Although many schools make an effort to keep a school song at least somewhat timely and fun to sing, and there are a lot of good school songs around Japan with the inevitable charismatic brass band to play it as well as they can… Shigakukan High School in Nagoya city, Aichi Prefecture has a great JPop…
There is news going around that seems to reference a 5 year old BBC article that calls up 20 year old research and has been recycled into an article on the internet that points out that nearly a dozen (nearly a dozen! That could be 10 whole people or more!) Japanese citizens are treated for…
A previous post listed the 2011 Japanese tv shows that parents don’t want their children to watch as voted by members of Japan’s national PTA association. The flip side of the list are tv shows Japanese parents want their children to watch. Some of these are a lot of fun as well. Here is the…
This is a part of the annual poll conducted of members of Japan’s National PTA Association. It lists the top 8 Japanese TV shows that members think kids should not see. Topping the list for the 8th year in a row is a favorite among non-Japanese residents in Japan, followed by other perennials and even…
Well, I took advantage of a late night to do some light internet reading. Although I don’t often read news about Japan in English, tonight I was in the mood so I checked some of my RSS feeds for interesting articles. I came across a few that I don’t really want to link to, but…
In the what happens where you live happens where we live category, a 23 year old female teacher at a prefectural high school in Saitama was caught in the act of having sex with an 11th grade male student. The teacher was at the school as a temporary substitute. The teacher had been communicating with…
The Japanese Ministry of Health, Labor, and Welfare has released a list of eight cliches they say people interviewing for jobs with Japanese companies should avoid saying. These are the kind of things that teachers in Japan, many of whom have never had jobs other than teaching, advise their students to say. I hope the…
In my previous post on the Japan University Entrance Exams, I mentioned that we would be seeing some feel-good news about people making efforts to make sure the high school seniors can make it to their tests on time. Here’s the first one I spotted… probably more to come. Akita JR workers spent hours shoveling…
This Saturday and Sunday are the days for the “Senta Shiken” or “Center Shiken” or “Center Test”, Japan’s national university entrance exams. Many people talk about exam hell in Japan, but personally I don’t think it’s any different. When I was a wee lad back in the U.S. I put my heart and soul and…
Although rumors of this had been floating around, it seems that G.education, the company currently behind the famous Nova name, is finalizing plans to create Nova University somewhere in the Tokai region. They are also currently exploring other names for the new privately run university. A formal announcement about the future of the endeavor is…
Although this is just being reported now, the suicide happened in June of 2007! Although the family of the Indian student who committed suicide asked the Otemon Gakuin University to investigate, the school let this case sit on a shelf for 3 years. The university made no report until the bereaved family hired a lawyer…
Kiyosato Elementary School in Maebashi City, Gunma Prefecture is looking for help paying its overwhelming water bill this summer. A 30 year old teacher at the school, thinking ahead to the coming opening of the pool, left a valve open when filling the pool leaving it to overflow for 13 days and waste a total…