Japanese are still most cultured and well mannered people in the world

When my daughter was just learning to talk we insisted on teaching her please and thank you.
She used to go to me or my husband and point at something she wanted and say "Ees ees dat ees!" And once we gave her what she wanted she wave as she turned away and said "dat-chu!" Lol she was so cute back than. Now she is 12 and sings songs I never heard of and she makes me feel like an old fart when I tell her to keep it down. Lol

That small child at that small desk is pure

So where do good manners start, and where does indoctrination? The Japanese are known for their tight, strict manners, and suicides are among the highest in the world, because of the pressure to conform to this strictness.

Also tests for 4 year olds are there not to 'judge knowledge,' they're there to assess development. I'd be interested to know how Japan rates to the west in terms of detecting eg autism in children

In Sweden we start grading in 6th grade (unless we changed it to 5th I don’t remember lol). Less about manners and more about less stress here tho

It is sad that some "parents" can't preform or are incapable of teaching their child manners. Yes this based on individual cases and not as a whole but they're too many bad seeds in this world and it all starts in their own home.

It’s ironic that the Japanese have the world beat at basically everything, they make the best stuff, design the best ways, are well behaved and disciplined, and then 32 feet across the sea the Chinese behave like undomesticated animals

stop lying

They also eat rare wildlife and are obsessed with schoolgirls and pain

I think that Japan is a largely homogeneous nation with a majority moral, racial, and cultural identity. Teaching students in Japan that way works for Japan because it is Japan. Countries like certain Scandinavian or other Asian nations might also have good results with a system like that because they tend to be mostly made up of a singular dominant group. More diverse nations might have trouble with that, and there’s also the very real parallels to how certain colonial and religious powers once used mandatory schooling to assimilate other cultures and supersede their cultural values and beliefs.

I once got permanently kicked out of class by a Japanese teacher for putting my feet up on an empty plastic chair during a movie break day because it was against his sense of manners.