Is there something wrong with the Japanese mentality? Is it, as some have suggested, unable to coordinate details with overall strategy, to realize that the contradictions between "tatemae" (guiding ideals) and "honne" (real intentions) or approving ideas in general while objecting to minutiae ("soron sansei, kakuron hantai") cannot simply be left hanging in the air?

Take the recent fuss over three regional universities found guilty of trivial errors in their computerized processing of entrance-exam results. In one case, would-be entrants had semi-scientific careers upended simply because of failure to include a few marks from an exam in ancient Japanese. Academic heads were bowed deeply in apology. No one seemed to realize that the basic problem was the archaic system that allowed careers to be decided so arbitrarily in the first place.

True, arbitrary university entrance exams are not confined to Japan. But in Japan the damage is far greater since employers like to judge job applicants almost entirely by the name and reputation of the university entered.

The exams themselves are largely a test of high school textbook memorization and slick exam techniques; private schools sending graduates to top universities have come to regard even laboratory experiments as a waste of time for chemistry students.

Efforts by the Education Ministry to force public schools to ignore entrance exam requirements have simply led more parents to enroll children in the private schools and prep schools ("juku") that do focus on entrance exams.

Nor have the attempts to put more emphasis on high school recommendations, interviews, and general knowledge -- the so-called AO, or admissions-office system -- been very successful. Distortions are inevitable, given the lack of strict accountability in Japan and the pressures to enter name universities.

In short, drastic reform is badly needed and one obvious answer is the provisional entry system found in many Western, publicly funded universities: The universities accept all reasonably qualified students, but warn them they face weeding-out exams at the end of first year.

A lot of good things happen as a result: First-year students have every incentive to study diligently, something badly lacking in Japan. As well, they are selected for further study on the basis of whether they can actually handle university education, and not just ability to memorize high school textbooks.

Those who fail at the end of year one can repeat if they want to. But many begin to realize that maybe they are not really suited to university education. By dropping out they provide openings for better students.

These gains would be magnified in Japan, given the many unsuitable students who try to gain university entrance simply to appease parental or social pressures, and the difficulties many suitable but poorer or rural-based students face in preparing for difficult entrance exams.

The dreadful pressure on Japan's 18-year-olds -- the "exam hell" as it is called -- would be greatly eased.

Needless to say, this being Japan, we could not hope for something as severely logical as the Western approach. As well, there is the problem of the quota limits on student numbers set by the Education Ministry for each university. But a modified version that allowed students with good results in entrance exams to be accepted as regular students while those with marginal results were accepted provisionally in first year would go a long way to removing the excesses in the current system.

True, this would mean that the total of first-year regular and provisional students would have to be slightly above ministry quota. But if the pass/fail ratio in the yearend exam for provisional students was adjusted properly, numbers of second-year students could easily be brought to precisely the levels set by the ministry quotas, something not found in most universities.

In short, Japan would have a system that satisfied ministry needs while eliminating "exam hell," provided our Japanese friends could think sensibly about it all. Which, of course, is precisely the problem.

My first attempt to introduce the provisional entry idea came at one of those never-ending committees set up by the ministry to reform education. The committee's draft report repeated the high-sounding call for the "entrance gate" to university education to be broadened and for the "exit gate" to be narrowed. How to broaden the entrance gate and maintain ministry quotas for student numbers, I asked. No answer.

How to narrow the exit gate given the near impossibility in Japan of failing students? Again, no answer.

The report also called for strict appraisals of students ("genkaku hyoka"). And what happened to those found wanting, I asked? "Ryunen" (staying on for an extra year to do repeat study), I was told. But would this not mean that under the rigid quota system the numbers of bad students at a university would automatically increase, at the expense of good students? Again, no answer.

My efforts to show how a provisional entry system would help solve all those problems met a dead, conservative silence.

Later, as a member of the National Conference on Education Reform, I actually managed to get a recommendation for provisional entry ("zantei nyugaku") into the final report since this time the agenda was set by the government and not the bureaucrats. But did this register with the bureaucrats? Of course not. As Foreign Minister Makiko Tanaka is discovering painfully, the bureaucrats think that they, and not the government, run Japan.

So when my own university set out to get Education Ministry approval for a very limited version of provisional entry (with "provisional" changed to "challenge" to ease any cold and harsh overtones), it was told abruptly that no plan that allowed first-year students to exceed quota could be accepted. But the same ministry does not object if many universities go over quota through alleged "accidents" in setting the pass/fail lines in entrance exams, sometimes by as much as 20 percent.

And, we were archly told, any system that failed provisional students at the end of first year on the basis of an exam with a fixed cut-off mark could not be accepted since law and custom in Japan decreed that only students guilty of gross indolence could be failed.

Meanwhile, the same ministry frets over the lack of academic excellence in Japan, and says it wants reform of the entrance exam system.