The Eiken tests, which are backed by the ministry of education, are designed and administered by Eikyo, the Eiken Foundation of Japan (formerly the Society for Testing English Proficiency), a public-interest incorporated foundation established in 1963 and based in Tokyo. Many employers see the certificate as a valuable asset in a prospective employee’s portfolio, and cram schools offer courses dedicated to Eiken test preparation.

But the tests, which have been taken by more than 90 million people, are problematic in many ways, according to some researchers. In academic circles, the term “validity” is used to refer to the extent a test does what it is supposed to do. So how well do Eiken tests really measure proficiency? Eikyo appears to have no research data available on the validity of the Eiken, although it “has begun carrying out a research program designed to gather evidence which will be able to support the construction of a comprehensive and cohesive validity argument,” according to their site.

Foreign researchers have been complaining about a lack of data for decades. “Eikyo has been operating a successful testing business in Japan for more than 30 years,” Laura MacGregor of Sapporo International University wrote in 1997. “In all likelihood, this trend will continue. However, published reports of studies by Eikyo on item construction, reliability and validity are urgently needed to help consumers become better informed about the test, and to encourage research that would improve the quality of the test so that someday the Eiken tests might approach (a more acceptable) reliability.”

Although this report was published nearly 20 years ago, it could have been written yesterday.

‘English as scribblings on paper’

I spoke to an English teacher who has been involved in preparing Japanese children for the Eiken at a cram school. He asked to use a pseudonym — let’s call him John — due to worries about repercussions at work if he were identified. The training is good business for the school, he says, as it takes a huge amount of time to prepare students and the hourly fees are substantial.

“I began to have serious doubts about whether the Eiken is useful to English learners,” he explains. “Not only are there many head-scratchers among the test items, but I think there is something flawed about the whole idea of promoting English proficiency by the means of paper-based examinations. After all, the origin of any language is oral — that’s the natural mode of human communication. But with the Eiken’s heavy emphasis on grammar and reading comprehension, the language comes over to students as a formula to be solved on paper.”

On its website, Eikyo claims the tests contribute to a higher level of English proficiency in Japan. However, recent international comparisons do not seem to support the claim. Although it would be a stretch to suggest this is cause and effect, the number of takers of the Eiken test has been increasing over the past few years while Japan’s ranking in the EF English Proficiency Index has been falling, from 14 in 2011 to No. 30 last year, overtaken even by countries like Vietnam, which rose from a “poor” proficiency level at No. 39 in the list in 2011 to a “moderate” 29 last year.

What does this mean in reality? Any tourist will quickly learn that English as a lingua franca has yet to take root in this country. Attempts to correct the problem are stumbling. Data collected by the education ministry last June and July indicate it is falling way short of meeting its goals for English proficiency among Japanese students. For junior high school graduates — the first generation who studied English from elementary school — the goal is for 50 percent of junior high school students to have Eiken Grade 3-level competency by the time they finish school. Yet according to the survey, only 26.1 percent of final-year students nationwide were proficient to that level in reading, 20.2 percent in listening, 43.2 percent in writing and 32.6 percent in the relatively easy speaking component.

John believes the Eiken, with its heavy emphasis on the written language, is part of the problem.

“If by ‘proficiency’ you mean ‘communicative skills in situations ranging from everyday’s life to business,’ as the Eikyo defines it, it’s really hard to see why the tests are all about grammar and reading comprehension,” he says. “The listening part is far easier, and the speaking test is little more than an afterthought. Would you, for example, consider reading a text aloud to constitute communication? That is one part of the so called speaking test. So the way the test is designed makes students think of English as scribblings on paper, not a living language.”

Tough vocab, easy listening

So what are the test-takers themselves saying? Although it would be wrong to suggest there is a great clamor for change, there is no lack of critical voices online. One blogger, who took the top Grade 1 test, writes the following about the first, paper-based part and second speaking section of the Eiken:

“The total score necessary for passing part 1 is set low. At the same time, the level of difficulty of the test items is too high for the reading and vocabulary sections, and too low for listening comprehension. So even if you do horribly in reading or vocabulary, you can make up for it by scoring high in listening comprehension, and still pass.”

