In the 2025 PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment) results released by the OECD on the 8th, Japan’s first-year high schoolers maintained world-class standing in science, reading, and mathematics — ranking first among OECD member countries in all three fields for the first time since the survey began. At the same time, the share of students in the lowest proficiency tier has been growing domestically: in reading, the bottom tier rose from 13.8% to 18.6%, and average scores fell across all three fields. On 5ch, a thread debating how to interpret this ‘widening domestic gap’ saw opinions split over the link between reading habits and comprehension skills, and over whether math and science should be dropped as required subjects.
The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) released the results on the 8th of the 2025 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), administered to 15-year-olds across 91 countries and regions. Japan, represented by first-year high school students, maintained top-tier standing in all three fields — science, reading, and mathematics. Domestically, however, the share of students in the lowest proficiency tier increased. There was little change among top scorers, meaning the achievement gap widened. Average scores declined in all three fields, with the drop in reading comprehension particularly notable.
The three fields tested were scientific literacy, reading comprehension, and mathematical literacy. Japan’s science ranking fell from 2nd in the previous 2022 survey to 5th, reading dropped from 3rd to 4th, and math stayed at 5th, unchanged from last time. Because average scores fell across the board internationally, Japan actually ranked 1st in all three fields among the 38 OECD member countries — the first time this has happened since the survey began in 2000.
Breaking scores down by proficiency level, Japan saw the share of students at the lowest tier, “Level 1 or below,” expand in all three fields. The largest increase was in reading, up from 13.8% to 18.6%, followed by math (12.0% to 16.1%) and science (8.0% to 11.3%). The top tier, “Level 5 or above,” saw only a 0.8- to 1.1-point decline, not a statistically significant difference.
Source: 47news.jp / original article here
7AnonymousSep 8, 2026 17:12
Japanese people can't actually debate, can they?
What Japanese people call "debate" is really just debate cosplay —
just another form of play.
Most Japanese have no idea how to have a proper debate,
because nobody ever taught them how, not in school, not in society.
Sophistry and logical fallacies get used in discussions all the time,
but the other side barely even notices,
because they don't know enough about fallacies to call them out.
If this stayed confined to childhood or the classroom, it'd be one thing,
but it happens routinely in government, among lawmakers, in academia, even in the courts.
Japan is done for.
First, Japanese people need to actually learn how to debate.
A bunch of idiots arguing with each other isn't a debate at all.
120AnonymousSep 8, 2026 18:07
Re: #7
What are you talking about — that tendency is way stronger overseas.
21AnonymousSep 8, 2026 17:16
Did you seriously think you wouldn't need reading comprehension once AI came along?
34AnonymousSep 8, 2026 17:23
Re: #21
AI has gotten to the point where it can read between the lines and anticipate what you need, but
you can clearly see that if you don't constantly check what it's "thinking" and correct its misunderstandings or wrong turns,
it never reaches a real conclusion.
Reading the "Thinking…" status text as it works and feeding it real-time follow-up instructions
has basically become part of an engineer's job now.
22AnonymousSep 8, 2026 17:16
There's always that one guy who's great at Japanese class without studying at all —
reading comprehension comes down to how many books you read as a kid.
26AnonymousSep 8, 2026 17:18
Re: #22
This is seriously true.
188AnonymousSep 8, 2026 19:14
Re: #22
I didn't like reading until 4th grade.
My book-loving older sister, best friend, and cousin felt like aliens to me.
But my homeroom teacher praised my Japanese-language ability even more than my math, where I kept getting perfect scores —
and sure enough, book reports and essays I dashed off with barely any effort won top prizes, and my writing got published here and there.
What made the difference, I wonder?
Maybe it's because my dad used to read to me a lot,
or maybe it's because my mom listened to nothing but rakugo (traditional Japanese comic storytelling) while she was pregnant with me lol.
I barely talked as a kindergartner — even though I could actually do addition and subtraction —
so my kindergarten teacher recommended I be put in a special-needs class.
25AnonymousSep 8, 2026 17:18
This is only going to keep dropping from here.
40AnonymousSep 8, 2026 17:29
Japanese people are plenty smart —
what's lacking is the drive to act.
In other words, courage.
