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none of the important research and development work found in European and American universities. Only 6 percent of college graduates in Japan go on to graduate school (versus 15 percent in the United States) and, again, men outnumber women by two to one. Even the best colleges are run-down and dilapidated, with shabby, half-deserted laboratories, trash-littered grounds with uncut weeds, and poorly stocked and managed libraries. Mori Kenji, a professor at Tokyo Science University, observes, «Industries were in trouble [in the 1990s] and realized they needed basic science if they hoped to develop their own original technologies.» So industry leaders paid a visit to Tokyo University, Japan's most elite institution. «They came to see what was going on and were shocked to discover that there had been few improvements since their student days.»

Tokyo University (Todai), the very pinnacle of the elite, is an academic shambles by European or American standards. Todai graduates make few important contributions to world scholarship or technology; they go straight into government ministries, where they proceed to collect bribes, lend money to gangsters, falsify medical records, and cook up schemes to destroy rivers and seacoasts – with hardly a dissenting voice from their colleagues or professors. Few important schools in advanced countries can be said to have contributed so little of social value. As Nihon Keizai Shimbun puts it, the work of the elite schools is «to take the finished products of high schools and industry, pack labels on them and ship them out. They are like 'canning factories.'At the 'factories,' they are labeled 'XX Bank,' 'YY University,' but they only ship the same standardized product.» Karel van Wolferen points out that Todai graduates have become the elite because of a selection process that rewards those with stamina in examinations, not necessarily those with superior talents. He writes: «There is no doubt that Todai graduates tend to be 'bright,' but many Japanese with capable minds of a different cast are discarded and doomed permanently to operate on the fringes. Much capacity for original thinking is wasted. The Japanese ruling class is far more thoroughly schooled than it is educated.»

Edwin Reischauer comments, «The squandering of four years at the college level on poor teaching and very little study seems an incredible waste of time for a nation so passionately devoted to efficiency.» What are we to make of this? The situation is doubly strange because the Japanese do not usually do things by half measures. The only possible answer is that Japanese society functions in such a way that the nation seems not to need universities. «By the time he reaches age 18, the Japanese child has become a perfect sheep,» Dr. Miyamoto writes. «As sheep on the meadow are not concerned with freedom, to most university students in Japan, freedom as a concept is not important.» In other words, by the time students arrive at college, the training process is already complete. Universities are superfluous.

Japanese universities are one giant tatemae erected to the idea of advanced education. In the bureaucratic state, where training as an adult begins in the company or ministry, there is no social need for them. The fact that serious learning takes place not in college but in industry goes far in explaining the lack of variety of new technologies developed in Japan. Without the wide-ranging and inventive research in universities that would lead to advanced knowledge of the environment and to new theoretical sciences, Japan's best minds devote themselves to one narrow band of human activity: skills in making, building, and marketing things.

Henry Adams once wrote, «Nothing in education is so astonishing as the amount of ignorance it accumulates in the form of inert facts.» Their heads filled to overflowing with facts fed them by the Ministry of Education, Japanese students are surprisingly lacking in common knowledge. In February 1996, Azby Brown, an American teaching at a Japanese architectural college, noted these results