[barry-cotter]

> It's easy to get led into thinking this is ubiquitous, but it really isn't. Life gets difficult for school children around year 3 min middle school (about grade 9). The long and the short of it is that if you want to get a really top job, then you need to come from a top university, which means that you usually need to come from a top highschool, which means that you must get a good mark on your high school entrance example.

There are no fairly reliable, widely known alternative routes to the top jobs? In the US you can go to Directional State U and top jobs are mostly not barred to you. It’ll be very, very hard to get a job at McKinsey or Goldman Sachs but it’s possible. Even if you went to the University of Northwest Texas grad school washes you clean of all plebeian stain. Harvard Business School or Yale Law School opens the same doors whether you went to a good university or not.

More generally who the hell do Google, Siemens or LVMH hire in Japan if all the good jobs go to graduates of Todai who expect to work at the same Japanese company for life?

[mikekchar]

It's one of the difficult things about Japan. All very high end jobs are jobs for life in Japan, pretty much. Your university supervisor has contacts. You get your job from those contacts. There are very few other ways around it. In IT, it's a bit different -- for example, I think it's pretty easy to get a job at Line. I've heard Rakuten only hires foreigners, but I'm not sure about that. I don't know if any of these employees are shokunin (fulltime employees, essentially for life), but if you are used to western IT then the year by year contracts are probably fine anyway. A company really needs to look after a shokunin for life -- they even give them a big lump sum retirement gift when they retire and may even do more for them later.

I good example of a shokunin is a friend of mine who works for a fibre optics company. The company hires x number of people from her university every year. She started there wrapping cables (even though she's an electrical engineer with a very impressive academic record). Eventually after she learned about the company and worked in various departments, she was given managerial role and she will work as one of the elite people in the company for the rest of her career. After she retires, the company will look out for her. For example, my wife's uncle was a manager at Suzuki and they gave him some land near the factory so that he could build a house and retire. That kind of thing is pretty common.

If you miss the boat, your chances at being a shokunin at a large company are pretty much zero. I mean, it still happens if you have good contacts, but it's essentially impossible. Your best bet is to find a small company and get a yearly contract and just be the best employee ever. Then if the company grows, you might become a shokunin.

But you can still have a good career without being one of the elites. Hell, it's the same for me working for western companies. I'm never going to be CTO of some company or VP of software. I don't care. It limits my ability to make money, but I like being on the ground writing software. I don't think I could even be principle architect somewhere because I just don't want to think about the big picture. I like details.

So even if you go to a lower level school and get a lower level position somewhere, it's completely fine. I think that's the thing that people miss -- you can still have a good career and make a reasonable living. It's just that you are very unlikely to be on the elevator to being VP at Honda without coming from a big name university. Again, it happens from time to time, but it's just super unlikely.