＜prologue＞
I started a blog called “The Baby Boomer Generation’s Miscellaneous Blog”（Dankai-sedai no garakutatyou:団塊世代の我楽多（がらくた）帳） in July 2018, about a year before I fully retired. More than six years have passed since then, and the number of articles has increased considerably.
So, in order to make them accessible to people who don’t understand Japanese, I decided to translate my past articles into English and publish them.
It may sound a bit exaggerated, but I would like to make this my life’s work.
It should be noted that haiku and waka （Japanese short fixed form poems） are quite difficult to translate into English, so some parts are written in Japanese.
If you are interested in haiku or waka and would like to know more, please read introductory or specialized books on haiku or waka written in English.
I also write many articles about the Japanese language. I would be happy if these inspire more people to want to learn Japanese.
my blog’s URL:団塊世代の我楽多（がらくた）帳 | 団塊世代が雑学や面白い話を発信しています
my X’s URL:団塊世代の我楽多帳（@historia49）さん / X
I have long been curious about something. That is the question of what is being done by those who graduated from university medical schools who just couldn’t pass the “National Medical Examination”.
Some, like myself, who graduated from law or economics departments took the bar exam or the CPA exam and became lawyers, judges, prosecutors, and other legal professionals, or professionals such as CPAs.
The majority, however, went out into society as “salarymen” or “civil servants.
In this sense, it can be said that graduates of university law and economics departments “have employment opportunities outside of the professions. In other words, even if they are not “professionals” in law or economics, they are capable of doing well in other professions and in other fields.
However, I have always wondered what would happen to those medical school graduates who failed to pass the “National Medical Examination” since medical school is a department dedicated to physicians.
The pass rate for the “National Medical Examination” in 2018 was 90.1%, so those who failed the “National Medical Examination” (about 10%) must either retake it the following year or give up on becoming a doctor and take another path.
As with the university entrance examinations, there are also 2rou (three times-examined students) and 3rou (four times-examined students), and some of them are 5rou (six times-examined students) or more.
Looking at the 2018 pass rates by university, the best three were Jichi Medical University at 99.2%, Yokohama City University at 97.7%, and Hyogo Medical University at 97.5%. Incidentally, the University of Tokyo was 90.0%.
The reason why university deviation values do not correlate with the pass rate of the national medical examination for doctors is that some private medical schools do not allow students with low chances of passing to “stay in school” and take the national examination in order to raise the pass rate.
The pass rate of the National Medical Examination directly affects the reputation of a university’s medical school. A low pass rate can lead to a reduction or termination of subsidies from the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT), making it a matter of life and death for university management.
The son of an elite bureaucrat at the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT) has made headlines for his “backdoor” admission to Tokyo Medical University.
I am concerned about whether he was able to endure the criticism of “backdoor admission” from those around him, graduate from the university, and pass the national medical examinations, even though I am not a doctor myself.
Medical school graduates can take the national medical exam no matter how many times they fail, but in general, multiple wandering also lowers the pass rate. There are some preparatory schools for ronin, but tuition fees are said to exceed 2 million yen per year.
However, during the six years of medical school, private universities require an average of 32 million yen in tuition, so they want to pass the exam as soon as possible.
Finally, some of those who gave up the idea of becoming doctors and went on to other paths became “IT companies,” “management consultants,” or “professional tutors.
If a person who has failed the national medical exam is the son of the president of a large hospital, there is a way for him to become a “board member.”…