Little love lost among Asian students - survey

TOKYO (Reuters) - Only about a quarter of Chinese and South Korean high school students say they like Japan, and even fewer of their Japanese counterparts reciprocate the feeling, according to a survey published this week.

Only 10 percent of Japanese respondents to the survey by the Japan Youth Research Institute said they liked China, and fewer than 17 percent said they liked South Korea, amid generally fractious relations between Japan and its two Asian neighbours.

Chinese students responding to the survey described the Japanese as polite and group-oriented, but also as possessing violent tempers.

The Japanese participants described Chinese people as deeply patriotic, violent-tempered and old-fashioned in their thinking.

Japan's relations with China and South Korea are at a low ebb, mainly over issues relating to Japan's invasion and occupation of large parts of the continent before and during World War Two.

Mutual perceptions between Japanese and South Korean students seemed slightly warmer, with the Koreans describing the Japanese as strictly observant of rules, polite and kind. The Japanese students saw the South Koreans as patriotic, hard-working and old-fashioned.
The study of more than 7,000 students was carried out in high schools in Japan, China, South Korea and the United States between October and December last year.

Another section of the survey found Japanese students were less enthusiastic about their studies than those in other countries -- a shock for a nation where parents spend fortunes on extra tuition to get their offspring into the right schools and universities.

When asked what kind of student they would like to be, around 80 percent of respondents in the United States and China said they wanted to be good at studying. For Japanese students the most important factor was popularity, with nearly 50 percent of respondents saying they wanted to be liked by their classmates.

Japan also had the highest proportion of students who agreed with the statement "I want to live an easy life, provided I have enough to eat."

Japan's standings in international comparisons of academic achievement have fallen in recent years, a phenomenon some have blamed on government efforts to take the emphasis off rote learning at primary schools.

"People no longer see the value of making an effort," Masahiro Yamada, a sociology professor at Tokyo Gakugei University, told the daily Yomiuri Shimbun. "We may not be able to sustain our society amid the ageing population and falling number of children."

http://in.today.reuters.com/news/newsArticle.aspx?type=worldNews&storyID=2006-03-02T111457Z_01_NOOTR_RTRJONC_0_India-238926-1.xml