Education in Japan

Education in Japan is managed by the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT) of Japan. Education is compulsory at the elementary and lower secondary levels. Most students attend public schools through the lower secondary level, but private education is popular at the upper secondary and university levels. Education prior to elementary school is provided at kindergartens and day-care centres. The programmes for those children aged 3–5 resemble those at kindergartens. The educational approach at kindergartens varies greatly from unstructured environments that emphasize play to highly structured environments that are focused on having the child pass the entrance exam at a private elementary school. The academic year starts from April and ends in March, having summer vacation in August and winter vacation in the end of December to the beginning of January.

Japanese students consistently rank highly among OECD students in terms of quality and performance in reading, mathematics, and sciences. Japan is one of the top-performing OECD countries in reading literacy, mathematics and sciences on Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) tests with the average student scoring 520, compared with the OECD average of 488, placing it eighth in the world in the 2018 ranking. The contemporary Japanese population is highly educated, steeped in a traditional cultural ethos influenced by Confucian values dating back over two millennia in a civilization whose national strength was dependent on an educated populace coupled with a deeply ingrained societal quintessence that has long acknowledged the fundamental importance of education as a central means to propel scientific advancement and cultural progress. Japanese culture and society has traditionally placed an enormously important emphasis on education as a means of advancing in both socioeconomic standing and securing promising employment prospects within the nation's advanced technologically driven economy, both historically and in modern times. The nation's fulsome pool of highly educated and skilled individuals has played a pivotal role in facilitating the economic transformation of the island archipelago in the aftermath of the Second World War. Tertiary-educated adults in Japan, particularly graduates in sciences and engineering, benefit socioeconomically from their extensive breadth and depth of scientific knowledge and technical skillsets when navigating the country's high technology-oriented economy.

Spending on education as a proportion of GDP is 4.1 percent, which is below the OECD average of 5 percent. Although expenditure per student is comparatively high in Japan, total expenditure relative to GDP remains small. In 2020, the country ranked third for the percentage of 25-to-64-year-olds that have attained tertiary education with 52.7 percent. In 2023, approximately 65% of Japanese aged 25 to 34 have achieved some form of tertiary educational qualification, with bachelor's degrees are held by 34.2% of the Japanese populace aged 25 to 64, the second most in the OECD after South Korea. Japanese females are more highly educated compared to their male counterparts as 59 percent of Japanese women possess a university degree, compared to 52 percent of Japanese men. As the Japanese economy is largely scientifically and technologically based, its labor market demands people who have achieved some form of higher education, particularly related to science and engineering in order to gain a competitive edge when searching for employment opportunities. According to the MEXT, the percentage of Japanese going on to any higher education institution in the eighteen-year-old cohort was 80.6 percent, with 52.6 percent of students going on to a university, 4.7 percent to a junior college, 0.9 percent to a college of technology and the remaining 22.4 percent attending a correspondence school, the University of the Air or a specialized training college. Japan's education system played a central part in Japan's recovery and rapid economic growth in the decades following 1945.