Japanese schools are struggling with foreign pupils

WHEN HIROKO TSUKIHI instructs her pupils to write down “water” in kanji, the ideograms derived from Chinese that are used alongside Japan’s home-grown syllabic scripts, they groan. Even for native pupils steeped in the language, kanji take hours to memorise. But Ms Tsukihi teaches immigrant children who have recently arrived in Toyohashi, a city in central Japan, as part of a programme called Mirai (“the future” in Japanese), which provides ten weeks of intensive language classes for middle-school pupils before integrating them into local public schools. The city launched the Mirai programme in 2018. “The schools couldn’t support all the foreign students coming in,” says Ms Tsukihi.

In many parts of the country schools are becoming a bit less homogenous. There are currently 124,000 registered foreign-born children of school age in Japan. Although that is only just over 1% of pupils in the school system, it marks a 30% rise from 2014. A new visa scheme that went into effect in April, meant to lure blue-collar workers into industries facing labour shortages, is expected to bring more immigrants and their children. In the manufacturing hub of Toyohashi, labour-brokers recruit thousands of Brazilians and Filipinos to work in factories every year. Such workers have 1,976 children in the local schools, up from 1,352 five years ago.