Life: School Life - FAQ - Kids Web Japan (2024)

FAQs

How many hours a day do Japanese students go to school? ›

In general, kids have to be at school by 8:45 am. School finishes around 3:15 pm, so they have to be in school for about six and a half hours every day from Monday to Friday. However, most kids also attend after-school clubs, and many also go to juku (cram school) in the evening to do extra studying.

Japanese students put in a whopping 240 days a year at school, a whole 60 days more than their American counterparts. Although a significant portion of these days are dedicated to preparing for annual school events, Japanese students still log more classroom hours than their Western counterparts.

Schools say they impose rules on their students to create a sense of uniformity and keep out any negative influences. Teachers in Japan seem to believe that teenagers dyeing or styling their hair in a unique way indicates they are “bad students”.

Under the current system in Japan, students can skip grades only after completing two years of high school. The only available accelerations are to skip the last year of high school to enter a university early or skip the last year of university to enter a graduate school.

The amount of studying required in Japan is astronomically higher than what is needed in America. However, once students are in school, many find the actual classes to be far easier than the admission exams. Many high schools in Japan provide a focused education and training, whether academic or vocational.

Japanese schools have three semesters, separated by vacations. At most schools, summer vacation covers the 40-odd days from July 20 to August 31; winter and spring vacation both last around 10 days, from December 26 to around January 6 and March 25 to around April 5, respectively.

The School Education Law obliges parents to send their children aged seven to fourteen to primary and lower secondary education schools. High school is not mandated. Parents who violate this provision can be punished with a fine (Article 16, 17, 144).

Almost 300,000 elementary and junior high school students in Japan skipped school for at least 30 days in the 2022 school year, a government survey showed on Tuesday.

In Japan, there is a tradition that the students themselves clean their schools. For just 15 minutes at the end of the day, students use brooms, vaccuums, and cloths to clean the classrooms, bathrooms, and other school spaces.

What age is grade 1 in Japan? ›

Under this system, children enroll in primary school as first-graders on the 1st of April, immediately following their 6th birthday. Also, under the principle of the age-grade system, children neither skip grades nor are they held back to repeat grades based on their academic performance.

Public schools in Japan have classes five days a week, from Monday to Friday. There are also schools that have classes on Saturday. In junior high and high schools, there are six class periods each day, typically lasting 50 minutes for each.

In principle, schools are operated on five-days-a-week system. In public elementary schools the time frame per class is 45 minutes. Generally, 4 classes are taken in the morning and 1 or 2 classes are taken in the afternoon. The number of classes varies by academic year.

With this in mind, you can map out your study plan so that you dedicate 20-30 minutes to learning Japanese every day. By doing so, you'll pick up the language faster than those who have hour-long study sessions only a few days a week.

Daily schedule

In a typical high school, teachers gather each morning at 8:30 a.m. for a brief meeting. Students meet at 8:35 a.m. for a 5-minute homeroom period. Regular classes begin at 8:45 a.m. and there are four 50-minute classes before lunch. High school students eat in their homeroom.