American School in Japan

Tokyo's heritage American school, founded in 1902, with a fourteen-acre Chofu campus and a separate early-learning centre in Roppongi. The default pick for US-track diplomats, executives, and corporate-quota families.

ASIJ runs roughly 1,700 students aged three to eighteen across the two sites. The programme is American with AP, WASC accredited, and a long bench of facilities, athletics, and arts that few schools in Japan can match. University outcomes track to selective US destinations.

Families describe a confident, well-resourced school with strong global standards and a tight community. Honest notes from current families centre on the bus ride. Chofu is a genuine commute from central Tokyo, and primary children sometimes struggle with motion sickness on the long routes. Late returns make weekday extracurriculars off-campus harder to schedule. Fees sit near the top of the Tokyo market. Sibling households can plan for annual costs in the eight to ten million yen range.

• Tokyo's most established American international school. Posters routinely place it in international teaching's top tier alongside Singapore American School and International School Bangkok.
• Selectivity has tightened as Tokyo's international school market expands. ASIJ reportedly received over 1,000 applications for around 20 to 23 teaching positions in one recent hiring cycle.
• Strong technology and AI-in-education profile. One teacher posted that ASIJ is "doing some very cool work with ed tech and AI."
• Big-school feel with deep co-curricular catchment. Parents who picked it over smaller Tokyo schools cite size, sports and the breadth that comes with it.
• Significant historical safeguarding scandal hangs over the school. The Jack Moyer abuse cover-up, decades of incidents formally acknowledged by the school in 2015, still surfaces in any thread that goes deep on ASIJ's history. Survivor advocacy site asijsurvivors.org remains active.
• Drug-and-substance-use chatter persists in the local international-school grapevine. One Tokyo teacher said students at other schools "talk about the drugs and crime at ASIJ."
• One former Japanese parent who looked at the school and walked away said spoken-Japanese and core-academic levels (especially mathematics) sat "way below Japanese public school level standards" in their judgement.
• Tuition runs around 2.8 to 3.3 million yen per child per year.