Tag: education

Japan's relationship with the English language is an interesting one. All Japanese study three years of English in junior high ...

The top two private universities in Japan are Keio and Waseda, and like the famous Yale-Harvard football rivalry, the two ...

Japan has a new leader, Yoshihiko Noda, who will be sworn in as Japan's 95th Prime Minister on Friday. It ...

If you've watched more than a few anime series, you'll know that clubs are an important part of life in ...

Japan's masukomi -- what the news media is called here, from "mass communications" -- loves attaching labels to budding social ...

Today is an adventure for my son: his juken, or high school entrance exam, which he's prepared for all year. ...

Right now it's juken (test) season in Japan, when hundreds of thousands of students take the entrance exams they've spent ...

Japan is a culture obsessed with benkyo (studying) as a tool for creating a fair, merit-based society that encourages had ...

My son is a jukensei right now, preparing for the most difficult tests of his life which will determine which ...

It's funny how words change as they move from one language to another. The word "sabotage" supposedly came from the ...

One of the good things about teaching ESL in Japan was learning my own language. Languages are based on rules ...

J-List carries thousands of fun items from Japan, including awesome snacks, fun dating-sim games, wacky Japanese T-shirts and DVDs and ...

I noticed that Japan had been officially ranked 97th in gender equality by the World Economic Forum, comparing to the ...

Over the weekend my family and I went down to Yokohama to check out a high school we might be ...

It's interesting having kids who are half Japanese and half American, and my wife and I put quite a lot ...

One aspect of Japan that appears odd to us free-thinking foreigners is how strict the educational system can be, especially ...

I saw in a news article that the word hikikomori (pronounced "hee-kee koh-moh-ree") had officially found its way into the ...

Last time I talked about the concept of filial piety, or oya koko, which is the respect you pay to ...

The Japanese Ministry of Education has announced a new initiative designed to improve English ability by requiring English lessons to ...

Before I started J-List, I had a career as a teacher of eikaiwa or English conversation. In Japan there's a ...

I often write about what it's like to raise kids in Japan, since this subject may offer some insight into ...

One interesting aspect of Japan is that around 80% of the people here consider themselves to be "middle class," which ...

Currently the status of pro-North Korean schools in Japan is being debated. There are of course many "Koreans" living in ...

Manga are the famous comics that have come to define Japan around the world, although Japanese above a certain age ...