Time to Choose a Junior High School

In many ways it's been Japan's blessing to have very little in the way of natural resources compared to, say, Saudi Arabia: this has forced the country to invest heavily in its own citizens through education. There are quite a few mechanisms for encouraging students to be serious about their studies from an early age, for example the many standardized tests for everything from English to kanji-writing to calculating numbers with an abacus, which provide goals for students that help them buckle down and apply themselves in ways I didn't learn until I got to college. My daughter will be entering Junior High next year, but we're not too keen on the idea of putting her in the normal public Junior High schools here, so famous for taking students that stand out (as my daughter is sure to) and hammering them into shape until they're just like everyone else, in accordance with that famous Japanese axiom deru kui wa utareru (DEH-roo koo-EE wa oo-TAH-reh-roo), or "the nail that sticks up will be hammered down." Instead, we're applying to a private Junior High in our area that's got quite a long history, having been established back in the Meiji Period. (On the school grounds they've preserved the original building the American missionaries who taught at the school in the 1880s lived in, and I love going in there to soak up all the history.) Since my daughter has to pass a test to get into the school, she's worried about how to prepare for it, but thankfully there's another useful mechanism for helping students out: the mogi shiken or "mock exam," where students can take last year's test and learn exactly what kinds of subjects will be on the new test, get used to pacing themselves, and so on. She took her mock exam over the weekend and is feeling much better about the upcoming entrance exam.