Getting public high school acceptance results in Japan

There is no nationwide system for the announcement of accepted applicants in Japan. However, each prefecture generally announces accepted applicants on a fixed day in early March. Today is the announcement day of public high school accepted applicants day in Saitama Prefecture.

My eldest daughter was among the thousands of students in Saitama Prefecture this morning who found out whether they got into their public high school of choice. Thankfully, she did. Because my daughter applied to school in Kawagoe, it is on the same system as the prefectural schools. So she used the website for the prefectural schools to check her results. It is the same with Saitama City and Kawaguchi. But most other cities and towns use the same separate website. For private schools, they usually check on the school's website, earlier in the year (often February), to find out whether they got accepted or not.

Generally speaking, in order to find out whether or not you got into the public high school of choice in Japan, you go to the dedicated website on the day of the announcement, between fixed hours. The hours are often 9 am to noon and again from 1 pm to either 5 pm or later. The student then has to find the school they applied to on the list of the schools.

From the name of the school you click to be brought to a page that you have to log in to. The applicant needs to input two numbers and their date of birth. Names are not used at all. The first number, 12 digits long, is their identity number and the second number, 4 digits, is their examination number. They get a piece of paper with these numbers on them. It is a very important piece of paper called a "jukenhyo" in Japanese. Saitama Prefecture call it an "examination ticket" in English.

Once you enter the above details you are brought to page that announces whether you passed or not. My daughter got the message shown in the photo in this post, several times, before finally getting through to the results page. Don't worry, it doesn't mean an unsuccessful application, just that the website is very busy. It took us 12 minutes to get to the result, which was thankfully good news! Below the announcement was a notification what to do next - see my next post for that!

Have you any experience with getting a public high school acceptance in Japan?