Spring approaches, and the thoughts of the media, which like nothing better than the warm comfort of a predictable news cycle, turn to education. Students are wrapping up the scholastic year and some are taking tests that will determine their lives. Last year, reporters got a bonus; That story about the young man who, while taking the entrance exam for Kyoto University, solicited answers via his cellphone from social-network sites. It was the kind of bombshell whose repercussions would have continued reverberating well into the new school year had that earthquake not been such a distraction.
This season's education story is the University of Tokyo's plan to change the start of the academic year from spring to fall in order to align with other countries and become more "internationally competitive." Known locally as Todai, Japan's most prestigious institute of higher learning has been talking about it for some years, and the university's president, Junichi Hamada, made it official at a press conference on Jan. 20. The stated aim for the change, which the university hopes to implement in five years, is to enroll more foreign students and send more of its own Japanese charges overseas.
The reaction was positive. Media, government and business leaders say it's a good idea, but one prominent magazine is not so sure. Aera implied in a feature that many other universities, while not necessarily rejecting the fall start plan, resent what they see as presumptuousness on Todai's part. The president calls a press conference and says, "We're going to start in the fall," and suddenly everyone assumes the entire Japanese education system will fall in line. Of course, Hamada didn't say that, but that's the way his announcement was interpreted. On the Asahi Shimbun opinion site Web Ronza, Tomoyoshi Ito of Chiba University expressed his dissatisfaction by saying, "Why do all other schools have to do the same thing?"