Japanese schools are struggling with foreign pupils
Dec 12th 2019TOYOHASHIWHEN HIROKO TSUKIHI instructs her pupils to write down “water” in kanji, the ideograms derived from Chinese that are used alongside Japan’s home-grown syllabic scripts, they groan. Even for native pupils steeped in the language, kanji take hours to memorise. But Ms Tsukihi teaches immigrant children who have recently arrived in Toyohashi, a city in central Japan, as part of a programme called Mirai (“the future” in Japanese), which provides ten weeks of intensive language classes for middle-school pupils before integrating them into local public schools. The city launched the Mirai programme in 2018. “The schools couldn’t support all the foreign students coming in,” says Ms Tsukihi.In many parts of the country schools are becoming a bit less homogenous. There are currently 124,000 registered foreign-born children of school age in Japan. Although that is only just over 1% of pupils in the school system, it marks a 30% rise from 2014. A new visa scheme that went into effect in April, meant to lure blue-collar workers into industries facing labour shortages, is expected to bring more immigrants and their children. In the manufacturing hub of Toyohashi, labour-brokers recruit thousands of Brazilians and Filipinos to work in factories every year. Such workers have 1,976 children in the local schools, up from 1,352 five years ago.Choose us for news analysis that respects your time and intelligenceSubscribe to The EconomistWe filter out the noise of the daily news cycle and analyse the trends that matterWe give you rigorous, deeply researched and fact-checked journalism. That’s why Americans named us their most trusted news source in 2017Available wherever you are—in print, digital and, uniquely, in audio, fully narrated by professional broadcastersThis website adheres to all nine of NewsGuard‘s standards of credibility and transparency.ORContinue reading this articleRegister with an email address