[Luckyfish05]

A few years ago, I spent some time in Japan (Kyoto, Tokyo, and Hiroshima) and did some talking about FIRST and showed some videos of the robotic competitions. If I'm remembering correctly, their were some students (and I was mostly with college students at the time) that had seen something like this before while others had never seen anything like it. No one had ever heard of FIRST and too my knowledge there have never been any FIRST FRC teams in Japan (I did some looking while I was over there to answer questions). I can probably send out an email though and ask my friend who recognized the robotics what the competition is called that he knew about.

As for the culture, as Rachel mentioned above, there's a big problem in Japan of getting high school students interested due to the riggers of the examination to get into colleges and the amount of homework that they have at night. It is much easier for the middle school students to get involved in FTC because of the way the school is structured. I can see a couple of ways to bring FIRST into a school system, but it won't be easy I don't think.

If there is anything I can help with from any angle, PM me and let me know. I would love to help in any way I can. Japan is something I love, and if I can help to introduce it to FIRST (something else I love) then that would be just awesome.