How the japanese learn to work 2nd edition - part 6 pps

The 20–40 per cent schools which have an overall 20 per cent senshu entry rate, have a 27 per cent rate in the most senshu-entry-prone prefectures, a 17 per cent rate in the least.. An i

Post-secondary, non-university VET 85

cent of all leavers) comes in the fourth category—schools where 20–40 percent of leavers went on to college or university Those in higher ranks areless likely to go because they are bent on getting into colleges or universities—

though the contraction in university places has been raising senshu entrance

rates over time from among the graduates of those schools too Those at thebottom are less likely to go because they have long since been mentallyprepared to go straight to work at the end of high school; ‘the system’ longsince made it clear that the university was not for them—though, again, timeseries show that a restriction in job opportunities leads to an increase in

numbers going on to senshu-gakko from these schools too But the prime candidates for senshu entry are those in the intermediate-rank schools, where

environmental pressures keep them wavering between trying for a job orgetting further training

The researchers uncovered, also, a geographical locational effect as well

as a school effect Some prefectures have far cheaper senshu places available

than others Higher overall prefectural attendance rates at such schools leads

to a greater salience of senshu schools in the public consciousness, which

increases the propensity to consider that option And so on Thus, even schools

with the same level of university progression have different senshu entry

rates depending on the prefecture The 20–40 per cent schools which have

an overall 20 per cent senshu entry rate, have a 27 per cent rate in the most

senshu-entry-prone prefectures, a 17 per cent rate in the least

But quite clearly, as other studies show, ‘opting for a senshu school’ is

not by any means a single homogeneous category of action It is frequently

suggested that the senshu schools are filled with what are known as the

‘might-as-well’ tribe Disappointed in their initial hopes of passing the entrance testfor a good firm, or the college or university they had hoped for, they decide

that they ‘might as well’ try a senshu-gakko in the hope that it might improve

their job chances

But there are other different categories There are also youngsters who

have set their heart on becoming cartoon animators or fashion designers andset out determinedly for a school that will help them to become one It seemsthat hairdressers, cooks and dieticians are more likely to fall into this pattern

An interesting survey by Recruit Research (2,000 students in 44 senshu

schools) found that more than 60 per cent of the students in hairdressingschools and cook/dietician schools said that they were doing what theyintended all along to do Only about 30 per cent made the same claim in theindustrial, business and teacher-training schools The percentages in thefashion, design, domestic science, art and music and nursing schools were

in the 40s The next question was only to those who had come to a senshu

school as second best What had been their first best? The industrial, design,art and music students were the disappointed college students—60 per cent

of the reluctant joiners, or 40 per cent of the whole For hairdressers, cooksand dieticians who had hoped for something else, that something else wasmuch more likely to have been an immediate job (Recruit 1985)

How far the second best is a best at all depends very much on the school.There is a general impression that it adds very little to the chances of careersuccess In the National Institute study, the 1,000 high school teachers incharge of their graduands’ career guidance were asked to rate their agreement

or disagreement with a number of judgements about the senshu schools The

statement with which there was the strongest general level of disagreement

was: it is easier to get a job if you have been to a senshu school than if you

have only been to a high school The question did not contain the proviso,but probably should have done, ‘if you are looking for a job outside your

home district’ A senshu-gakko qualification is a good deal less powerful

than recommendation from a known local school

But the extent to which this common judgement about the general run of

senshu schools applies to particular schools is limited The statement the

high school teachers disagreed with least was: there is a great variation inthe reliability of these schools Undoubtedly, many of these schools are ofpoor quality There are some, on the other hand, which have a high reputationfor brisk efficiency, whose graduates are keenly sought by employers, andwhose entrance examinations reject a good number of applicants (More

than 20 per cent of the industrial senshu school students in the Recruit Research survey reference had not got into their first-choice senshu school,

nearly the same proportion of the cooks and dieticians, and close to 30 percent of the nurses.)

WHERE DO THE GRADUATES GO?

Overall characterizations of the labour market’s reception of senshu school

graduates need, therefore, careful qualification, but the figures of an annualRecruit Research survey may nevertheless be worth quoting (1,100 firmsresponded in 1985 out of a polled total of 5,200) The proportion of firms

which had recruited someone from a senshu school during the year has

increased from 42 per cent in 1980 to 48–49 per cent in 1982–4 (Rodosho

1986 (Koyo Kanri Chosa) shows that 13.4 per cent of all firms recruited senshu graduates; the proportion was as high as 50.5 per cent for firms with

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5,000 or more employees, as small as 8.4 per cent for firms with 30–99employees.) The industries which favour them more than average werecommerce and services, and also electrical, electronic and precision-machinery makers The most common occupational specialities of those hiredwas data-processing (39 per cent of firms), followed by accountancy andbook-keeping (38 per cent), secretarial (24 per cent), and foreign languageskills (15 per cent) A similar Recruit survey in autumn 1994 cited softwareand information technology as the most popular occupational areas forgraduates of industrial courses (Recruit 1994) Those hired were more likely

in 1984 than in 1981 to be treated for salary purposes as the equivalent of atwo-year junior college graduate, though still 13 per cent of them were counted

as high school graduates (One printed circuit board manufacturer whichwas perfectly happy with raw high school graduates and saw no reason to

explore the senshu graduate market gave as its reason the difficulty of fitting

them into the salary system Treat them as high school graduates and theyare unhappy; treat them as college graduates and you make everybody elseunhappy.)

