Success for Sale? Roles, Perspectives and Motivations within the Juku scene in Japan

Abstract

Juku, Japanese private supplementary teaching institutions, are an extensive feature of the Japanese educational landscape. A shadow (Bray 1999; Yamato & Zhang 2017) that follows and fills in the gaps of mainstream education. This article focuses on the juku industry surrounding the entrance examination system for junior high school in Japan and looks at the different roles individuals interacting with juku play and how they change over time. It uses interview data from the author’s 2024 fieldwork and situates it within the existing literature on the topic. It finds that juku is a complex experience not easily labeled as positive or negative and that former students who had negative experiences as children do not necessarily view juku as a negative thing as adults. It raises the question of whose opinion matters most, children, or the adults those children will become.