Free Japan's New Middle Class: The Salary Man and His Family in a Tokyo Suburb by Ezra F. Vogel

examinations.
    Although it seems a tragedy to the participants, there is a certain logic in how the examination system works. Because the firm commits itself to a young man for life and because business in contemporary Japan is highly competitive, the firm must be careful to select men of unusual promise and ability. The number of men a large firm takes in each year is so large and the number of personal connections of company officials so great that it would be impossible to use personal evaluations as the primary basis to select applicants. One need only imagine the problems of large numbers of company employees each urging the company to support his favorite candidate, to understand the convenience and value of a more universalistic basis of judgment. Because there is such wide agreement in Japanese society as to which universities are most desirable, firms consider the university attended as important or even more important than their own examinations for selecting salary men. Not only the university's relative standing, but even its style of life, has considerable stability over time, because of the practice of inbreeding. Nearly all professors at a major university have received their
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    training at the same institution, and it is almost unthinkable for a professor to move from one major university to another. [3] Organizations add to this stability by selecting applicants according to the university's reputation. Young applicants know which universities the firms prefer and choose their university accordingly, thus perpetuating the emphasis on the university attended as a basis for selecting competent young men.
    A large company ordinarily hires older workers only when absolutely necessary and even then gives more security and more rapid pay increases to younger employees. Here again, there is a self-fulfilling accuracy to the company's predictions. People who do change companies tend to be opportunistic and less devoted to the company's interests, and the company feels justified in hiring workers directly from college making work experience irrelevant as a criterion.
    From the view of the outside observer entrance examinations involve an intensity of affect which cannot be explained only by the desire to obtain a good job. Although the search for security has rational components, as mentioned before, it has been heightened by the many upheavals in the lifetime of the average adult and by the difficulty which the contemporary urban parent had in finding a long-term livelihood when he was young. For the urban resident, a job in a large corporation is as close as one can come to the security that country relatives have by belonging to a household firmly attached to land and the local community. Just as obtaining land is thought to secure the future of a family even in the next generation, so does a job in a large corporation provide long-range security and insure that one's children can be given a proper position in life.
    There are now opportunities in Japanese society for adventurous and talented young men, especially in new fields like electronics, advertising, entertainment, and foreign trade. New small companies in these fields can offer higher salaries than larger organizations, but
    [3] They may, however, move from this major institution to smaller institutions, and then from there to better universities or back to this major university. It is unlikely, however, that they would ever move to a major university other than the one they attended.
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    most young men are unwilling to take this risk of less security; however, those who do not pass the entrance examinations to a good university may have no other choice.
    But even if one wants to work in a smaller company, attending a good university makes it easier to get a good job and even to change jobs at a later time. [4] Once a student has passed an entrance examination to a first-rate university, he has no worry about graduating because