Japanese Tennis

In junior high and senior high schools, there are tennis clubs as extracurricular activities. However, during practice time, first-year students are not able to practice tennis at all. Second and third-year students, or so-called seniors, monopolize the courts, and the first-year students are only given the role of collecting stray balls and passing them to the seniors. Moreover, they are required to run at full speed while picking up the balls. It seems that something akin to the present North Korean society has been entrenched in the foundations of Japanese school education for over 100 years, and it shows no signs of leaving.