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© 2018 AFPWomen demand Tokyo Medical University compensate them over entry test rigging
By Kazuhiro Nogi TOKYO©2025 GPlusMedia Inc.
41 Comments
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Yubaru
In my opinion they deserve some type of compensation, but in a court it is going to be very hard to prove without knowing these scores.
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Yubaru
Why keep the information quiet? Oh right, I'll bet any money that the trail leads back to MEXT itself! I would not be surprised one bit if there were consultations between MEXT and these colleges regarding this issue. MEXT wants women to be teachers and put into positions where they are subservient to their male colleagues.
Out these schools!
Do the hustle
Cue ABBA, “Money, money, money.....”
Schopenhauer
Japan has more than 50 national and public medical schools and they are more difficult to enter than private medical schools except Keio University medical school. Many try private medical schools after they fail in exams of the national or public medical schools. In other words, for many, they are fallback schools. If they are competent challengers, they try national medical schools. I am not very sympathetic to them.
Ah_so
Not really. The JPY 100,000 is only a token sum and only a couple of days work for a doctor.
Those who lost a career as doctors for this should be entitled to lost earnings.
Ah_so
Perhaps they are not the very top performers, butthey are clearly better than a lot of the men who did become doctors in their place.
SaikoPhysco
This is exactly what I wanted to see.... these women need their day in court. These Universities took the law into their own hands. They denied capable women of something that they worked hard to achieve. Women that studied countless hours only to be denied due to their gender and fear that they'd get married and leave the work force. This is a travesty. Each women that was denied should receive at least Y50 Million. Being a Doctor is a well paying occupation.... so why shouldn't they be compensated accordingly.
Michael Jackson
Only 100,000? Is that a misprint?
Schopenhauer
Many private medical schools should decline funds they receive from the government. Many private medical schools were built to help sons and daughters of hospital owners whose children are not as smart as their fathers and could not inherit their family business - hospitals.
Yubaru
Japanese courts are not in the habit of making people rich through compensation.
Spidey
Women need to be demanding a hell of a lot more than just fudged exam scores in this country. A lot more! And Japan would be a whole lot better for it.
S
Maria
I am so pleased to see this. They are quite right to demand compensation from these scam artists.
Wallace Fred
Lol might as well accept the disgusting fact ladies. There's simply no equality for you in japan. Japan needs more brave, outspoken, scandal free ladies to bring feminism to the forefront.
Garthgoyle
That sounds pretty fair to me. They should at least be reimbursed all that money.
Bintaro
Preparing for any university in Japan is stressful, so it must be even worse with medical schools. Then to learn your results have been intentionally lowered...
These are not asking for much considering what was done to them ! I hope more join, and these schools take a big hard hit to their reputation.
Dango bong
translation: nothing will change
Goodlucktoyou
I wish them good luck and hope becomes the top news story.
Schopenhauer
Ordinary students do not apply to private medical schools. They are sons and daughters of rich families.
rainyday
Tokyo Medical University isn’t some degree mill or low ranked med school. In the US News rankings it is tied for 11th in Japan for med schools, ahead of some prominent national universities like Hiroshima and Kobe.
Getting scammed out of a spot there would mean serious career harm to a lot of applicants, and even for the ones who got in elsewhere they still wasted a lot of their time and money on taking a fraudulent exam. They deserve compensation for that.
thepersoniamnow
This kind of widespread thing shows that the core is rotten. Obviously the educational system is rigging itself, if its happening in more than 2-3 places.
But usually its for money or some lond of politics...pretty crazy that in Japan its the guys not wanting the ladies to surpass them in medicine.
Oh no look now we don’t have enough doctors and people...
kyushubill
And yet Dear Leader Abe-kun keeps blabbing about more women in the work place yet his slobbering, doddering, oyaji refuse to punish those caught discriminating against said women. Typical LDP waste land.
Schopenhauer
I am tired of correcting wrong views about Japan by foreigners. I do not know about the ranking of U.S. News but teaching staffs of private medical staffs are mostly from other national medical schools.
