Mass Production in Tokyo

In cavernous classroom No. 350 at Tokyo's Nihon University, 800 drowsy students, dressed mostly in the traditional black tunics and black trousers, stared dully at the far-off rostrum. Suddenly, the 8 a.m. mood was shattered by the magnified rumble of a professor clearing his throat into a powerful P.A. system--and a lecture on commercial law was under way. The Japanese call it masu puro kyoiku (mass-production education), the style of academic life in the world's most university-populated city. Within Tokyo are no fewer than 102 universities with nearly 500,000 students, roughly half of the entire nation's college-level enrollment.

Rarely taller or more distinctive than the factories, mah-jongg parlors, bookshops and tile-roofed rooming houses that hem them in, Tokyo's overcrowded university buildings line traffic-trampled streets rather than wooded malls. While top-prestige Tokyo University (15,879 students) has a wall to set it off from the city's bustle, even it has no greenery that could properly be called a campus. At many of these schools it is even rarer for a student to talk to a professor than it is at a U.S. multiversity. Nihon has 75,500 students, second only to the Sorbonne as the largest single-campus university in the world--but only 5,400 teachers. Equally understaffed are such colossi as Waseda (39,782 students), Meiji (32,584), Chuo (29 774), Hosei (27,708) and Keio (23,785).

Suicidal Exams. Tokyo's pressure-packed universities are the result of the postwar democratization of Japan and its booming economy. Before World War II, parental status or unusual brilliance was essential to university admission; now, a secondary-school graduate need only pass the entrance examination of the university he selects--but so many select the same few that the rate of rejection is 20 to 1 at some schools and 9 to 1 nationwide. Beginning in kindergarten, much of lower schooling aims at the exams. Preparing for them and taking them is such a traumatic ordeal that thousands of suicides and nervous breakdowns occur every year. Next spring some 510,000 high school graduates will compete not only against one another for 370,000 openings, but also against 200,000 ronin/---students who failed the tests and have been cramming for months to try again.

Most students consider the struggle worthwhile, since a university degree represents guaranteed access to a high-paying job. Anyone who graduates from Tokyo University has easy entry to any of the professions, biggest corporations or the top rungs of government. Seven of Japan's past ten Prime Ministers had degrees from Tokyo U. Keio students, more affluent than most, have inside tracks to good industrial and business posts. Waseda's tough-minded, politically oriented students tend to get first crack at jobs in journalism, while Hitotsubashi is strong on languages and produces many economists. Also good in language-training are Jesuit-run Sophia and the Protestant-supported International Christian University. Except for a dozen top schools that compare favorably in academic quality with the best in the U.S., most of Tokyo's universities are underfinanced, lecture-oriented schools that offer an undistinguished faculty and curriculum.

Whatever a Japanese student's goal, the good life beckons the moment he gets past the narrow entrance-examination gate. Since the accent is on rote memorization of facts, a student can always cram to pass a test and he has to be atrociously uninterested to flunk out. For rural youths, the excitement of living in Tokyo compensates for classroom tedium. Money is rarely a problem. A student can find board and room--the universities have few dorms--for as little as $30 a month. A curry-and-rice lunch costs 30 cents. He can meet his tuition and fees (about $40 a year in state-owned Tokyo University, up to $500 in a private school) by tutoring high school students.

At Tokyo's universities, the pay scale is so low (roughly $140 to $250 per month) that most professors care more about their moonlighting ventures in business or publishing than their class duties. Lacking any intellectual contact with the faculty, students frequently pour out their frustrations in politics.

Once admitted to a university, a student theoretically becomes a member of the Zengakuren, the national federation of student governments. Actually only a few thousand of the Zengakuren's members are convinced radicals, but they nonetheless constitute a cadre of professional riot organizers, who almost annually create a governmental crisis.

Although proud of their country's democratic approach to higher learning, many Japanese scholars lament the loss of the universities' prewar intimacy, when there was close student-professor contact, more emphasis on moral guidance than career-oriented degree-granting. Schools today, complains Tokyo University President Kazuo Okochi, are "producing a lot of young graduates who do not have enough self-consciousness or sense of human values." Like the U.S., Japan has discovered that overcrowding and impersonality are part of the price a nation has to pay for mass higher education.

/- Originally, wandering, masterless samurai of feudal Japan.

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