Myth and Reality in the Japanese Educational Selection System.

leads both Japanese and non-Japanese to believe and claim that Japan is a country where early selection takes place, and that once rejected no one is able any longer to take part in the race for upward social mobility via education. Here we have a piece of folklore which parents employ to urge their children to attain entry to as selective a school as he or she can; people never obtain a satisfactory occupational position without graduating from a selective senior high school and a selective university. That widely accepted image of competition in Japan compares with tournament matches in sport: if you lose, you are knocked out of the whole competition; even if you win, you are given the right to move on only as far as the next round. Most Japanese, therefore, describe Japan as a country lacking a "return match" system. On the contrary, they draw an idealised picture of the USA as a country where open competition continues for a long time. This paper re-examines such popular conceptions of the selection system in Japan by using hard evidence from a case study of educational selection. What I mean by educational selection here is the mode of competition for entry to selective universities.