Another Bureaucratic Scandal!

Here's a bit of a shocker for you: Japanese high schools have not been teaching the entirety of the mandatory curriculum. For the last several years principals at various schools have been trimming down student's course load, chiefly, they say, because of the recent reduction in the school week, which went from six days to just five.

According to a Kyodo News survey of prefectural boards of education and top high schools nationwide, as of Thursday, 213 schools in 35 prefectures have not been teaching all the compulsory subjects, including world history. The number of seniors affected is estimated to be more than 20,000.

[...]

Takashi Tomita, head of the Fukushima prefectural board of education, admitted he was aware of the problem in 2003, when he became a principal of Fukushima High School.

"As weekly school days have been shortened to five (from six since 2002), class hours were reduced. We had no choice but (to omit some compulsory subjects) to have (students) advance to universities. Now I regret it," he said.

The schools will give the seniors extra classes to catch up and will discuss with the school boards how to deal with the people who have already graduated. (Japan Times)

The Japanese bureaucracy has been rocked by a series of scandals in the past ten years or so, most famously a high-level cover-up of HIV-infections from blood transfusions that blew open in 1996. The dirty blood was supplied through a inept government-funded agency that employed pricey retired bureaucrats from the Phramaceutical Affairs Bureau within the Ministry of Health and Welfare.

Since that time, the once-proud Japanese bureaucracy has taken a clobbering in the public arena, for everything from sex scandals to entertainment cost over-runs. This most recent affair, local and only mildly inconvenient, is just another connecting right hook in the ongoing struggle.

It comes at an inconvenient time for the left though. With Prime Minister Abe chomping at the bit to further centralize the education system and bring in his own little dirigisme of "nationalist education" - that's code for glossing over wartime atrocities such as Nanjing and Comfort Women - the leftists in Japan are going to be hard pressed to keep the Prime Minister's Office out of this mess.