TOKAI HIGH SCHOOL AND JUNIOR HIGH SCHOOL

Greetings from Tokai to The St. John's Global Ambassadors and a Very Happy LINKED 2014!

Here is some basic information about Tokai. Hopefully we will be able to build on this but one has to start somewhere! Thank you for the information about St. John's. There are many similarities between our schools - and many differences and it will be fun to explore these leading up to the time when the groups can meet again.

Tokai is made up of two schools that share a campus near the centre of Nagoya, Japan. Tokai is a Buddhist school founded in 1888. The campus is very modern now though, having been recently renovated throughout - rather like St. John's has.

All the boys who came to visit St John's last summer were from either the 3rd year of the junior high school or the 1st year of the senior high school. Students nearly always carry on from the junior high school up into the high school so essentially it is like one school covering 6 years of secondary education. About 80 boys join at the high school level.

Nagoya is bang in the middle of Honshu, which is the largest island of Japan. It's an industrial city with a population of  2.2 million people.  As the centre of Nagoya was largely destroyed during the Second World War the city is now largely modern. It's convenient, and a very pleasant place to live. Nagoya is the capital of Aichi prefecture (Japan is divided into prefectures like the UK is divided into counties). Outside Nagoya is Toyota City, home to the automobile manufacturer.

The 1st thing that you would notice if you were a St John's student visiting Tokai is that the campus is relatively small compared to the number of students. Every class has about 40 students and there are 10 classes in each year group. That makes 2471 students in total.

Students all wear uniforms which is a black jacket and trousers in the winter and a lighter shirt for the hot summer months. The junior high school boys are supposed to wear a cap although after the 1st year most of them leave these behind!

Students spend all of their lessons pretty much in the same classroom with teachers coming to them.  Desks are arranged in straight rows and most lessons take place through a formal lecture style with the teacher talking from the front of the class. There is much less interaction between students than you would find in most lessons in the UK.

Please check out the Tokai school website which you can find here, (okay we KNOW it's in Japanese but just click around - you may also have some fun trying to translate it with Google Translate!) and the Wikipedia entry for Nagoya which you can find here.

In the next post we will look at a day in the life of a Tokai student.  It will be interesting to think about the similarities and differences between the 2 schools. The good news is that another group  of boys will be coming to Marlborough this summer so there will be at good chance to find out more. In the meantime, we look forward to building this bridge between St John's and Tokai.