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Prestigious membership matters most

In his poem Paradise Lost, John Milton quotes Satan as saying that it is better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven. In Japanese high schools, precisely the opposite is true. Hiro found himself near the bottom of his class of 180 throughout junior high and high school, but absorbed the important lesson that membership in a prestigious organization is everything in Japan. Constant examination and feedback told Hiro where he was ranked within his class, but the scores were not published, and he was treated no differently than other students. To outsiders, all that mattered was that he attended a very prestigious high school whose ranking was known to all. Without question, in terms of prestige and career prospects, it was better to bring up the rear at such a place than to be first at a high school that didn't get many students into Tokyo University.

Hiro found himself surrounded by very bright classmates. Yet, for all their brightness, it seemed to Hiro that they had no clear idea how they would use their talents. Once, during open discussion in a weekly homeroom class, Hiro raised the question "Why do you want to go to Tokyo University?" Hiro's class was in the eleventh grade, a year away from selecting a college, yet very few of his peers had clear reasons for making that choice. One student told Hiro that he wanted to be a government bureaucrat, which meant that he "must" graduate from the University of Tokyo (colloquially called "Todai"). Others said that Todai was the most selective, and therefore it had to be the best. Yet these students had no idea which departments or professors had the strongest reputations and cared little what would happen after they got into the school. The answer that seemed most authentic to Hiro was "I know that Tokyo University attracts the best students from all of Japan, which shows it has the best facility and faculty, and I can also make friends with those outstanding students."

Like hundreds of thousands of other students, Hiro took a "sham" examination at the end of high school to decide which university examination to take. His score suggested that he would not get into the Tokyo University, so he entered one of the colleges in the elite tier behind Todai. This severely diminished his chances of becoming a high-level government bureaucrat but left him well positioned to become a salaryman at the end of four years. Like other Japanese university students, he focused more on extracurricular activities than on academic work. Japanese collegians seldom strive to achieve high academic ranking the way they did in secondary school, because they know that what they learn will seldom be tied directly to their future jobs. They do study, but not as intensively as before, because the goal is more ambiguous. Doing well in high school clearly leads to college acceptance, but university students have no clear idea how their studies may help them in their careers. Grades don't count for much in job hunting, unless one is either at the very top or very bottom of one's class. Extracurricular activities, on the other hand, show that a student is cooperative and team oriented, and making captain or vice captain of a team signals that he is accepted by the group.

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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