Forgive me if I sound a bit ignorant, but I don’t know many high schools that offer REGULAR Japanese classes. Why is their such a thing as an AP Japanese exam, yet no AP level exam for, say, Philosophy? And why do so few schools offer Japanese classes?
Not offered at my kid’s HS, but offered at our rival school 2 miles away plus offered at the HSs in the cities to the north and south of us, so it is offered around here quite a bit.
IDK how many offer regular Japanese (mine does), but in terms of AP Japanese, the number is 637
https://secure-media.collegeboard.org/digitalServices/pdf/research/2018/Program-Summary-Report-2018.pdf
I’ll give you the party line answer as well as my cynical reason.
Party line: The College Board was looking to expand its portfolio of AP exams and established a task force in 2003 to review. It concluded that Japanese and Chinese were two languages that had sufficiently high enrollments that would warrant brand extensions.
Cynical response #1: The cost if the program was underwritten by outside funding (which also explains why there is an AP Italian exam)
Cynical response #2: Administrative costs are low because the exam is computer-based.
https://apcentral.collegeboard.org/pdf/japanese-teachers-guide.pdf
Basic economics. If there were demand, there would be increased supply. As I understand it, Japanese was one of the more popular lee-commonly-taught languages in the 1980s, but then came the collapse of the Japanese economy of the 1990s, coupled with the onset of the rapid growth of the Chinese economy around the same time,and resources shifted.