A study examined levels of reported communication apprehension in Japanese elementary and secondary school students and to compare them to normative levels of apprehension of American children and adolescents. The Personal Report of Communication Fear (PRCF) was administered to 1,446 students from 6 elementary, junior, and high schools in Japan. Developers of the PRCF reported the instrument to be unidimensional but results indicated that three factors emerged: classroom communication fear, general communication fear, and stranger communication fear. The subscale scores were used in subsequent analyses. Major findings were: (1) communication apprehension levels increased fairly steadily from kindergarten through the senior year in high school, particularly for the classroom communication fear subscale of the PRCF; and (2) there was virtually no difference between Japanese and American students in grades K-12 in the PRCF using the normative means established by the developers of the PRCF. (Contains 37 references and 5 tables of data.) (Author/RS)