Japan has achieved a major milestone in global education, ranking No. 1 among all 38 OECD member economies in science, mathematics and reading for the first time in the history of the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA).
But the headline achievement comes with a warning: Japanese students’ scores fell in all three core subjects compared with 2022.
The results come from the OECD’s PISA 2025 assessment, released September 8, which tested roughly 760,000 15-year-olds across 91 countries and economies, including about 6,500 students in Japan.
Japan leads the OECD — but its scores are falling
Japan recorded an average score of:
- 538 in science, down 9 points from 2022
- 525 in mathematics, down 11 points
- 503 in reading, down 13 points
Despite those declines, Japan remained far above the OECD averages of 482 in science, 463 in mathematics and 461 in reading.
Looking across all 91 participating education systems, Japan ranked fifth in science, fifth in mathematics and fourth in reading.
That means Japan remains firmly among the world’s strongest education systems — even as its own performance shows signs of weakening.
The global education picture is getting worse
Japan’s results also need to be viewed against a broader global decline.
The OECD reported that average performance across its member countries reached its lowest recorded level in mathematics and reading. One in five 15-year-olds across the OECD is now considered a low performer in science, mathematics and reading, up from 16% in 2022.
Reading has been particularly hard hit. The OECD said the average reading score across OECD countries fell by 28 points between 2015 and 2025, equivalent to roughly one and a half years of learning.
Reuters likewise reported that global reading, mathematics and science scores have fallen to their lowest levels since PISA began collecting comparable data in 2000.
Japan’s reading decline deserves attention
Japan’s reading score of 503 remains one of the highest internationally, but the 13-point drop from 2022 is significant.
The OECD’s Japan assessment says the proportion of low-performing students in reading increased by six percentage points compared with 2015. Mathematics also saw a five-percentage-point increase in the share of students performing below Level 2 over the same period.
The result suggests that Japan’s overall ranking can obscure an important internal trend: the gap between its strongest and weakest students is widening.
Between 2022 and 2025, the difference between Japan’s highest- and lowest-performing students widened in mathematics, reading and science.
Japan also stands out in digital learning
There is another striking part of the PISA 2025 results.
Japan ranked No. 1 among OECD members in the new “Learning in the Digital World” assessment, with an average score of 557 points.
That is notable because Japan also reported relatively low recreational social-media use among the countries surveyed.
Japanese students reported spending an average of 2.3 hours per weekday on social media for leisure, the lowest figure among the 24 OECD countries that provided comparable responses, according to Japanese broadcaster TV Asahi.
Japan also had the lowest reported frequency of using AI for schoolwork among the 38 countries that responded to that question. About 43.8% of Japanese students said they never or almost never used AI to help with learning, compared with an OECD average of 20.7%.
That creates an intriguing contrast: Japan is performing extremely well in digital problem-solving while its students report relatively limited use of AI for schoolwork.
The smartphone and AI problem is global
The OECD results also raise questions about how technology is affecting students.
The OECD found that students in member countries reported spending an average of 3.4 hours per weekday using digital devices for leisure, in addition to about three hours for learning at school and home.
Reuters reported that the OECD found digital distraction was associated with lower science performance in 59 of 82 education systems examined. Students who used digital devices for more than five hours a day also tended to see performance decline.
AI presents an even more complicated picture.
Nearly half of students surveyed reported using AI chatbots for learning. But students who frequently used AI for tasks such as drafting essays, summarizing material or researching topics generally scored about 20 points lower in science than those who did not use it in those ways.
The OECD has stressed, however, that these findings show associations rather than proof that technology directly causes lower scores.
Japan is still beating most of the world
Despite the warning signs, Japan remains one of the world’s education powerhouses.
The OECD found that Japanese students performed significantly above the OECD average in all three core subjects. Japan also has a relatively small share of low-performing students and a substantial proportion of top performers.
In science, for example, only 11.3% of Japanese students performed below Level 2, compared with 25.7% across the OECD. At the other end, 17.2% of Japanese students reached the highest performance levels, compared with 7.2% across the OECD.
Japan’s results also reinforce the continuing dominance of East Asian education systems.
Singapore and the Chinese provinces and municipalities represented by Beijing, Shanghai, Jiangsu and Zhejiang occupied the top positions across the major subjects, while Japan, Korea, Taiwan and Macao also ranked among the strongest systems.
The bigger story
Japan’s PISA result is therefore both a victory and a warning.
The country has achieved something unprecedented: it is now the highest-performing OECD member in science, mathematics and reading simultaneously.
Yet its scores have fallen across all three areas since 2022, while the number of lower-performing students has increased over the longer term.
That makes Japan’s latest education story far more complicated than simply saying “Japan ranks No. 1.”
The real question now is whether Japan can preserve its position at the top while reversing the decline among its weaker students and adapting its education system to an era increasingly shaped by smartphones, social media and artificial intelligence.
And with global PISA scores falling at the same time, Japan may not just be defending its place near the top — it may be trying to figure out how to stay there.
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