Yuuki Takano, an athletic sixth grader, hopes to attend a private junior high school with a strong soccer team after he graduates from his Tokyo public elementary school next year.
To help him pass the junior high school’s notoriously difficult entrance exams this winter, Yuuki’s mother, Asuka Takano, decided to place him in a traditional Japanese preparatory school, made up of big classes with dozens of students. The schools are often called cram schools, or juku in Japanese.
Mrs. Takano assumed her son would do well there, as she had attended a big cram school herself when she was preparing to enter a private high school.