This article examines Japanese education system especially relevant to the school curriculum, which might support Japanese high performance in the OECD's Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), mainly through Japanese policy documents. The Japanese education systems have been constructed by the local context of society and politics, and it is hard to analyse the reasons why Japan has seen better results in the previous PISA assessments than other OECD countries. However, the 2008-2009 revision of the Course of Study (the national curriculum in Japan) shows that the Japanese government was really concerned about the decline of Japan's ranking in the previous PISA assessments and revised the Course of Study in response to children's skills which the PISA aimed to measure (key competencies). The Japanese government has placed importance on the cultivation of human resources which are necessary to compete within the international community, and the PISA has had a large effect on the direction of Japanese education.