The first part, consisting of reading and listening, is paper-based, while the second is an interview-form speaking test held on a separate occasion. Passing part one is a prerequisite for taking part two.

The blogger is unhappy with the design of the tests. “The vocabulary test in part one is so hard that there is no way you could attain the necessary level by reading newspapers, for example,” the blogger writes. “To learn the vocabulary necessary for Grade 1, you basically end up cramming word lists from old tests. Wasn’t that what we were supposed to leave behind in the age of modern education?”

The blogger argues that you can’t even find the Eiken test vocabulary in newspapers. But are the words really that uncommon?

Word frequency in various text material can be checked by consulting the Corpus of Contemporary American English. I ran a couple of queries on items that came up in a Grade 1 test from 2015. Test-takers were asked to fill in the blanks with one of four multiple-choice items. “Frequency” here means the number of occurrences of a given word per million words in the corpus, in this case COCA, which holds 520 million words of spoken, fiction, newspaper and other text material.

Test item 1: “Jeffrey, tuck in your shirt. And brush your hair! You look so ___.”

1) disheveled 2) derivative 3) reticent 4) pervasive

Frequency: spoken: 0.61; fiction: 4.86; magazine: 1.06; newspaper: 0.82

Test item 2: “Although the advertisement for the cruise had promised ___ dinners, the guests were disappointed by the quality of the food aboard the ship.”

1) elliptical 2) abject 3) sumptuous 4) imperative

Frequency: spoken: 0.13; fiction: 1.90; magazine: 3.55; newspaper: 2.18

In other words, if you read a million words of the fiction included in COCA, your would likely encounter “disheveled” four or five times, and not even once if you read a million words of newspaper articles. You would find “sumptuous” about twice in the fiction texts, three times in magazines, and twice in newspapers. It seems like a daunting project to acquire this vocabulary by reading, given the little spare time the average Japanese student has. On the other hand, root learning by cramming word lists — the only viable alternative — will most likely not help proficiency, as research indicates that root learning results in poor retainment.

There does seem to be some truth to the test-taker’s claim that the vocab is quite uncommon, and perhaps irrelevant if the test is designed to test proficiency in “communicative skills in situations ranging from everyday life to business,” considering that the words are rarely used, particularly in spoken language.

“The listening part of the test, on the other hand,” continues the blogger, “is dead simple. But the English spoken seems unnatural, pronunciation is overly clear, and very different from what you hear on TV. The test seems to be about reading speed more than anything else, since listening comprehension is easy but you have very little time to select an answer.”

But perhaps all this concentration on the Eiken is a distraction from the real issue: Japan’s obsession with “teaching to test” rather than for fluency in communication. Some of the same criticisms of Eiken could also be leveled at the two other popular tests, TOEIC and TOEFL, but there are also crucial differences.

Jun Saito, a former assistant professor of political science at Yale University, now heads a Japanese prep school with the mission “to better the overall quality of the Japanese educational system from bottom-up, rather than merely teaching conversational English or preparing for entrance exams in Japan.” In a recent article in Japanese business magazine President, he stressed that TOEIC is all about the ability to engage in natural English communication at natural speed. The grammar, on the other hand, is comparable to what Japanese students learn at middle school. The balance in Eiken is arguably skewed the other way.

What’s the alternative?

While there does indeed still seem to be validity questions surrounding the Eiken, the difficulty of preparing students for the tests further reduce the value of the tests as an educational tool, says John.

“The problem is not only the design of the tests, but the teaching situation as well,” he says. To explain the fine points of the grammar and vocabulary tests in English is of course an impossibility. Our students’ command of English was simply too poor. Teachers fall back on Japanese, so we essentially spent 90 percent of the time explaining hairy English grammar problems in Japanese.

