Jyuuguo (Class)

It an attempt not to study for the GRE I'm going to launch into another rant.

Before I do I want to clarify two things.

1) I even though I complain a lot, I'm actually having a good time here. I think complaints and observations are a lot more interesting that reading blog post after blog post of "OMG THIS AND THIS WAS JUST FANTASTIC"

2) In terms of research I'm getting exactly what I want out of the program.

A note to future YSEP students. Don't do this program for the classes. If you come here for the course work you will not be happy.

That said I'd like to talk about classes Japan for a few minutes. Or actually I'd like to talk about the joke that passes for classes here.

Classes here are 1 1/2 hours long each week for a Semester. The standard undergrad student takes maybe 8-10 classes. So the amount of time spent in classes is about the same as in the states. Although with 8-10 classes one day a week the Japanese school system obviously is going for breadth, not depth.

For grads the standards are even lower, given that they are expected to conduct 10-12 hours of research every day. They only take 2-3 classes.

I'm going to take 4, maybe 3. To give you a feel for how easy these classes can be I'll describe the two classes that I choose to sign up for. My two mandatory classes are so easy I'm not even going to bother describing them.

One class "Advanced Developmental Biology" has 10 classes. In order to pass I need to attend 6 of those classes. Grades are purely attendance based.

The other course "Distributed Algorithms" sounds so cool you can't possibly fuck it up, right? Wrong. Were spending the next 3 lectures, out of 10 proving concurrency algorithms from the 70s. Problem sets are optional. I think I'll sit in but not take the class. Low standards in classes for me breads laziness.

Now at this point in the conversation a lot of people have asked me, "But Gabe, Japanese people are the most technically advanced people and hardest working people in the world, look at all their crazy phones, look at their GDP, look at all the crazy shit we see coming out of the country every day"

Well those people that ask me that are kind of right. Its just that the Japanese education system is screwed up. To fully explain the root of this problem, we have to go to where most of our problems originated: High school.

High School in Japan in hell. Students attend school Monday-Saturday 8-10 hours a day. Then they go home to do homework. They do this in the name of being able to pass college entrance exams to get into the best colleges.

Wait... what? I go to one of the best colleges, and I just got done saying how east it is.

Well it turns out that it doesn't really matter what college you go to. All that matters is where you went. After World War II Japan started using a lifetime employment system. You get a job at a company after college and you stay there your entire life, or else you suffer huge, and often times irrecoverable financial setbacks from switching jobs. It also turns out that if you didn't come from one of the best colleges a company won't even bother looking at your resume. A good college here, even more so than the states is the ticket to a good job.

A job, that the company will train you how to do for the next 3-4 years, they can afford to spend that much timing training you because you'll be working there for the next 40 years. Also job where you'll be expected to work 10-12 hour days regularly.

So as it turns out Japanese colleges are a 4 year break between having the ability to get a good job, and actually having to work in that job. The only Japanese people who work hard in college are the ones who want to study abroad, generally in America, and the ones who want to go to graduate school.

Speaking of which, time to get back to studying for graduate school...