Last year, investigators discovered that a number of Japanese medial schools deliberately lowered the entrance exam scores of female applications to keep them out. Now, Japanese media reports that an independent committee has uncovered similar malfeasance at a prominent Catholic medical school.
Official Records Lowered “Uniformly”
The accusations center on St. Marianna University School of Medicine (聖マリアンナ医科大学) in Kawasaki, Kanagawa Prefecture. A committee, led by former Osaka High Public Prosecutor Kitada Mikinao, examined the evaluation scores that entrance committee members gave to student applications between 2016 and 2018.
The committee found a discrepancy in some student’s scores, which they said were “uniformly” lower than other students. In its report, the committee identified gaps in the scores of female applicants as well as “rouninsei” (浪人生), or “gap” students who initially failed their entrance exams. Digging further, the committee discovered notes indicating that male students in certain years had had their scores adjusted upwards by a fixed amount. They found similar notes indicating evaluators had similarly changed scores for women and for one- and two-year “gap” students.
To validate its findings, the committee asked former entrance committee board members to re-evaluate past student submissions. However, this time, the committee blacked out the student’s identifying information, such as their name and gender. The resulting scores, the committee said, were “significantly different” when compared to their initial evaluations. As a result, the committee concluded that St. Marianna has engaged in discriminatory behavior towards women and gap students.
“Are They Gonna Leave It Like This?”
For its part, St. Marianna is denying any uniform discrimination against students. That denial isn’t sitting well with Japan’s Ministry of Education, which is reviewing whether it should pull the school’s governmental grants if it fails to enact critical reforms.
The news has drawn a strong reaction on Japanese Twitter. Many are complaining that few outlets even in Japan are taking the news seriously. User @yukoyy fumed: “…it seems this is already disappearing from net news. Are they just gonna leave it like this? Isn’t this taking discrimination against women too lightly? Isn’t such discrimination grounds for letting the school perish?”
Other users have noted that the university published the report in the most surreptitious way possible. A PDF of the report was published on a Google Drive account (not the University’s official Web site). The PDF allowed neither downloading nor copying. “If they delete it once the noise dies down,” noted user Yamada Masayuki (@yymmdd), “there’ll be no trace of it left.” Enterprising Internet users have since taken full screenshots of the report in case it mysteriously “disappears.”
Shadows of Tokyo Medical University Scandal
The story touches a sore spot for many Japanese women, especially in the wake of the 2018 Tokyo Medical University scandal. In that scandal, investigators eventually discovered that up to nine medical universities had “adjusted” applicant’s scores to allow men and the relatives of connected government and business officials in – and to keep many women out.
Why do these cases keep recurring? The answer, unfortunately, is that there’s a deep and longstanding prejudice towards women in the Japanese medical community. One Twitter user says this practice has long been a hallmark of private universities:
I’m a doctor, and I’ve heard about things like this since I was attending preparatory school 25 years ago. I don’t remember a lot of weeding out at national medical school departments, but I’d hear stories about private universities that didn’t accept gap students with more than two years [since failing entrance exams] and that didn’t accept women. They’d decide who got to take entrance exams based on that.
It remains to be seen whether the Japanese media will continue to run with this story, or whether it’s content to let St. Marianna bury it. One thing’s for sure – Japanese women have had enough of such treatment. Online activism and protest movements such as the Flower Demos are proof that women in Japan won’t let such behavior slide.