At national and public medical schools, more than 20% were female students today.
Zack
nothing can compensate the time they lost, and the dreams that were broken by the school
GW
And I can guarantee you this same practice will be happening at the same & other schools in other fields, this is a LOT bigger than med school.
There are many ways to weed people out of things, but they need to be in PLAIN SIGHT where everyone knows the deal, not hard to do.
browny1
Shopenhauer -
So you're saying in all of Japan's med schools the ratio of men to women students is about 80% vs 20%?
That doesn't seem very balanced does it. I think the current national pop. stats show females at 51+% and males at 48+%. So the med school acceptance figures are way behind the 8-ball.
Perhaps the problem is much more widespread than revealed to date.
rainyday
That's nice. I am a foreigner, but I am also a professor at a major university here and am tired of being condescendingly corrected about stuff when I am not wrong simply because I am a foreigner. I cited the US News and World Report simply because it was the only available ranking I had at hand and simply as evidence that TMU is not some bottom rung last chance Med school.
I'm not familiar with the percentage of medical staff at Tokyo Medical University which are graduates of national universities as opposed to Tokyo Medical University itself. Obviously academia in general is dominated by grads of the former imperial universities like Todai, but it is obnoxious to argue based on that that applicants at TMU who were scammed somehow deserved it since they weren't good enough to get into Todai, etc.
powderb
How one can not have nothing but sympathy for these women is beyond me.
Raw Beer
If test scores of female applicants were manipulated, some form of compensation is in order. But I hope people realize this kind of thing is not limited to Japan. There is also a lawsuit against Harvard for its alleged anti-Asian bias.
CrazyJoe
Imagine the hard work and sacrifice it took to become a top candidate only to have your dream taken from you by colluding, closed minded misogynists.
wtfjapan
If they are competent challengers, they try national medical schools. I am not very sympathetic to them.
If men are just that much smarter than women then why the need to rig the test scores!?
Mocheake
It would be nice if they could win compensation that would bankrupt that university. Might help jar some of those other institutions into doing the right thing.
kohakuebisu
I don't know about the medical field, but It is not uncommon for schools in Japan to set the same dates for entrance exams to prevent students from applying to rivals.
If this was the case here, manipulating a score to fail a female applicant would also leave her with fewer options elsewhere.
Brian Wheway
"but are calling on the university to disclose their results." I wonder how many medical uni's have accidentally lost or destroyed old paper work? and what is wrong with female doctors? I am sure they can be as good at there job as any male, can some one remind the medical uni that were in the 21 century NOT the 14 century. as for the compensation 100,000 yen (£680) thats pretty low I thought that it wound have been higher.
Ah_so
At the equivalent schools in the UK, female students make up closer to 60%. So clearly the problem is just as bad at Japan's national schools as well as the private ones.
smithinjapan
"But the ministry has no plans at present to punish the implicated schools and has declined to name them, while urging them to change their practices."
Good old Japan! Same with the government scandals of padding numbers, same as construction companies padding numbers, same as car companies padding numbers, and all of them producing inferior products they pad said numbers to look superior and take care of connections. This nation is diseased with corruption at every level, and THAT is why there are "no plans to punish". The verdict of these lawsuits will go like this:
Judge: "We understand and sympathize with the frustration these women feel, and that there may have been some wrong doing that contributed to it on the part of the schools at that time. However, we do not find them guilty, and cannot recommend compensation. We urge them, however, to conduct internal investigations and be transparent, and to try their best to avoid similar situations in the future."
ushosh123
What is the point of conducting a probe into decades of systematic discrimination then refusing to release the results or handing out any kind of punishment?
Lost in translation or is Japan just a big joke?
UlsterBoy
I wonder, could we apply the same logic for Kids with Foreign names when applying for places in High Schools or Universities here ? I wonder, how far entrenched this biased attitude stretches beyond gender ?