“It’s the brute-force method. What you do is essentially have the kids do loads of old tests and hope that something similar will come up when it is showtime. The point is not what is actually correct, but what is the ‘right’ answer — the one that the test designers expect you to choose. In some cases it is hard even for the instructor to know.”

So what’s the alternative to this way of teaching? President magazine also re-published an article by Shin Sasaki, contributing editor with the English Hacker learning portal site. Sasaki raised his TOEIC score from 400 to a perfect 990 by completely changing his style of study, ditching the traditional Japanese juken (exam preparation) style, in which grammar is king, in favor of focussing on speed-reading texts for gist (rather than word-by-word understanding) and honing his listening comprehension at natural speed. In other words, he worked on skills you need in everyday life.

Sasaki mentions how he talked to friends who studied English and found that many had the same, positive experience from “escape from juken-style English study.” Juken study, he points out, is very high-level but demands constant translation from English to Japanese, never allowing students to forget about their mother tongue and start thinking in the foreign language.

Although immersion abroad is still seen as the the holy grail, there are many alternative paths to English proficiency, even in Japan. You can study English on your smartphone with Duolingo, take cheap conversation classes over Skype or make English part of your life by watching English-language movies with English subtitles. When you have improved a bit, you can join an English-speaking MeetUp group and pursue your hobbies there. But none of these methods will lead to a certificate, and that is the core of the problem. Today Japanese students and job-seekers must choose between committing themselves to getting a ticket to a job or something of practical value for the future — between English proficiency on paper and true communicative skills.

Will this ever change? Well, attitudes among the young generation — the test-takers — may be changing already. “What people want today,” writes one Japanese blogger, “is not mastery of advanced English, but of English that you can actually use. If tests don’t change to emphasise practical usage and proficiency more, I think they will become obsolete.”

John agrees. “I think there is something tremendously static about the Eiken tests,” he says. “The second-stage speaking test illustrates this really well — everything about it is reality in suspended motion: The student knocks on the door, is asked to enter, and greets the test official; he steps up to his desk and hands over his test card from the exact right distance; he is then asked to read a short passage, describe what is happening in a couple of pictures and reply to a few questions, with predetermined follow-ups. All this has been drilled over and over at the prep school. The student will recognize much of what is happening like deja vu.

“But now we are rapidly moving towards a world with shrinking distances, virtual-reality commuting, automated factories and workplaces, and jobs that don’t even have names yet. Who will ask for a person who can only function in a world where everything is predictable, including what is said, and the responses to what is said? How much is a paper that certifies such a skill worth then? If I was in charge of designing the Eiken, I would begin to consider taking the red pill and looking that future in the eye.”

Your comments and story ideas: community@japantimes.co.jp

 

After the minimum voting age is lowered from the current 20 to 18, youths eligible to vote will cast their first ballots at the national level in the July 10 Upper House election. On the local level, mayoral polls on July 3 in Ukiha, Fukuoka Prefecture, and the Shiga Prefecture town of Hino will be the first tests of the new system. According to the internal affairs ministry, about 2.4 million voters ages 18 and 19 will be added to the electorate, totaling about 2.3 percent of Japan’s 104 million voters. Universities and high schools are gearing up for the Upper House poll. Earlier this month, about 150 students at Kanto Gakuin University in Yokohama attended a special class intended as a guide to politics. The primary focus of the class was to teach young people how they can take part in democracy by exercising their voting right. During the class, which was specially designed to be youth-friendly, a lecturer showed those in attendance how to research the policies and political beliefs of candidates by using various online resources such as social networking services. Among the students, however, the reactions were mixed. “Am I entitled to cast my vote even though I don’t know much about politics,” said one. “I want to go to a polling station, so I’m doing research by watching news,” said another. Hidetoshi Kawaguchi, an associate professor at Jumonji University in Niiza, Saitama Prefecture, who has been involved in efforts to educate young voters, emphasized that it is wrong to say political apathy predominates among the group. “Indeed, young people have certain levels of interest in politics,” he said. “The problem lies in schools and families, where politics rarely become a topic of conversation.” The government says there has been progress in educating young voters. On June 13, the education ministry released a survey that asked the country’s high schools and schools for children with special needs whether they provide special classes to 18-year-old students. Valid responses were received from 6,322 schools. Up to 94 percent of the schools said they had devoted more time to providing instruction on the country’s election system and had held classes with mock votes. Still, despite the progress touted by the ministry, some regions are struggling more than others. Aomori Prefecture, for example, has logged the lowest voter turnout among the country’s 47 prefectures in the past two national elections. This year, it is trying to improve voter numbers for the July 10 poll. The voter turnout in Aomori Prefecture came to 46.25 percent in the previous Upper House election in July 2013. In the December 2014 Lower House poll, that number stood at 46.83 percent — a slight improvement.

