Education

Perhaps he won the presidency thanks to his specialized knowledge of voting behavior and public opinion, or maybe it was his casual tweets in conversations with students, his use of mocking buzzwords or his adoption of slang used by his pupils.

A suprapartisan group of Diet members has compiled a bill aimed at fostering Japanese education for foreign nationals, putting forward a policy stating that three sectors — the central government, local governments and the private sector — should each be responsible for promoting Japanese education.

A Keio University research team will begin clinical tests for the treatment of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), administering ALS patients an existing drug used for another disease, which is confirmed to be effective in experiments with induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells.

A government panel on Thursday recommended the introduction of a variable work-hour system for public school teachers to tackle the problem of overwork.

Hiroshima has unveiled the Hiroshima Peace Tourism project, which includes an interactive map showing routes intended to help visitors view the city’s many memorial sites beyond just the Atomic Bomb Dome in the Peace Memorial Park, the main and only destination for about half of tourists.

More and more elementary and junior high schools in the nation are serving breakfast to students.At one elementary school in Osaka city, local residents prepare breakfast for students three days a week.

Children who spend a lot of time reading perform better in academic subjects, particularly mathematics, than those who do not, a private-sector survey has revealed.The Benesse Educational Research and Development Institute, which carried out the survey, said it believes that reading “helps enhance children’s capabilities of precisely understanding given questions and conditions” for solving them.

Japanese-language education is becoming more important for children of foreign residents in Japan at a time when the government is planning to introduce a new visa system to increase the number of foreign workers.

Elementary and junior high schools accept children with almost no conditions regardless of nationality. When it comes to high school education, however, they must pass entrance exams, including those on the Japanese language. In many cases, foreign students give up on advancing to high school because of the language barrier.

Canned mackerel in soy sauce developed by high school students in Obama, Fukui Prefecture, has been chosen as a “Japanese Space Food” by the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA).

Nobel laureate and immunologist Tasuku Honjo on Tuesday called for a better environment in Japan for conducting research in the life sciences, saying more efforts are needed by both the private and public sectors in enabling researchers to come up with medical cures for illnesses such as cancer.