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The ladder starts in primary school

To join a large Japanese corporation as a junior executive, Hiro had to be a new graduate of a top-ranked Japanese college. He knew he would be disqualified immediately if he did not join a kaisha directly after graduation, if he attended a college outside the elite circle, or if he failed to graduate at all. To get into the right college, he had to work hard to get into a "good" high school (grades ten to twelve). A good high school is simply one with a high percentage of graduates who enter top-ranked colleges. The ticket to such a high school is a "good" junior high school (grades seven to nine), again defined as one that channels a high percentage of its graduates to good high schools.

One way to get into a good junior high school is to enter a preparatory school. Many Japanese students go to public elementary schools through the sixth grade, but some also attend private after-hours preparatory schools, which typically start in fourth grade. Admission to such preparatory schools is based on the results of an examination. In Hiro's day, the early 1970s, it was still unusual for elementary school students to attend a preparatory school. By 1985, however, 16.5 percent of them were enrolled in such schools, a figure that grew to 23.6 percent by 1993.' To many Japanese, it seems that the competition to enter the charmed pathway begins earlier and earlier as the years pass.

Hiro's first lesson in prep school was nonacademic. Before classes began on his first day, he remembers entering the classroom, dropping off his school bag, and leaving to run a quick errand. Upon returning, he found that his classmates had taken his bag and turned it in to a teacher, reporting that somebody they didn't know had left a bag in the room. Everyone else in the class had been together since fourth grade. Even as children, they had a strong sense of being a group, not only because they had been studying together for two years, but because they already viewed themselves as an elite, set apart from others destined to follow a different path. Hiro found himself able to keep up with them and even excel, but he never forgot the feeling that highly intelligent students who joined the race late were already treated like outsiders, even before the race officially began in junior high school.

Hiro went to extra classes four weeknights plus Saturday evenings every week for a year. Every Sunday, along with 2,000 students from different preparatory schools, he took a test, after which every student was ranked from first to last according to test score. Most children studied past midnight, believing that this was the only way to pass the extremely competitive examinations administered by elite junior high schools.

Hiro's first choice was a junior high school associated with one of the top ten high schools in Japan, ranked according to the number of students in each class admitted to Tokyo University, the apex of Japanese education. He knew exactly which schools to target because many leading Japanese magazines produce special issues ranking high schools according to the percentage of students who pass the entrance examinations of Japan's most prestigious colleges. Hiro passed the examination of his first-choice junior high school, putting him on the path to its associated high school, which spared him another grueling round of examinations after ninth grade.

Excerpted from Inside the Kaisha: Demystifying Japanese Business Behavior, Chapter 1, by Noboru Yoshimura and Philip Anderson (c. President and Fellows of Harvard College, 1997 ).

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