Have you ever thought about Japanese high schools?
There are many animes that show how schools are in Japan, but in the animes we can’t see the real daily life of a Japanese high school student.
Japanese teenagers are very busy. Every school has extra curricular courses, such as sports (tennis, soccer, karate, kendo) or music (orchestra, singing) and also courses of writing and communication (radio) that students have to choose and attend for the 3 years of high school.
Each course is taken every day in the morning, before normal lessons, and in the afternoon after lessons, and they last circa 1h and 30 min.
Before starting afternoon courses all students have to clean their classes because it is the student’s duty, so in every class there is a cupboard where there are cleaning tools.
For this reason students care a lot about their classrooms and they learn to respect the environment!
After school students attend other courses to improve their school capacity this courses are called “jyuku”. They can attend English, Math, Grammar and Science. It’s a long school day!
Generally in the schools there are many rigid rules that must be respected. For example all students have to wear the school uniform; boys have to cut their hair and girls have to tie one’s hair if long; it is forbitten to bring cigarettes at school because legally under 18 years old they can’t smoke.
Japanese classrooms are very big and in one class there are about 35~40 people (it depends on the school’s reputation). There are just two kinds of schools: a professional and a generarical one.
School’s days in Japan are 250 so holidays are just a few. A hard day of school, a hard year but the majority of the students will attend University and they will become good citizens.
Anna Locatelli, 2 B Ls
