Speed Tribes: Days and Night's With Japan's Next Generation by Karl Taro Greenfeld

Author:Karl Taro Greenfeld
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Japan, Sociology, Asia
ISBN: 0060926651
Publisher: Harper Collins, Inc.
Published: 1994-01-01T15:00:00+00:00

VI

HIRO AND YOSHIHARA

THE BEST AND THE BRIGHTEST

Hiro Ikeda, a chubby, bespectacled boy about to turn eighteen, studied the pass list posted on the wrought-iron gates of the Komaba campus of the University of Tokyo. Four thousand eight hundred fifty-six kanji (Japanese names) were listed—but not his. He had failed the University of Tokyo entrance exam. For a full ten minutes Hiro stood frozen in total shock amid hundreds of other black uniform-clad high school and juku (cram school) students. A few of the boys about him were quietly crying, others were hugging each other and dancing about in joyous jigs of celebration. To Hiro it was as if some avatar had descended and told a few lucky souls they were destined for heaven and that the rest were condemned to hell.

Exam hell. Because anyone failing the University of Tokyo, or Todai (pronounced “toad-eye”), entrance exam who was not prepared to settle for admission to a lesser college becomes a ronin, a masterless samurai, as he spends the next year or two or three, cramming, cramming, and cramming for another try. “Being a ronin, having to study every day, all day long, and practically never going out, is so bad.” Hiro grimaces. “It’s like having the life sucked out of you.”

Hiro first attended cram school during his senior year of high school. He had never kissed a girl; he had rarely drunk a beer. What free time he had before that was spent playing video games, at which he excelled; or constructing military models, particularly World War II-era 1/700-scale battleships manufactured by the Tamiya corporation. But even such innocent pursuits had to be shelved in the single-minded drive for Todai acceptance. His father, a salaryman at a major electronics company, and his mother, a housewife, had long cherished the vision of their son going to Todai. And Hiro was proving a good student, good enough, his high school teachers encouraged, to possibly pass the Todai exam. But seven thousand dollars in cram school fees had to be invested if Hiro was to have a real shot. And if he didn’t make it? Then the dreams of another suburban Tokyo family would sink as surely as one of Hiro’s model battleships.

* * *

The word ichiban translates literally as Number One. But it also means the best, the finest, and finally, the one and only. In Japan Todai is ichiban. No other college in the world can match it in influence, prestige, and clout. Not Harvard. Not Yale. Not Princeton. Not Oxford. Not Cambridge. Not even, it has been seriously suggested, all of the above, combined.

The Todai entrance exam determines who is destined for what passes for the good life in Japan—employment in a key government agency or at a top company, corner office, fat expense account, mistresses, and golf course memberships. And it determines who is destined for a no-name company, office in the sticks, small expense account, little money, and nary a mistress.

Only 1,763 of Todai’s 15,451 1992–93 undergraduates were female,

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