To help raise public awareness of the importance in voting, especially among the region’s young people, the Aomori Prefectural Government has produced television commercials and made posters based on ideas submitted by high school and college students. In addition, a group of people in their 20s is collaborating with the prefectural government and employing social networking services to get out the youth vote in the summer poll. “I hope the upcoming Upper House election will become the first step for young people to think about politics,” said Kazuto Soma, the 20-year-old Aomori Chuo Gakuin University student who leads the group. However, merely urging young voters to go to polling stations, even when they are insufficiently informed, is far from the long-term goal of fostering responsible citizenship. In this regard, a high school in Kanagawa Prefecture is focusing on training and teaching its students how to weigh facts and sort out opinions. Yosuke Kurosaki, 28, who teaches social studies at the Kanagawa Prefecture-run Shonandai High School in Fujisawa, is experimenting with ways to focus on the issues relevant to the current political climate. While the upcoming Upper House election highlights immediate economic issues such as the consumption tax hike, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and his Liberal Democratic Party are trying to keep the emphasis off moves to revise the country’s pacifist Constitution. “While many in the opposition urge for protecting the Constitution, the LDP view is Japan was forced to adopt the current Constitution” by the Allied powers following the nation’s defeat in World War II, Kurosaki said, during a recent class where he was seeking the opinions of his students. One of the students raised a hand and said, “I think it is the pacifist Constitution that has made Japan what it is today.” Another said, “The Constitution needs to be revised in line with changes in society, such as environmental rights and privacy rights.”

In terms of constitutional revisions, the upcoming poll could play a pivotal role. To hold a national referendum on revising the Constitution, the ruling camp must command a two-thirds majority in both Diet chambers. Currently, the ruling LDP-Komeito coalition holds a two-thirds majority in the 475-seat Lower House and a simple majority in the 242-seat Upper House. If the ruling bloc gains 86 seats in the Upper House election, it will be able hold a national referendum. After the discussions, Kurosaki said his class is not aimed at eliciting perfect answers on difficult issues.

“Students don’t need to understand the issues completely,” he said. “What’s important is to interact with others and build his or her own opinions through the process.”

 

