SAITAMA—Parents and children of Chinese heritage are an increasingly common sight at entrance exam venues for competitive junior high schools in Japan.

Officials of certain top-tier schools said that children of Chinese descent now account for about 10 percent of their new enrollments.

The trend is part of a broader picture of a wave of “globalization” finally reaching the shores of private junior and senior high schools in Japan.

ONLY 80 SPOTS

Those out in Saitama Prefecture’s capital on Jan. 10 may have seen a line of about 5,000 test takers forming along a street that leads to the highly selective and co-ed Sakae-Higashi Junior High School.

The massive turnout signaled the kickoff of entrance exams for the 2025 academic year in the prefecture, with the first batch of private junior high schools holding exams that day.

Sakae-Higashi would only choose some 80 applicants of everyone testing.

As students waited, conversations in Chinese could be heard here and there throughout the crowd.

One woman seeing her son off to the exam venue was a 37-year-old Yokohama resident who moved to Japan from China about 14 years ago. She and her husband, who is also from China, raised their son in Japan.

Though her son was taking the exam for Sakae-Higashi that day, his first choice was the Seiko Gakuin, a private all-boys junior high school in Yokohama.

Rather than a public school, the woman said she chose to have her son take exams for private junior high schools because she wanted her son to “be in a good environment as early as junior high school age.”

Unlike in China, “universities in Japan have entrance screening systems that take into account strengths other than academic performance,” she said. “There is less competition in Japan because there are fewer children in the country. I hope our son will go on to a Japanese university, which could hopefully send him to go to study at a university in the English-speaking world.”

Another mother who was at the Sakae-Higashi venue shared that her daughter attended the same cram school as the Yokohama woman’s son and said her daughter’s first choice was Shibuya Kyoiku Gakuen Shibuya Junior High School, a private co-ed institute in Tokyo.

“Junior and senior high schools in China place so much emphasis on studies that they don’t even operate extracurricular activities,” the 42-year-old Chinese national said. “My daughter could probably spend time in a more easygoing atmosphere in Japan. It also appears she would have more chances, if she were here in Japan, of going on to universities overseas.”

“Perhaps somewhere around 10 percent of our new entrants have one or both parents from China,” said a Sakae-Higashi Junior High School official in charge of entrance exams. “The corresponding rate is particularly high in our ‘University of Tokyo class’ (for would-be entrants to Japan’s most prestigious university).”

SMALL, BUT GROWING DEMOGRAPHIC

An official with Kaisei Junior High School, a top-tier private school for boys in Tokyo, also chimed in.

“The number of our students with roots in Taiwan, Hong Kong and China is on the rise,” the official said. “They possibly account for slightly less than 10 percent of all our enrollments.”

Starting last year, Kaisei began opening the doors of its general entrance exams to elementary schoolers who attend institutions other than those defined in Article 1 of the School Education Law.

As a result, some students from international schools and schools for overseas Chinese have taken Kaisei’s entrance exams directly without having to transfer to “Article 1 schools” to qualify for the tests, the official said.

“One could say Japan is finally going global,” Kaisei Principal Tsutomu Nomizu said. “High schools and universities in Western countries have been enrolling many Chinese students for some time now.”

Nomizu added: “The presence of students with diverse backgrounds is beneficial from the viewpoint of international, cross-cultural understanding. Many students of similar backgrounds are hard-working and proficient in English, so they offer a good sense of motivation to the rest of our students.”

An official of the so-called “top three” private girls’ junior high schools in Tokyo also said: “There have been a certain number of students who seem to have Chinese heritage in our new enrollments over the past decade or so. There are currently several students of that demographic in each class.”

The education ministry’s School Basic Survey shows that about 90,000 students with non-Japanese citizenship were enrolled at public elementary schools as of May 2024, up 2.1 times from a decade earlier.

The number of non-Japanese junior high school students also rose 1.6 times to 33,000 or so at public institutions and grew 2.1 times to around 2,000 at private institutions during the same period.

According to Board of Education officials in areas where many children opt to take junior high school entrance exams, the number of public elementary schoolers of Chinese descent is “on the rise.” Tokyo’s Minato Ward is one example of these locations.

'MENTAL WOUNDS'

The “overheating” entrance exam race in China is attributed as one factor behind this trend.

While there are generally no tests for junior high school admission there, students face “zhongkao” entrance exams for high school.

In 2023, only 60 percent of junior high school graduates were admitted to regular high schools across China.

Competition to attend prestigious high schools is fierce due to the belief that they give students an advantageous foothold in their eventual university entrance exams.

Back in Japan at Fu Lihua’s after-school care center, children of Chinese heritage learn English, Japanese and other subjects.

According to Fu, the majority of preschoolers and first- and second-graders who come to study at the center join cram schools dedicated to junior high school entrance exams in the third or fourth grade and end up in prestigious junior high schools.

“Parents who took rigorous university entrance exams in China are now working for information technology companies and other businesses outside the country,” Fu said.

She continued: “Based on social media and elsewhere, a significant number believe that if their children go to a Japanese cram school and work hard, they could make it into prestigious junior high, high schools and universities.”

On the Chinese social media platform Xiaohongshu (RedNote) are numerous photos of mock exam results from Sapix and other cram school chains in Japan. These were likely posted by parents.

Fu, who was a junior high school teacher in China, explained that schools there load students with reams of assignments and strict instructions, keeping them at school until late.

Elite junior and senior high schools in Japan, by contrast, leave it up to students and their families to decide how well they want to do at school and where they want to go after graduating.

“Some parents feel disoriented after putting their children into those schools, because they wrongly believed the schools would look after their children in the same way that schools in China would,” Fu said.

She added that the Japanese language barrier can be so high for children who come to Japan as fifth- or sixth-graders, or perhaps as junior high schoolers, that they cannot even get around to taking entrance exams for junior high or high schools.

“The children could end up with mental wounds if the right timing and the right schools are not chosen for taking entrance exams,” Fu said.

“Private junior and senior high schools in Japan will face a tough time in the years to come because of the low birthrates,” said Osamu Yasuda, head of the Yasuda Education Research Institute, who is well-versed in the circumstances surrounding junior high school entrance exams.

“There will, therefore, be an even stronger tendency to recruit not only students from China but those from international schools as well as students with a good command of English who are likely to go on to universities overseas or competitive universities in Japan,” he said.

(This article was written by Senior Staff Writer Asako Miyasaka, Tokuhiko Saito in Beijing, Honomi Homma and Seri Ishikawa.)