One other change is that the senshu graduates are slightly more likely

than they once were to be hired specifically for their specialty—like thewomen hired from foreign-language schools by Mitsukoshi and sent on two-year contracts to their branch shops in France and Germany The standard

journalistic cliché about senshu schools is that they produce ‘combat-ready’

employees—an interesting indication of the general expectation that normallyemployers have to do a lot of initial training before newly-hired employeesare useful A 1986 Recruit survey showed that two-thirds of the 738 employers

who hired senshu graduates said that they did so ‘because they needed people

with specialist knowledge or skills’ (Kosugi 1987) Still, however, about 50per cent were taken on as general employees and not put to work specifically

in the areas for which they were trained—and this applied, it appears, rathermore to those who had received some specific qualification from that trainingthan those who had not

During the late 1980s when employers faced labour shortages, somemedium-sized companies supplemented their intake of university graduates

with senshu-gakko graduates A case in point is a software house which

would have ideally wanted to recruit science and engineering universitygraduates, but had to make do with university graduates in liberal arts This

prompted the company to tap into senshu-gakko graduates in information

technology (Tokyo Prefecture 1989) The survey by the Tokyo Prefecture in

1987 indicates that while many employers expressed satisfaction with the

quality of senshu graduates, others complained about their weak basic ability,

less than expected level of specialist knowledge and hence reservations aboutthe graduates as ‘combat-ready’ workers These limitations in trainability

appear to be responsible for giving senshu graduates in technical fields a

narrower scope in job rotation, as compared to university graduate

technologists (1986 Koyo Kanri Chosa as quoted in Kosugi 1987:82).

Whereas university graduates are seen to be bright enough for their specialist

knowledge to be deepened by firm-specific training, senshu graduates, though

they may have particular skills of immediate use, are not thought usually to

be capable of the same sort of further development

What is the career orientation of senshu graduates themselves? An Employment Promotion Corporation survey of senshu graduates in 1982

and 1983 within Tokyo showed that 50 per cent of the graduates with jobsmoved to another firm within 5 years, although the move was most commonlywithin the same occupational group (Kosugi 1987) According to anothersurvey of 1,035 graduates in Tokyo in 1987, a specialist career within oracross firms was preferred among graduates in design, while graduates inbook-keeping, hotels and catering aimed for the same sort of generalist career

in a big company as university graduates usually aim for It appears that

while senshu graduates, as compared to graduates of other institutions, have

a greater attachment to occupational specialism than to the place of work,there are variations within them in their career orientation A common reason

for 18-year-olds preferring senshu-gakko to junior colleges or universities

especially in the 1990s appears to be not so much an increase in occupationalattachment among young people, but their wish to maximize their chances

of getting gainful employment after graduation Whereas the success rate inobtaining jobs declined from 80 per cent in 1990 to below 70 per cent in

1996 among male university graduates (and from around 80 per cent to less

than 65 per cent among female graduates), the rate for senmon gakko

graduates kept up at over 80 per cent throughout 1990–96 (Recruit 1997).There is no easy way of assessing in any quantitative terms the contributionthese schools make overall to the build-up of Japan’s stock of human capitalbeyond the rather obvious propositions that:

Some senshu schools specializing in very specific occupational

preparation—the hairdressing, cookery, surveying, nursing schools,for example—do a straightforward and on the whole craftsmanlikejob of teaching a well-routinized and only slowly changing curriculum.The existence of a national qualifying examination in all these fields is

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an effective monitoring device to ensure that adequate standards arereached

— Some which teach more general occupational skills, also of arelatively unchanging kind—English, accountancy—are alsocompetent and of good reputation A lot have been in the business foryears, and have established good reputations Many, once privateproprietorships run for profit (as the bulk of senshu schools still are),have been turned into trusts of one kind or another on the originalowner’s death It is perhaps proof of the ability of some of these schools

to impart substantive skills rather than a mere graduating qualification,that some university students—the ‘double-schoolers’ —are said to

be taking parallel courses at senshu schools in accountancy orcomputing

— Some schools, which operate in the more fluid fields of businessand computer studies and industrial technology, also perform a valuableservice and are often well ahead of both vocational high schools anduniversity engineering departments in teaching today’s rather thanyesterday’s industrial and office techniques and practice They are oftenexpensive (over a million yen for industrial schools), but are well-equipped and use lively part-time teachers from good progressive firms,rather than dead-beat retirees who have been eased out of seats-by-the-window in firms in which they had long ceased to play an activepart Some, like the best software writers’ schools, are major centresfor the diffusion of important new industrial skills Some can claim intheir advertising that they had twenty times as many job offers (or,rather, invitations to apply) from firms as they had graduating students.The best ones have developed a regular relationship with major firms

