For children aspiring to become future diplomats, it may be the gateway to success.

Twenty junior high school pupils have passed rigorous tests to enter the Japanese government's student diplomat corps, an elite group that will be dispatched to the United Nations headquarters in New York for the first time this summer.

According to the Foreign Ministry, the 20 junior high school students were recently selected from 831 applicants from across the country who entered its Japanese-language composition contest. The students had to pick one of two themes: "A future U.N. we want to see" and "What we expect from the U.N."