全塾留年生扶翼会
A young law student, caught between the expectations of society and the weight of his own inner turmoil, chronicles his quiet descent through the years. His journey is marked by cycles of effort and collapse, hope and despair, pride and shame—leading him to a critical crossroads. Amid family breakdown, financial hardship, and growing isolation, he begins to question the meaning of learning and living. The tone is calm, yet carries a quiet, prayer-like intensity. This is not merely a record of academic failure. It is the soul-searching account of a young man confronting his own fragility, and still striving to return to society.
A Record of My Experience Repeating a Year
Second-Year Student, Faculty of Law, Department of Legal Studies
There’s no end to the reasons why I repeated a year.
Ultimately, it all stems from my own lack of discipline.
However, in order to objectively reflect on how I perceive the world and why I ended up repeating a year, I’m writing this account.
What Everyone Around Me Says They all say the same thing:
I have an extremely all-or-nothing way of thinking.
Looking back, ever since I failed my junior high school entrance exam, I barely studied at all.
In my second year of high school, my academic performance was poor—my deviation score on a mock exam from Kawaijuku (a well-known prep school in Japan) was around 42.
Naturally, I failed my first university entrance exams, even the backup schools I applied to, and ended up as a rōnin (a student who spends a year or more preparing to retake university entrance exams).
In April of my rōnin year, a teacher at the prep school I attended encouraged me with these words:
“If you skip one day of studying, it’ll take three days to make up for it.”
At the beginning of that year, I was highly motivated. By confronting my weaknesses and starting from the basics, my grades began to improve.
But then, in the fall, I hit a slump. My mock exam scores dropped, and I lost a lot of points in English grammar—a subject I thought I had mastered.
For several days, I couldn’t bring myself to study.
Ideally, I would have bounced back, but instead, I found myself calculating how many days it would take to make up for the time I had lost.
And then, one day, something snapped in my mind, and I gave up on studying altogether.
That’s how I spent my rōnin years—rising and falling repeatedly—until I finally managed to pass.
Even though I was a multi-year rōnin, my acceptance to Keio University was rare for someone from my high school, so my father and my mentor were thrilled.
(My mother had disappeared a few years earlier—meaning she suddenly left home due to some kind of trouble and hasn’t been heard from since.)
When you enter university after spending years as a rōnin, your classmates are naturally younger than you.
But I didn’t mind the age gap much.
When I first enrolled, I thought: Since I’m in the Faculty of Law, I should aim to become a legal professional.
Soon, I noticed that other students who also aspired to become lawyers were carrying strange-looking binders.
They were materials from a judicial exam prep school that advertises prominently near Hiyoshi Station.
I happened to glance at the materials the student next to me was using.
They were impressively well-organized, and I couldn’t imagine that this university—Keio—would provide anything of that caliber in its regular classes.
Naturally, I wanted to attend that prep school too.
But having already spent a lot of money during my rōnin years, I couldn’t afford the tuition, which exceeded one million yen.
To make matters worse, my parents were in the middle of a bitter divorce trial.
(In Japan, regardless of who’s at fault, marital assets are typically divided equally.
And hiring lawyers for courtroom battles costs money.)
So even if I begged on my knees, there was no way I could afford it.
A Turning Point: The Part-Time Job That Changed Everything
Around that time, I landed a job as a tutor at a cram school.
The hourly wage was nearly double what I had been earning at the family restaurant—a typical, budget-friendly chain in Japan catering to families—which made it very appealing.
I enjoyed the work, and the students gave me decent evaluations.
Since the school was chronically understaffed, I often filled in for absent teachers, supervised exams, and took on various roles.
As a result, I was able to earn close to 100,000 yen per month.
However, I was spending nearly all of my time working—time that should have been used for studying or building relationships through university clubs.
I barely passed my first year, and once I started teaching students preparing for university entrance exams (a major life event in Japan that demands full commitment from the student, their parents, and even their tutors), the overtime increased.
Working six days a week became the norm, and ten consecutive workdays without a break were not uncommon.
Eventually, I started thinking absurd things like, “Going to university doesn’t pay by the hour.”
I ended up going to campus maybe once a week—if at all.
During exam season, my cram school’s summer intensive courses and last-minute prep sessions overlapped with university tests.
There was a time when I scheduled a day like this: work in the morning, take a university exam in the afternoon, and then work again in the evening.
Even my fellow “workaholic” colleagues—who I thought were in the same boat—were stunned when they saw my schedule.
the Most Dangerous Justification
The worst part was that I justified the collapse of my university life by telling myself, “I’m working to pay for my studies.”
Because of my mental health issues, people around me found it difficult to interact with me, and by this time, I had lost many acquaintances.
Rather than trying to catch up with my university studies, I convinced myself that I had no choice but to keep earning money.
And so, I became even more absorbed in my part-time job.
In the fall of my second year, I finally saved up enough to afford the judicial exam prep school I had longed to attend.
But by then, it was already too late for my life.
Since I had to start studying law from scratch at that point,
what I learned at the prep school didn’t help me at all in my university lectures.
Even though I had finally enrolled in the prep school, the students I was tutoring were approaching their own entrance exams,
and my overtime hours increased again, leaving me unable to study as I had hoped.
When Repeating a Year Became Reality
When I found out I had to repeat the year, it felt so inevitable that I couldn’t help but let out a dry, self-deprecating laugh.
At my university’s Faculty of Law, there’s a system informally called “Phoenix” (named after the famous game Final Fantasy),
which allows students who fail to advance to the next year to make up missing credits during the spring semester and then move up in the fall.
I thought this system would solve everything.
But the studying required for it interfered heavily with job hunting and preparing for qualifications.
More than anything, once you’ve fallen this far, it’s hard to find the motivation to attend university at all.
I cried with joy when I got accepted into this university.
Now, I go to class feeling nothing but pain.
No matter how I try to dress it up, repeating a year as a private liberal arts student is seen as a sign of being socially unfit—a dead end in life.
If anyone reading this is at risk of repeating a year,
I hope you’ll use your courage not to fall deeper, but to find your way back into society.