Nihon Victor, for example, is reported to have nearly 1,000 senshu

graduates on its books, nearly all drawn from one of seven or eight

schools (Nikkei Ryutsu, 20 May 1985).

— But others, also, are exploitative and barely short of fraudulent

in their pursuit of profit, relying on recruiting none-too-choosy ‘might

as well’ students (and often over-recruiting beyond the declared

capacity on which they fulfilled the space requirements for senshu

registration purposes) giving fewer hours of instruction than theypromised, and being none too concerned about either the professionalcompetence or the pedagogical skills of those they hire to teach Suchschools are a good deal more common in the rapidly changing fieldswith more advertisable glamour Should one, for instance, take seriously

the school in Saitama which has newly established a ‘Techno-ladyDepartment’ with courses in computers, the basic theory of officeautomation, practical secretarial work, English conversation and ‘eventproduction’? Perhaps some firms will.

The atmosphere of live-and-let-live hugger-mugger which pervadesJapanese society (equally describable as the Japanese capacity for reachingreasonable and equitable solutions to problems without open confrontations)militates against the emergence of a genuinely independent consumers’association-type attempt to provide an assessment guide to such schools.The rough justice of such efforts would cause too many problems, and inJapan it is normally to the state rather than to citizen initiative that one looksfor such services The state has, indeed, used one implicit quality-vettingmechanism until recently The Ministry of Labour legally retains control ofall job placement services It is illegal to operate a personnel agency withoutauthorization, and all the placement services of universities are so recognized.This authorization was until recently granted only to about 200 of the largerand better-established schools—which were able to advertise the fact in their

brochures and make claims about their bairitsu—the ratio of employers’

requests to numbers of graduating students The other 3,000 schools—atleast the conscientious ones among them—were not, of course, deterred fromtrying to provide the same service for their students, and there was never anyquestion of prosecution The Ministry has now bowed to reality and madeall senshu schools automatically authorized for personnel placement work.One other form of official intervention: 123 schools are recognized bythe Ministry of Education as bringing middle-school graduates up to thelevel of high school graduation, hence eligible for university entrance But

this is a minor function of the senshu schools, affecting, it is estimated, only

80,000 of the million-plus students The schools are now overwhelminglyconcerned with the further training of high-school leavers

PUBLIC ASSISTANCE

This is not to say that government agencies are not concerned with the

senshu-gakko and are content to leave them entirely to the market There

are always officials ready to offer a little administrative guidance Oneschool which was starting a new course to train biotechnology labtechnicians told reporters that they had at first intended tentatively tointroduce biotechnology as a minor part of the pharmacy course until they

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were urged by an official to make it a full-scale department in view of itsimportance for the future

In financial terms, however, apart from the small number of state,

prefectural and municipal schools among them, the senshu-gakko constitute

an almost pure market sector Assistance for students from the StateScholarship Fund is on an exiguous scale The maximum grant for high-school leavers attending a private institution and living away from home is

¥37,000 a month and there is a quota of 2,400 students a year (plus a quota

of 1,200 students attending public senshu schools—the nurses, etc —whoget a lesser amount) Middle-school leavers on high-school-equivalentcourses— 600 of them—get half that amount

Total state subsidization was reckoned (Nikkei, 5 June 1985) to amount

in 1985 only to ¥1.7bn—mostly in the form of the above-mentioned loans

to students, overseas aid funds for foreign students, and a small sum fromthe national fund for large-scale instructional equipment In addition therewere reduced-interest loans of ¥2.4bn from the Private EducationalInstitutions Fund for school buildings

This sum, however, probably includes only monies disbursed under theauspices of the Ministry of Education There is also a certain amount ofassistance available to nursing schools from the Ministry of Health, andthe Ministry of Labour and its prefectural Labour Department counterparts

provide some assistance to certain senshu schools.

