Japan schools face ‘major crisis’ if officials fail to cut teachers’ work hours, unions warn

The Japan Teachers’ Union (Nikkyoso) on Wednesday sent a petition with 698,091 names to the Ministry of Education, a month after the All Japan Teachers’ Union (Zenkyo) filed a similar document with some 180,000 signatures calling for the government to establish a firm plan on how teachers’ hours can be cut.

Regulations state that teachers cannot be forced to work overtime, although they come under pressure to assist outside classroom hours, such as by taking sports practices at weekends and going on school trips, without being paid. Administrative tasks and the grading of student papers also takes place outside official hours, as do class preparations.

“Excessive hours of overtime for teachers must be eliminated,” Chihiro Okamoto, an official of Zenkyo, told This Week in Asia. “The biggest reason for the additional hours is because the ministry has cut the education budget year after year, so there’s an acute shortage of teachers, which is now becoming a serious social problem.

“Every school in every prefecture in Japan has a shortage and that just means the other teachers have to put in more hours,” she said. “When we talk with our colleagues from teachers’ unions abroad, they are absolutely shocked at the situation in Japan. They cannot believe we have to do so many extra hours and that we do them without pay.”

The average public school teacher earns around 3.7 million yen (US$24,822) a year, rising to 5 million yen (US$33,543) per annum after 10 years.

According to a report in the Mainichi newspaper last year, teachers at junior secondary schools typically work 11 hours every weekday, with their primary-level counterparts clocking 10 hours and 45 minutes each day.

Teachers also put in an average of 2 hours and 20 minutes on