Under Japan’s School Education Act, elementary school lasts six years and junior high school three. In compulsory education there is no tobikyū, skipping a grade, and no repeating a year. Children move up by age.
In 1998, Chiba University admitted the first tobi nyūgaku students in Japan under the current school system, students who entered university before finishing high school.
The Japanese government asks business organizations to follow one calendar for hiring university graduates. Company information activities start on March 1, just before the students’ final year. Selection starts on June 1 of the final year. Formal job offers, the naitei, are given from October 1 of that year.
On Sunday, February 14, 2021, Japan’s health minister gave special approval to Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine. The approval followed a phase 1 and 2 trial in Japan, planned for 160 healthy adults aged 20 to 85.
Two days later, at the press conference of the minister Kōno Tarō, a reporter’s question noted that the vaccine had been approved even though the number of Japanese in the trial was small.
Two ceremonies mark stages in building a Japanese house. The jichinsai, the ground-calming ceremony, is held before construction begins. It asks the guardian deity for protection.
The jōtōshiki, the ridgepole ceremony, comes in the middle of construction. It is held when the frame is finished and the ridgepole has been set in place, to celebrate that stage.
Jikōtei kanketsu (自工程完結): completing one’s own process. At a 2017 quality forum, a Toyota speaker explained the term. It began as the idea of making things without letting defects arise in the production process. The speaker also named a goal: that workers can feel their work helps the customer and the people in the next process, the atokōtei.
At a Japanese driving school, the course is split into two stages. In the dai ichi dankai, the first stage, students take classroom and driving lessons. When all of them are done, students take the shūryō kentei, the completion test, and then a written test for the karimenkyo, the provisional license. The test has 50 questions, and 45 correct answers are needed to pass.
Only then does the dai ni dankai, the second stage, begin.
Ringi o ageru (稟議を上げる): to raise a ringi, a document circulated inside the company for approval. Ringi ga tōru or ringi ga oriru (稟議が通る, 稟議が下りる): the ringi passes, or comes down. Kessai (決裁): the decision to approve or reject it.
A sales site warns sellers that if the security, purchasing and legal checks are not cleared, the ringi is not even drafted.
Making Wajima-nuri, the lacquerware of Wajima in Ishikawa Prefecture, takes about 124 steps, divided among specialized craftspeople.
Before the lacquer, the weak parts of the wooden body, such as the thin rims of bowls and plates, are reinforced with cloth. This is nunokise. The base coat mixes lacquer with ji no ko, a diatomaceous earth that is Wajima’s own. Only then come the middle and top coats and the decoration.
Osso (越訴). The Daijisen dictionary defines it as bringing a complaint in the Edo period to a higher office over the head of the office or official in charge.
The penalty is described in different ways. The Nipponica encyclopedia writes that people who appealed directly to the top were generally punished by death. A dictionary of history published by Yamakawa writes that unauthorized appeals were not punished severely.
A ringi-sho is a proposal drafted at the lower levels of an organization and passed in turn to the relevant departments and sections. Each manager adds a personal seal, the hanko. Approval builds up level by level, and final approval rests with the head of the organization.
The political scientist Tsuji Kiyoaki studied the system in Japanese government. He criticized it because it spreads responsibility across many seals.