Japanese Education System

The Japanese education system is managed by the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology, with education compulsory at the elementary and lower secondary levels for a total of nine years. Its contemporary form dates to reforms of the Meiji period that established modern educational institutions delivering instruction in Japanese rather than a foreign language, and current policy emphasizes lifelong learning, advanced professional education and the internationalization of higher education as the country's population ages and shrinks. Japanese students consistently rank highly among OECD countries in reading, mathematics and science, placing eighth globally in the 2018 PISA assessment, even though education spending as a share of GDP, at 4.1 percent, sits below the OECD average of 5 percent; as of 2023 about 65 percent of Japanese aged 25 to 34 had attained some tertiary education, and Japanese women now surpass men in higher education attainment.