{"id":11057,"date":"2010-03-11T12:55:58","date_gmt":"2010-03-11T16:55:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jetwit.com\/wordpress\/?p=11057"},"modified":"2010-03-15T00:00:30","modified_gmt":"2010-03-15T04:00:30","slug":"wit-life-81-japanese-high-school-tuition","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jetwit.com\/wordpress\/2010\/03\/11\/wit-life-81-japanese-high-school-tuition\/","title":{"rendered":"WIT Life #81: Japanese high school tuition"},"content":{"rendered":"

WITLife<\/strong><\/em><\/a> is a periodic series written by professional Writer\/Interpreter\/Translator <\/strong><\/em>Stacy Smith<\/strong><\/a> <\/em>(Kumamoto-ken CIR, 2000-03). She starts her day by watching Fujisankei\u2019s newscast in Japanese, and here she shares some of the interesting tidbits and trends together with her own observations.<\/strong><\/em>\"\"<\/p>\n

There is a bit of a controversy brewing over implementation of one aspect of the DPJ’s Manifesto.\u00a0 This is the proposal of free tuition for high schools currently being debated in the Diet.\u00a0 Students have to pay to attend high school as Japanese education is only compulsory through junior high.\u00a0 The question here is whether North Korean schools in Japan (of which there are 10 and where about 2,000 students of both North Korean and South Korean nationality are enrolled) should be similarly subsidized considering that Japan imposes economic sanctions on North Korea and in light of the yet unresolved abduction issue.<\/p>\n

PM Hatoyama is waffling on this issue, with him initially making a statement favoring their exclusion but lately saying the government was undecided.\u00a0 He declared there is a need to set solid criteria to determine if the schools offer curricula equivalent to those at Japanese schools.\u00a0 New Komeito and other political parties have supported including them as part of the proposal, on the basis that diplomatic concerns should not interfere with children’s education.\u00a0 An editorial<\/a> in today’s Mainichi Daily News argues that: “These students, born and raised in Japan, have been and will be members of Japanese society.\u00a0 The free tuition measures, as with the child allowance<\/a> program, are based on the principle that society as a whole should bring up children.”\u00a0 Stay tuned to see how these political pressures play out<\/p>\n

In other news, Forbes just released its annual list of world-wide billionaires, and this year 22 Japanese made the list, 5 more than last year.\u00a0 The highest ranking one was #76 Tadashi Yanai<\/a>, whose wealth is estimated at 6 billion dollars. \u00a0 He is the 60-year old founder and president of Fast Retailing, of which Uniqlo is a subsidiary.\u00a0 Coming in at #721 was 33-year old Yoshikazu Tanaka<\/a>,\u00a0the world’s second-youngest self-made billionaire after Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg.\u00a0 His worth\u00a0is\u00a0estimated at 1.4 billion dollars, and\u00a0this\u00a0entrepreneur is the founder of Japan’s second most popular SNS behind Mixi, Gree.jp.\u00a0 Japan is said to have 30% less billionaires than last year, faring slightly better than\u00a0its neighbor South Korea who lost 2\/3 of theirs.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

WITLife is a periodic series written by professional Writer\/Interpreter\/Translator Stacy Smith (Kumamoto-ken CIR, 2000-03). She starts her day by watching Fujisankei\u2019s newscast in Japanese, and here she shares some of the interesting tidbits and trends together with her own observations. There is a bit of a controversy brewing over implementation of one aspect of the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[42,4,30,18,36],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11057","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-anecdote-article","category-articlejournalism","category-japan-trends","category-translatinginterpreting","category-wit-life"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pkZ7m-2Sl","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jetwit.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11057","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jetwit.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jetwit.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jetwit.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jetwit.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11057"}],"version-history":[{"count":15,"href":"https:\/\/jetwit.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11057\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11100,"href":"https:\/\/jetwit.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11057\/revisions\/11100"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jetwit.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11057"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jetwit.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11057"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jetwit.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11057"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}