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This chapter begins with the premise that educational qualifications have a great impact on first job placement and the higher an individual's level of educational attainment, the more likely he or she is to acquire a 'good' job. In fact, in industrialised countries, higher educational qualifications are often a precondition for entry to a 'good' job. The analysis presented here differs from other chapters in the volume in that neither the same analytic framework nor a nationally sampled data set are used. Instead, the chapter offers an examination in detail of the mechanisms of the school to work transfer from the widely accepted perspective of Japan as a meritocratic society. As well as introducing more detailed meritocratic criteria into analyses, two linkage models (the institutional linkage model and the semi-institutional linkage model) are presented to explain the relationship between education and first job attainment.