ii. Translation & Cultural Notes

School

Compulsory schooling in Japan runs for six years in Elementary School (ages 7 to 12) and three years of junior high school (ages 13 to 15). Over 95% of students then commence three years of Senior high school in Japan (ages 16 to 18). It is common for elementary and junior high school students to walk to school as these are geographically located so as to be true local neighborhood fixtures. Senior high schools can be generalized or offer specific study pathways such as engineering or sciences, humanities, communications, agriculture or business studies. Senior high school students may walk, ride bikes, or take buses and trains depending on how far away from home their high school is.

Students in most junior and senior high schools are involved in club activities or student council activities as a way of developing interests and leadership skills. Whilst these are supervised by a member of teaching staff, this is very light and the older students are expected to plan and run practices or meetings as a demonstration of senior leadership.

Many prestigious or highly-academic high schools don’t allow students to do part-time jobs without school permission as possible impact to academic performance impacts on the marketability of the school to potential students. Therefore it is not uncommon for some schools to have policies as part of the enrolment agreement whereby they have veto over a student’s participation in part-time employment.

The term ‘escalator school’ refers to private schools which have elementary, junior high, senior high, and a university integrated in such a way that gaining entrance to one level automatically assures progression to the next level; if you are able to get in as a junior high school student, for example, you are assured a university place provided you don’t fail out of school.

Families & Households

In Japanese, there is almost universal use of familial titles in place of pronouns (e.g., ‘oniisan’ or the more familiar ‘oniichan’ for older brother). I have gone with the English translation rather than maintain the Japanese because of personal taste.

In Japan when couples divorce, there is almost no shared-custody. In most cases the children go with the mother and have no further relationship with the birth father.

Children and siblings bathe together, and parents bathe with children within the household. This usually stops as children get older, partially over perceptions of propriety but also simply due to the diminishing space in the bathroom. In most cases, children are bathing by themselves by junior high school.

Typical Japanese bathrooms consist of two rooms; an outer room which contains a large sink (senmenjou in Japanese) that is used for washing the face and usually houses the washing machine/dryer, and the bathroom itself which contains a space for washing the body outside of the bath which is used to soak in.

Money

The Japanese currency is called the ‘yen’. A single yen is analogous to a single cent, which makes one thousand yen roughly the same as ten dollars, and ten thousand yen roughly the same as a hundred dollars.

The average hourly rate for part-time jobs for university students is around a thousand yen (or ten dollars an hour). The rate for high school students is closer to eight-hundred yen an hour.