Sure Orange County’s weather is great, its streets are safe and its high-technology economy is booming. But for many Japanese nationals here, education is king.
Japanese executives have taken up in Irvine and other cities in a bid to place their kids in the most highly rated public schools. They often augment their children’s schooling with separate English-language courses. Many also attend Japanese classes at the Asahi Gakuen Saturday school in Garden Grove, one of four such schools in Southern California. The Garden Grove site counts about 500 Japanese students.
Japanese executives’ younger children, because they are relatively quick to learn new languages, often have less trouble adapting to local schools. It’s not so easy for older students.
“My children had a very tough time at first,” said Shin Kurihara, senior vice president of product planning at Cypress-based Mitsubishi Motor Sales of America Inc.
But students who attend elementary and high school classes here for any length of time before returning to Japan can find re-entry into the Japanese university system tough because of its notoriously difficult entrance examinations.
“The closer they get to college, the more they actually need to be studying in Japan, because there’s no way they could be studying at an American university and then be successful at a Japanese entrance exam,” said Richard Walsh, Ricoh Electronics Inc.’s strategic planning director.
Jun Asami, Mitsubishi Motor’s director of product planning and communications, attended high school in Chile, where his father held a post with a Japanese company. He later had to readjust to Japanese society and its education system.
“It was really brutal,” Asami said.
Asami said he was lucky enough to have the benefit of an experimental “decompression chamber” program in Japan specifically tailored to children of foreign-based parents returning to study. The program carefully monitored the progress of these students and offered intensive coursework to get them back into the Japanese education system as quickly and seamlessly as possible.
Of course, things in Japan have changed. Overseas experience and foreign-language immersion,especially English,is increasingly seen as asset for youngsters rather than a liability.
