Whether the increasing rate of truancy in Japan and the United States qualifies as a genuine crisis is arguable. But it is not hyperbole to characterize truancy as a serious threat to both nations.
In Japan, foreign children are of immediate concern because of the dramatic growth in their numbers, and the disparate way they are tracked when they fail to attend school compared with their Japanese peers. Approximately 10 percent of the 100,000 school-age children of foreign nationality are truant. Unlike Japanese children, whose truancy is investigated by boards of education, these children fall through the cracks. Neither the central government nor the education ministry follow through, or do so only superficially. This dereliction is in violation of the Convention of the Rights of the Child, which took effect in 1990 guaranteeing the right of children to attend school.
Although weakness in Japanese-language skills and fear of bullying are the two likeliest causes, little is known about the role that poverty plays. It's here that data from the U.S. can shed much needed light. According to education researchers at Johns Hopkins, children from impoverished backgrounds are by far most likely to be chronically absent from school, which is defined as missing at least 10 percent of class days a year. Under that definition, about one in 10 kindergarten and first-graders miss a month of school each year. In California, one million elementary school students were truant at last count.