#mext

I did Hatsumode yesterday, which is the New Year tradition of visiting a shrine for the first time in the New Year. It’s like a festival with a religious angle to it — kids get to have fun while the teenagers and adults pray for good wealth, health, and grades in the new year.

I specifically went to this shrine because of the god that it’s dedicated to, the Shinto god of knowledge, who actually was a real person who lived during the Kamakura period and got exiled and came back as a vengeful spirit and they built this shrine to appease him.

A lot of parents were there with their kids along with high schoolers and college students like myself. We all wanna so good this year and so hopefully Sugawara no Michizane will be merciful as I move on to the first step to my PhD.

I saw on Facebook that MEXT aka Japan Ministry of Education just opened their Young Leader Program which gives opportunity to study in Japan universities.

Unfortunately, not every country is eligible to apply but most south east asia countries are included so check out the link below for more info,

Hi! Thanks for the question.

I would say in general to focus on maths or sciences (if they apply to you) instead of trying to study Japanese. If you already know Japanese and wanna push it a bit, that’s ok. You have time to brush up your Japanese after you get accepted. But you should focus your time on the other subjects as they seem to weigh more. Especially so if you are not doing Humanities. 

Obviously you would do the past year papers. I’ve heard the EJU syllabus is quite similar to the MEXT exams so you can check that out for math, science etc. The way they word the questions in math is a little different from my country so you kinda have to get used to that. Make sure you time yourself as well. I could do the math problems when I was practising but it didn’t occur to me that I had to complete the paper in an hour. I ended up barely finishing half the paper during the actual exam.Note: Score requirements differ from country to country and year to year. 

The math only had blanks for final answers (we did hand in papers with our working on it but I doubt they marked that). Extrapolating from this system, it would maybe be a good strategy to focus on easy questions (like the first part of every question) and get as many answers correct in the limited time allocated rather than methodologically try to answer all the questions. But that depends on the mark allocation and your own way of doing things. Since only final answers are graded, careless mistakes can cost you everything! I was Humanities so I devoted all my time to math (English and Japanese weren’t a problem for me). Identify your weak points and work systematically towards fixing them. There are past year papers from 2010 on the internet floating around. The links I had are all broken now (sorry) but if you look hard enough I’m sure you’d find something. 

I found resources and other people applying for the scholarship at this forum.