121AnonymousSep 8, 2026 18:07
Re: #40
The smarter you are, the more cowardly you get.
57AnonymousSep 8, 2026 17:39
The bubble generation is the real cause of this —
how did they even pass their university entrance exams?
Did they just glance at the question, go "too long, can't read this!", chuck it at the proctor, and still get in?
60AnonymousSep 8, 2026 17:41
Re: #57
Are you a kid? For the generation that spent their teens in the Showa era, reading novels as a hobby was totally normal.
Kadokawa's big media-mix strategy (tie-in novels, films, anime, etc.) meant even people who didn't normally read picked books up.
68AnonymousSep 8, 2026 17:45
Re: #57
It was rote memorization of trivial details and pattern recognition.
Exam techniques were still immature back then, and there were tons of needlessly tricky, obscure questions meant to weed people out —
it was actually worse than now.
These days the questions are more straightforward, but the passages have gotten longer, so you just need a bit more reading ability now, that's all.
65AnonymousSep 8, 2026 17:44
If it were just about personal reading comprehension, fine, whatever —
but depending on the job, you end up needing to parse government documents,
and that's a pretty high bar.
71AnonymousSep 8, 2026 17:48
Re: #65
Court rulings are pretty tough to read too, honestly.
84AnonymousSep 8, 2026 17:54
Re: #79
I mean, people call math a "science subject," but honestly the hardest humanities subject is math.
96AnonymousSep 8, 2026 17:58
Re: #84
Once math gets into applied problems, you need language comprehension too lol.
If it were pure logical thinking, basic pattern-recognition problems would be more than enough.
110AnonymousSep 8, 2026 18:03
Nursing care, farming, and trucking are so short-staffed we're having to bring in foreign workers —
so having more workers with just a middle or high school education is actually
about right for that.
124AnonymousSep 8, 2026 18:09
Re: #110
There's no guarantee that group has the drive or stamina for it —
if anything, the higher-achieving group tends to have more of both.
125AnonymousSep 8, 2026 18:11
Re: #124
Doctors are the prime example of that.
132AnonymousSep 8, 2026 18:14
Re: #124
No way.
They're wheezing after one lap around the field,
they're a laughingstock during dance class,
and at the ball-game tournament they're the prime suspect for costing the team the match before it even starts.
Get real.
175AnonymousSep 8, 2026 18:49
What's even in Singapore? Honestly, nothing.
I can already picture some anime-obsessed shut-in guy moving to Singapore, getting bored in no time, and coming back home teary-eyed.
178AnonymousSep 8, 2026 18:52
Re: #175 was simply demonstrating Japan's current level of reading comprehension in the flesh.
Through this, he tried to make a statement.
Raising this issue by putting his own body on the line — it brings tears to my eyes.
We will never forget your noble sacrifice.
180AnonymousSep 8, 2026 18:55
Re: #175
National University of Singapore — world rank 8th, Asia rank 1st.
Nanyang Technological University — world rank 12th-26th, Asia rank 3rd.
University of Tokyo — world rank 26th, Asia rank 4th.
Everyone wrote Singapore off as a tiny country, and look — it's overtaken us, while Japan's been busy running its idiotic "everyone holds hands and crosses the finish line together" style of education.
Background and Key Points
This round of PISA 2025 involved 91 countries and regions, and Japan ranked first among OECD members in all three fields for the first time — but that’s an easy point to misread, since it’s a relative ranking achieved while average scores fell almost everywhere, and Japan’s own average scores dropped in all three fields as well. In reading in particular, the bottom tier (Level 1 or below) surged from 13.8% to 18.6%, while the top tier stayed roughly flat, meaning what’s really happening looks more like “polarization” than an overall decline. The thread debated the causes of the drop — whether math and science should remain required subjects, how much reading kids do growing up, the practical need to read government documents at work — but these were all personal anecdotes, and no survey data backing up any particular cause appeared in the thread. Some posts also drifted into political point-scoring and comparisons with other countries, but since that isn’t directly related to the actual survey results, it’s been left out of this article.
*This article is excerpted and summarized from the 5ch (Breaking News+) thread “[High School Freshman Achievement] Domestic Gap Widens — Internationally High Level, But Reading Comprehension a Challenge.”
