Kieko Hara has attended a "cram school" for months in a desperate effort to be ready for entrance exams. She's 5, and her parents hope Kieko will make it into a top-ranked private elementary school.
She attends cramming sessions twice a week after kindergarten and on weekends.Some days, Kieko makes rice balls or crafts, or is drilled in the Japanese alphabet. Once a week, she takes a practice test like those used by private schools to choose the few applicants they accept.
"We wish she didn't have to go to cram school, but if she gets into a good private system now, then she'll be able to enter the school's junior high automatically," said Yuko, her mother.
Japanese public education is praised for egalitarianism and the high scores of students on achievement tests, but as public schools have become more equal, parents have sought an edge elsewhere.
Children are being sent at ever-younger ages to cram schools, called jukus, or are going to private rather than public schools in hopes of gaining ground in the merciless college-entrance competition.
The Education Ministry says 71 percent of elementary and junior high students attend jukus or have special outside lessons, in effect creating an entire second school system. It is a booming business estimated to be worth about 1 trillion yen, or $7 billion, a year.
Some Japanese contend the increasing role of private spending in education threatens the equality of opportunity created by the public school system. Others feel public schools have concentrated on educating the mass of students, neglecting the bright and creative.
Getting into the best schools frequently costs a staggering amount of money, as well as work.
Kieko's parents pay about 65,000 yen ($460) a month for her juku classes in addition to fees for her private kindergarten. Some classmates began attending a juku at age 3, to prepare for the kindergarten entrance exam, and now have daily cram sessions before kindergarten and again in the afternoon.
Such devotion to schooling has a long history in Japan and some other Asian nations, but the intense competition is largely a postwar development that grew with economic prosperity.
Japan spends less on public education than the United States, both in total amount and percentage of gross national product.
In the last fiscal year, the government allocated 16 trillion yen ($112 billion) to public education, compared with $353 billion this year in the United States.
An Education Minstry study in 1987 said 4.2 percent of Japan's GNP went to public education, compared with 4.8 percent in the United States, 4.4 percent in Britain and 4.2 percent in West Germany.
Spending on education in the United States varies greatly by school district and region, but Japan has followed a policy of equal distribution of resources. It also does not "track" students, separating them according to ability.
In the United States, the federal government provides about 6 percent of the public money for kindergarten through high school. Japan's central government pays 43 percent, much of it in subsidies to local districts that reduce regional disparities to less than 20 percent, according to government figures.
The Education Ministry approves textbooks and curricula, so all students study essentially the same material at the same time.
In high school, Japanese students cram for college entrance exams that determine not only what schools they will attend, but their chances for a good job afterward.