Students from 10 public schools in Japan will be coming to Singapore on a field trip in 2024, but the price tag per student has drawn mixed reactions, with many Japanese citizens questioning the wisdom behind this expenditure.

The five-day trip will be undertaken by students from 10 junior high schools in Tokyo’s Minato ward, and is estimated to cost 570,000 yen (S$5,280) per person, Minato mayor Masaaki Takei announced last Friday.

The affluent Minato would become the first municipality in Japan’s capital city to conduct overseas school trips for public junior high schools, Japanese media reported.

Singapore has been selected as the destination for around 760 third-year junior high school students, who at age 15 will be completing their final year of compulsory education in Japan.

At a press conference, Minato’s mayor said Singapore was chosen because it is an English-speaking and safe country that is close to Japan with a minimal time difference.

He said that since 2006, schools in Minato have been focused on improving their students’ English through additional lesson hours and programmes, and that the trips in 2024 will be the culmination of nine years of compulsory elementary and junior high school education for participating students.

While exact itineraries have not been decided, Mr Takei said there are plans to interact with Singapore students and also visit sites such as the Singapore Zoo.

“I would like to deepen international understanding and make the ward’s junior high schools more attractive,” he had said last Friday.

Each student will be expected to pay around 70,000 yen (S$647), an amount pegged to estimated costs incurred from domestic trips to cities including Kyoto and Nara in previous years.

Spillover costs will be borne by Minato ward’s taxpayers, with around 500,000 yen budgeted for each student.

The budget tabled for the trip is around 510 million yen; students are expected to travel between June and September 2024.

The high cost of the trip has raised eyebrows in Japan, where inflation hit a record 4.1 per cent in January before slowing to 2.8 per cent in August - a rate still above the central bank’s 2 per cent target.

One online commenter reacting to a report by the FNN Prime Online news site called for more transparency from the authorities, saying that Minato residents “won’t be convinced unless the trip’s breakdown and details are presented”.

“If the travel cost is over 500,000 yen, the flight must be in business class and the hotel (Marina) Bay Sands,” wrote another user on X, formerly Twitter.

Others remarked that such trips are opulence “to be expected from the rich in Minato”, and that junior high schools in less affluent wards could only go on local school trips.

Minato, one of Tokyo’s 23 wards, is home to some of the capital’s most wealthy and upmarket neighbourhoods, and also hosts more than 80 foreign embassies.

According to government data collated by software publisher Zenrin, Minato residents average the third-highest annual household income among Tokyo’s wards at 7.31 million yen, around 1.7 million yen higher than the national average.

Japanese author Akihiko Reizei said on Tuesday that the hefty investment could pay off “10 or 100 times” for the junior high school students who participated in the trip to Singapore.

In a weekly newsletter he writes from Princeton in the United States where he is based as an educator, Mr Reizei said that students should experience the “disparity” between Singapore and Japan.

He cited figures from the World Bank: Singapore recorded a GDP of US$82,800 in 2022, while Japan, which had a GDP of US$33,800, fell from being “one of the world’s top countries”.

“The affluence, the confidence of the people, the vitality of the city, the prestige of the nation... I want them to become acutely aware of the disparities in growth rates,” Mr Reizei wrote.

“If (students) can see and hear those aspects in the field, and speak English to the locals of the same generation... the investment (of more than 570,000 yen) will be worth 10 or 100 times more.”

Noting local Japanese criticism about inequalities between Minato and other less wealthy wards, education analyst Chikara Oyano said this move could be a reference for other local governments with sufficient financial resources to begin planning educational overseas school trips.

“I would like to hope that it will not end as a case of Minato Ward being “flamed”, but will lead to discussions on raising the level of public education spending as a whole,” he told online news site Aera Dot on Wednesday.