For example, a hairdressing school in Fukushima, with 88 pupils on aone-year course in 1986 had a dual legal personality On the one hand it

was a legal trust (shadan hojin), an association of 441 local barbers who

had each made a capital contribution of about ¥20,000 and paid an annualsubscription of ¥1,000 About a tenth of the annual expenditure of some

¥30m came from donations (including ¥100,000 from a textbook supplier)and about two-thirds from student fees At the same time it was alsoconstituted as a Vocational Training School, performing delegated trainingunder the terms of the Vocational Training Act In this capacity it had anotherbudget amounting to ¥11 m and in that capacity alone was entitled to receive

a subsidy for 55 student places from the prefecture The whole point ofthis fictional division of the budget was to receive a subsidy of ¥2 1/2m,the total effect of which was to reduce the fees to be paid by all its 88students by about 8 per cent, to about ¥360,000

Even if all these additional sources of support are taken into account,however, the total public subsidy, even if it has increased since 1985, is

marginal Total annual fee payments by students at senshu schools probably

amount to at least ¥660bn It might be expected that the current drive for

‘deregulation’ would have led to demands for the abolition of the licensing

controls over senshu- and kakushu-gakko, particularly since—apart from

the minority of public institutions in the public health and nursing fields—the central government which controls the licensing in principle, and theprefectural government which operates it in practice, do practically nothing

to help the schools with public funds In fact, however, the schoolsthemselves seem keen to preserve the system As already made clear, thequality of these schools varies immensely These schools are hoping thatthe licensing system will be changed in order to separate them from therest by creating a new category of quasi-university status Best estimates

seem to judge some 600 of the approximately 3,000 senshu-gakko as being

‘educationally respectable’

5 Training in the enterprise

In the mid–1990s there were over a 100 million Japanese aged 15 and over.Something like 65 per cent of them were gainfully employed or seeking to

be so Over 20 per cent of those were self-employed or family workers andanother 17–18 per cent were temporary or part-time workers That leavesjust over 40 million regular full-time workers, of whom a little under a quarterwere in private enterprises employing over 1,000 workers The public sectorwith similar conventions and conditions of service accounts for another 5million

So the 15 million or so employed in the large-firm and public enterprise/public administration sector are by no means a majority of the Japanesework force But they are a strategic minority It is among them that the mostdifficult learning goes on, and among them that the highest learning ability,

as diagnosed by the school and university labelling system, is concentrated.(According to one study, of graduates from universities with a ‘standarddeviation score entry rating’ of 45 or less, only 7 per cent found jobs in firmswith more than 5,000 employees (see Chapter 2) For universities rated over

70, the figure was 70 per cent (Takeuchi 1989:32).)

It is not surprising, therefore, that most of the available information aboutenterprise training concerns the larger enterprises, and it is with those that

we begin

LIFETIME EMPLOYMENT AND TRAINING

The anxious self-questioning prompted by the recession of the early andmid–1990s, produced yet another spate of brave and bold declarations aboutthe ‘end of lifetime employment’ Japanese firms, it was said, cannot compete

in world markets if they are hobbled by the fixed-cost burden and the minded false egalitarianism of a career employment system One reflection

tender-of this is to be found in the Ministry tender-of Labour’s launch tender-of its BusinessCareer System initiative for white collar workers, described in the last chapter.

In many firms the most obviously redundant workers, protected fromdismissal only by the conventions of lifetime employment, are older whitecollar workers—university as well as high school graduates who have notmade it into the senior managerial ranks The literature advertising theBusiness Career System stresses that the training courses in variousmanagerial functions serve not only for improving capabilities and improving

career chances within the firm, but also for improving the chance of getting

a job elsewhere— ‘if the worst comes to the worst’, as some would say, or ‘ifJapan succeeds in making the highly desirable transition to flexible labourmarkets’ according to others

It is symptomatic of the persisting attractions of the Western model—attractive particularly to the growing number of American MBAs among theranks of Japanese managers and bureaucrats—that the literature on this newprogramme is more than usually spattered with imported Japanglish—

kyariya-appu no jobbu-roteeshon (career development (=up) through job

rotation), for example

It may indeed be that eventually shareholders’ tolerance of low profitswill reach breaking point, their power over management will increase and

we shall see some Japanese firms go the way of those American type’ firms like IBM and Kodak, and start sacking redundant workers But

‘Japanese-so far the statistics tell a different story The recession of the early 1990s haslowered the separation rate across the board, but especially in the largerfirms Since it was largely separation due to voluntary resignations that isunderstandable, but there has been no increase in involuntary dismissals either

So the presumption of lifetime employment, at least for a firm’s corelabour force, still provides a strong justification for firms to invest in thetraining of their workers There is some loss of initial training investments—something like 40 per cent of new recruits leave their first job within threeyears over the labour market as a whole, though mobility rapidly declinesthereafter—and the loss is, if anything, exacerbated by the preference of thebig firms for making up for wastage by recruiting extra new graduates ratherthan by taking experienced people trained from elsewhere But these lossesare not yet such as to act as a major deterrent to training There has been asteady increase in the number of young people who say, in response to surveyquestions, that they would like to change their job, but a much slower increase

in the number who actually do so One training survey found that of whitecollar workers asked about the purpose of training that they were undertaking