Japan ranks high in scholastic performance of it's children. The Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) featured on wikipedia. was created to compare 15 year old children's performance around the world and Japan has ranked at the top.
PISA 2012 was presented on 3 December 2013, with results for around 510,000 participating students in all 34 OECD member countries and 31 partner countries. Shanghai had the highest score in all three subjects. It was followed by Singapore, Hong Kong, Taiwan and Korea in mathematics; Hong Kong, Singapore, Japan and Korea in reading and Hong Kong, Singapore, Japan and Finland in science. So for math Japan ranked 7th while the US ranked 36th. For science Japan ranked 4th while the US ranked 28th. Japan ranked 4th in reading while the US did pretty well at 24th. If you want your kids to excel it is best to give them the best role model possible.