The ordeal of educational competition begins when young children start preparing for examinations in primary school and even in kindergarten. In order to get into a good university, one has to enter a good senior high school, and td get into a good senior high school, one has to enter a good junior high school, and so on. In Tokyo at 10：00 P.M. on Friday, suburban trains are filled with primary school pupils aged around 10 who are just returning from well-known juku (after-school cram sessions) located in the central district. Some of them are already asleep, but the strong ones are rehearsing what they have just been taught. To foreigners it is an eerie scene.
In a national sample survey conducted by the Office of the Prime Minister in 1985, about 80 percent of the approximately 10,000 respondents aged 20 years and over felt that the social hierarchy and professional mobility pivot around employees' academic careers, particularly the stature of the universities from which they graduated (Office of the Prime Minister, 1985). A graduate of an outstanding school like the University of Tokyo can not only get a good job in government or in a respectable large corporation, but can also reach a high step on the hierarchical ladder.
This characterization of the academic career-centered system of promotion and upward mobility in Japan still requires statistical substantiation, but an important point is that it is entirely consistent with public perception. Hence, it is natural for anyone with above-average intelligence and some career ambition to try to get a ticket for the super-express in his life course. Thus, severe and ruthless examinations become the style of life in Japan. Under such circumstances, children become financially and psychologically expensive. Once modern methods of family planning and abortion have become available to every household, no one wants a large family. In Japan the ideal number of children (the number the average couple would like to have if circumstances permitted) is three, but the expected family size is two. In the most recent national fertility survery conducted by the Institute of Population Problems in 1992, one question asked why the couple did not attempt to have their ideal family size. The four most frequent answers from couples with wife aged 20-35 were as follows： (1) the cost of education is too high; (2) raising children requires a lot of money; (3) raising children imposes heavy physical and psychological burdens on the parents; (4) present house or apartment is too small for an ideal family size (Institute of Population Problems, 1993). The answers did not identify burdens from the strain of preparing for school entrance examinations since the questionnaire was not structured to ask such a question, but the implication would be clear.
