Japan’s students posted some of the best scores in the world on the 2022 round of PISA, the international test that measures how well 15-year-olds apply what they’ve learned in school. But the same country also logged 346,482 students who could not or would not attend school that year, and more than 732,000 recognized bullying cases. Those two facts describe the same students, and taken together they raise a harder question than any test score can answer.
Japan’s school system is one of the most admired in the world. It also shows how the same intensity that produces strong results can weigh on children. The useful lesson for other countries is learning to tell those two things apart: which habit is worth borrowing, and which cost is worth leaving behind.
A Classroom Built on Small Habits
In many Japanese classrooms, a single math problem can hold the class’s attention far longer than it would elsewhere.
Photo by Students try it, compare methods with a partner, and explain out loud why an answer works before the teacher confirms it. Checking with a partner turns getting the right answer into a shared job rather than a race.
The goal is for the whole row to understand, not for the fastest hand in the room to win. That shift sounds modest. Repeated over years of school days, it adds up to thousands of small rehearsals in explaining your own reasoning out loud, which happens to be exactly the skill that shows up later on international tests.
What the Numbers Show
That connection shows up clearly in test results.
Photo by PISA (the Programme for International Student Assessment) is run every few years by the OECD, a group of mostly wealthy democracies that compares policy data across countries.
In the 2022 round, Japan’s students scored 536 in math, 516 in reading, and 547 in science, all above the OECD average1. Between 2018 and 2022, reading and science scores improved while math held roughly steady1. That steadiness is notable because the 2022 test came after pandemic disruptions that pulled scores down in many other countries.
These are genuinely strong results. Still, rankings can exaggerate how far apart top countries really are. A few points between leaders tell us less than a headline suggests. The honest read is that Japan sits firmly in the top group of school systems, one of several with a real claim to the top spot.
What a Score Leaves Out
A test like PISA looks at a narrow slice of school life: applied reasoning on structured problems, measured once, at one age.
Photo by It can’t tell us whether a student feels safe at school, whether she looks forward to Monday, or whether her teacher has time to notice when something is wrong.
Japan’s own data fills in part of that picture:
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In fiscal 2023, 346,482 elementary and junior high students were classified as refusing or unable to attend school.
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The 2023 school year recorded 732,568 recognized bullying cases, including 24,678 involving cyberbullying.
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An earlier OECD review found that Japan’s high achievement coexists with pressure on child well-being, heavy teacher workloads, and high-stakes university entrance exams1.
Japan Is Asking the Question Too
Japan has been examining this gap on its own.
Photo by The country’s 2023 Basic Plan for the Promotion of Education, its national roadmap for schools, names improving children’s well-being as a policy goal2. In August 2024, the Central Council for Education issued recommendations on keeping and training good teachers, with attention to balancing a manageable workload with professional fulfillment.
That framing matters. Rather than treating high achievement and humane, fair access to learning as competing goals, Japan is trying to hold both at once. Exhausted teachers and anxious students don’t sustain strong learning for long, and the country’s own planning documents now say so directly.
The Practice Worth Carrying Home
If one piece of this system travels well, it’s the partner check. It needs no new textbook, no longer school day, and no extra exam. A teacher simply adds one step: before any answer counts as final, two students compare their work and explain their thinking to each other.
The routine builds the exact skill PISA rewards, reasoning you can put into words. It also acts as a small safety net, catching a mistake between classmates before it becomes a public one in front of the whole room. The pressure around exams and entrance tests is a separate matter, and it’s the part other school systems can choose to leave behind.
The habit worth keeping is simple: two students working out an answer together before anyone confirms it, without the exam pressure that comes bundled with it in Japan. A parent might try a version of this at the kitchen table, asking a child to compare homework answers with a sibling and explain any difference before checking the answer key. A teacher could add the same two-minute step before grading. What travels is the habit of working things out together, not the weight of the test that shaped it.
Sources
- PISA 2022 Results Country Note: Japan
- 2023 Basic Plan for the Promotion of Education
- PISA 2022 Results Volume I: Changes in performance and equity 2018-2022
- School refusal figures for fiscal 2023
- Report on Japan bullying data, 2023 school year
- Central Council for Education recommendations on teachers, August 2024
- Education Policy in Japan: Building Bridges towards 2030
