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Whatever a Japanese student's goal, the good life beckons the moment he gets past the narrow entrance-examination gate. Since the accent is on rote memorization of facts, a student can always cram to pass a test and he has to be atrociously uninterested to flunk out. For rural youths, the excitement of living in Tokyo compensates for classroom tedium. Money is rarely a problem. A student can find board and room—the universities have few dorms—for as little as $30 a month. A curry-and-rice lunch costs 30 cents. He can meet his tuition and fees (about $40 a year in state-owned Tokyo University, up to $500 in a private school) by tutoring high school students.
At Tokyo's universities, the pay scale is so low (roughly $140 to $250 per month) that most professors care more about their moonlighting ventures in business or publishing than their class duties. Lacking any intellectual contact with the faculty, students frequently pour out their frustrations in politics.
Once admitted to a university, a student theoretically becomes a member of the Zengakuren, the national federation of student governments. Actually only a few thousand of the Zengakuren's members are convinced radicals, but they nonetheless constitute a cadre of professional riot organizers, who almost annually create a governmental crisis.
Although proud of their country's democratic approach to higher learning, many Japanese scholars lament the loss of the universities' prewar intimacy, when there was close student-professor contact, more emphasis on moral guidance than career-oriented degree-granting. Schools today, complains Tokyo University President Kazuo Okochi, are "producing a lot of young graduates who do not have enough self-consciousness or sense of human values." Like the U.S., Japan has discovered that overcrowding and impersonality are part of the price a nation has to pay for mass higher education.
† Originally, wandering, masterless samurai of feudal Japan.