Clandestino
02-24-2005, 12:22 PM
Hint: It's Above South Korea
Wed Feb 23, 9:50 AM ET Oddly Enough - Reuters
TOKYO (Reuters) - North Korea (news - web sites) has menaced Japan with missiles, kidnapped its citizens and stands between it and a place in the soccer World Cup finals, but one in four Japanese high-school students can't place the country on a map.
Only 76 percent of high school pupils in a survey by an academic body could locate the reclusive communist state, despite a daily bombardment of news about it in the Japanese media.
As for Iraq (news - web sites), where Japan has some 550 soldiers in one of the country's most controversial overseas deployments and where a Japanese was beheaded by kidnappers, over 40 percent of university students and high-school pupils couldn't find it.
"While students are interested in the news, they don't see it as important to know where the countries are," said Yumiko Takizawa, a geography professor at Teikyo University who ran the survey for the Association of Japanese Geographers.
"Inter-dependence and links between countries are ever more important," Takizawa said. "It's clear that an education system that teaches a proper knowledge of the world is needed."
The survey polled 3,773 students at 25 top universities and 1,027 high-school pupils at nine schools across Japan.
They were handed a world map with 30 numbered countries and asked to write the number corresponding to 10 countries that have recently featured regularly in the news.
It wasn't only small countries that didn't register, however.
Takizawa said that some students couldn't find the United States and located it in China, Brazil or the central African state of Congo.
Wed Feb 23, 9:50 AM ET Oddly Enough - Reuters
TOKYO (Reuters) - North Korea (news - web sites) has menaced Japan with missiles, kidnapped its citizens and stands between it and a place in the soccer World Cup finals, but one in four Japanese high-school students can't place the country on a map.
Only 76 percent of high school pupils in a survey by an academic body could locate the reclusive communist state, despite a daily bombardment of news about it in the Japanese media.
As for Iraq (news - web sites), where Japan has some 550 soldiers in one of the country's most controversial overseas deployments and where a Japanese was beheaded by kidnappers, over 40 percent of university students and high-school pupils couldn't find it.
"While students are interested in the news, they don't see it as important to know where the countries are," said Yumiko Takizawa, a geography professor at Teikyo University who ran the survey for the Association of Japanese Geographers.
"Inter-dependence and links between countries are ever more important," Takizawa said. "It's clear that an education system that teaches a proper knowledge of the world is needed."
The survey polled 3,773 students at 25 top universities and 1,027 high-school pupils at nine schools across Japan.
They were handed a world map with 30 numbered countries and asked to write the number corresponding to 10 countries that have recently featured regularly in the news.
It wasn't only small countries that didn't register, however.
Takizawa said that some students couldn't find the United States and located it in China, Brazil or the central African state of Congo.