I say farewell and begin my own walking meditation along the rest of the Higashiyama route — a fitting end to my experience with Soto Zen that heightens the effect of zazen. With my senses awakened and spirit revitalized, I take in the scent of the flowers, which seem more vibrant than ever. The sound of water cascading through the city’s network of open canals can be heard in the distance and the words of a logic-defying Zen proverb run through my mind: “Knock on the sky and listen to the sound.” Though Zennoji offers meditation classes, it does not offer accommodation. So I find myself back in the center of Takayama at Zenkoji Temple, which, in return for donations, offers rooms for people who want to learn more about Japanese culture. Built in 1894, Zenkoji belongs to the Jodo-shu sect, a branch of Pure Land Buddhist. The guesthouse feels like a retreat, and I’m told I can use the shrine room to meditate, although the receptionist tells me “there is no monk at the moment” and, as a result, no zazen sessions. The room has a faint smell of incense, which has been burning here for more than a century. When I sit down, I am surprised how easy it is to clear my mind of thoughts and meditate, despite the noise of other guests coming and going. I’m not sure if it’s the environment or the fact I’m liberated from my daily grind, but I find it easier to focus in the mountains of Takayama than when I’m at home. My accommodation is a basic tatami room, with sliding doors and a single futon. But staying in a temple is a peaceful experience you won’t easily find elsewhere. My time in Takayama reminded me that Japan is much more than fast paced cities, with shopping, drinking and karaoke. Backed by spectacular peaks, the temples along the Higashiyama trail offer a taste of the ancient tradition of zazen and are a window to the religion that is still ingrained in the country’s art, culture and spirituality. Zazen is at the heart of Zen Buddhism — a means of finding insight into the ethereal beauty of nature and our own existence. Even those who don’t think of themselves as Buddhist, like myself, can find inspiration in Zen teachings and apply its practices to their daily life. The practice has influenced renegade writers such as Jack Kerouac, poets such as Gary Snyder, even ceramicists and silicon valley’s finest. Visiting Takayama is an opportunity to experience this quieter side of Japan. Let the temples and mountain air soothe your mind, and the scent of the forest and sound of rushing water relax you. Whether you live in Japan or are visiting from abroad, this little hilltop city is the perfect place to escape for a weekend to slow down and quiet the mind. Takayama Station is two-hour train ride from Nagoya Station. Limited express trains depart hourly for Takayama. Tickets can be purchased from major Japan Rail stations.

Accommodation

Takayama Hostel Guesthouse Zenkoji Temple (takayamahostelzenkoji.com; 0577-32-8470) offers modest rooms in return for donations.

Zennoji Temple (0577-32-4516) provides zazen meditation. Please ask the conccierge at your hotel to ring and book a session in advance.

Food and drink

Kakusho (kakusyo.com; 0577-32-0174) is an exclusive restaurant that makes the type of authentic shōjin ryōri (traditional vegetarian Buddhist cuisine) eaten by Zen Buddhist monks. It has been run by the same family for more than 200 years.

Heianraku (6-7-2 Tenmanmachi, Takayama, 0577-32-3078) is a reasonably priced restaurant that serves Chinese food in a Japanese style, including gyōza dumplings, noodle dishes and vegetarian options. The proprietress is comfortable speaking English.

 

For Schodt, translating the biography revealed even more about a man he describes as deeply complex, ambitious, competitive, and relentless in his pursuit of knowledge. “The biography mentions that he felt like he needed a better reference book to describe insects in his collections. So he actually created these pages of insect drawings, and they’re almost photorealistic, done with ink and pen and in color. He was probably like 12 or 13, and it’s just phenomenal,” says Schodt. “He spent an inordinate amount of time in the woods collecting insects and observing how they lived. Seeing them die, sometimes killing them. Seeing this cruel world of insects and their struggle to stay alive.” Tezuka’s own life struggle ended far sooner than most expected, and Schodt notes that the biography debunks myths about his public persona. Despite being authorized by Tezuka Productions and produced by his former assistant, “The Osamu Tezuka Story” is no hagiography. The character at its heart has a prickly temper, frequently embellishes or invents stories to dramatize his personal life and is a manic workaholic rarely seen by his family. Artist Ban’s principal memory of his former boss is summed up in two words: “Always working.” Yet the diligence has arguably paid off. Tezuka is much better known outside of Japan than he was when he died in 1989, and while he never saw his work published in English during his lifetime, today there are several translations of Tezuka available, more than of any other manga artist. And that’s partly because he created more. Roland Kelts is the author of “Japanamerica: How Japanese Pop Culture has Invaded the U.S.” He is a visiting scholar at Keio University in Tokyo.