or unfortunate, depending on your work ethic) enough to be taking non-language courses in Japanese. What this amounts to is many hours spent daily in a quiet area learning hundreds, sometimes thousands of characters by crude rote memorization (unless you happen to subscribe to the school of thought advocating strange and kooky pictorial mnemonics – for example, “Two brothers racing alongside each other, wearing funny hats.” [競]. Personally speaking, it’s not for me…) This is precisely why it is very important to make Japanese friends, or at the recommendations of one particular exchange students’ handbook, find yourself a Japanese girl/boyfriend at the earliest possible opportunity to make the experience of learning and practicing your language skills both easier, and markedly less dull. And that’s not to mention the additional benefits one may stand to reap from this kind of arrangement.

All in all, the workload, whilst certainly not to be underestimated, is not so demanding of your time as to prevent you from going out and discovering Japan’s rich culture, which is ultimately what you’re there for. Gaze upon scenes of unrivalled natural and architectural beauty and experience the unique art forms of Japan’s traditional culture, such as Kabuki Theatre, Sumo Wrestling and Tea Ceremony up close and hands-on; Immerse yourself in the comics, fashion, music, and absurd hairstyles of Japan’s new pop culture; Eat your way through the country’s many regional delicacies and beloved staple dishes, many of which have so much more to offer the palette than your local ‘sooshi’ place. Of course, there is a dangerous tendency on the part of the Japanophile to needlessly romanticise all of these things, and it is the perennial burden of the exchange student to avoid betraying him/herself to one of the many stereotypes people have of our kind: The beardy temple-watcher, the comic-book geek, the hapless wooer of Asian girls. While these people can be seen floating around Jaan in abundance, one can rest assured that, whilst the experience of living and studying in a culture as unique as Japan’s will almost inevitably be a life-changing one, these changes should leave you culturally inspired, yet just as enthusiastic or unenthusiastic about Pokemon as you were before you came.