Overall I agree with your assessment. Some points that I'm taking the liberty of clarifying or adding some information:
>A student can apply for as many as 75 companies
This is the case for students majoring in the humanities. Engineers typically tend to apply to fewer (15 or so). Some of them rely on corporate connection between the lab/school and a company to get a leg-in on the process.
>you beg to your parents to fund you through your master and you then try again once you are done with your master (if they are rich enough, it isn't cheap and same thing goes for Ph.D.;s)
It should be noted that PhD candidates must pay tuition, much like a Master's student. A PhD also makes it more difficult to find a job.
>the only successful Japanese start-up that I can think of that has gone big in the last 20 years or so is Rakuten
GREE and DeNA (social gaming companies) are the other big ones. I'm kind of impressed with kakaku.com too (a price-comparison site for retail goods).
>but the way foreigners fit into this whole mess is that we, to a large extent, are exempted from this honour system.
I think that one of the main reasons why the status quo is so impenetrable is precisely because of the racial and cultural homogeneity of the country. I presume you are in Tokyo, where the culture is at least somewhat mitigated by the presence of foreign nationals and their foreign employees, but as I'm sure you know, things get pretty monotonic when you step out into the other major cities.
> A PhD also makes it more difficult to find a job.
I am not sure if this is true or not. But what little I can draw upon, lacking a source for statistics, is only from a major school with a famous engineering and science department. So I am pretty sure what I have observed won't hold on a national level.
> I think that one of the main reasons why the status quo is so impenetrable is precisely because of the racial and cultural homogeneity of the country. I presume you are in Tokyo, where the culture is at least somewhat mitigated by the presence of foreign nationals and their foreign employees, but as I'm sure you know, things get pretty monotonic when you step out into the other major cities.
I whole-heartedly agree, I usually refer to the "acceptance" of foreigner behaviour as a double-edged sword. It allows us to violate the rules to make a point, but it also allows for the "natives" to dismiss our actions as those of someone much like a child.
>A student can apply for as many as 75 companies
This is the case for students majoring in the humanities. Engineers typically tend to apply to fewer (15 or so). Some of them rely on corporate connection between the lab/school and a company to get a leg-in on the process.
>you beg to your parents to fund you through your master and you then try again once you are done with your master (if they are rich enough, it isn't cheap and same thing goes for Ph.D.;s)
It should be noted that PhD candidates must pay tuition, much like a Master's student. A PhD also makes it more difficult to find a job.
>the only successful Japanese start-up that I can think of that has gone big in the last 20 years or so is Rakuten
GREE and DeNA (social gaming companies) are the other big ones. I'm kind of impressed with kakaku.com too (a price-comparison site for retail goods).
>but the way foreigners fit into this whole mess is that we, to a large extent, are exempted from this honour system.
I think that one of the main reasons why the status quo is so impenetrable is precisely because of the racial and cultural homogeneity of the country. I presume you are in Tokyo, where the culture is at least somewhat mitigated by the presence of foreign nationals and their foreign employees, but as I'm sure you know, things get pretty monotonic when you step out into the other major cities.