Japan Will Be Opening An Esports High School In The Spring

According to a recent report from Kotaku, Japan will be opening a first-of-its-kind esports high school in April. The educational institution will be known as “Esports Koutou Gakuin”, which translates to esports high school.

“Both professional gamers and streamers are good members of society. Esports High School is Japan’s first high school specializing in e-sports. Whether you’re a pro gamer, streamer, live game, programmer, game analyst, or game writer, the possibilities are endless. It is a high school that professionals thoroughly teach as a specialized high school that has never been seen before,” reads a description on the school’s official website.

The school will be funded by the Japanese telecommunications company NTT and the Japanese soccer team Tokyo Verdy. The staff will be made up of a variety of industry professionals from both companies. Additionally, enrolled students will have access to numerous gaming PCs as well as other types of devices.

An open house for the esports high school will take place in January. However, the exact date and time for this event have not yet been announced.

The Profit‘s Take:

This looks more like a LAN center than a high school, which is very cool. This is also clearly different from a local high school sponsoring an esports club. The economics are also a bit unusual here. It clearly indicates that this is privately sponsored, so maybe it’s not crazy to imagine an esports high school in Boston sponsored by T-Mobile at some point in the future. You could argue esports and gaming covers all of STEM. So, maybe this could be an effective way to introduce that curriculum to students. At the university level, there are plenty of business management degrees that relate to esports. Pretty much all the skills you learn in the context of gaming can be transferred to other areas of business like coding, marketing, management, etc. It’s great if you can frame these skills in an esports context because that will lead to more student engagement.

(All information was provided by Esports-HS, Hypebeast, and Kotaku)