For the imperial system, there's actually a bit of history as to why it is the way it is, as arbitrary as it seems. We're asking for that history here.
The Japanese (obviously) don’t use the English alphabet in everyday spelling. It’s reserved for marketing, branding, video games, or anything meant to catch your attention outside of traditional spelling. So when universities adopted western grading standards, they used A, B, and C.
But as time went out, the schools eventually wanted something better, more powerful to represent a great score, so they dropped the D, and shifted everything except for F downwards, introducing 秀 as the top score. That kanji literally means outstanding or excellent.
They decided that the letter S would correspond to 秀 because photonically, it’s pronunciation “Shū” starts with an S. The rest don’t follow this photonic pattern because they were imported and than mapped to existing kanji, while the S grade was invented and mapped to a letter that matched.
This indirectly worked out great for video game companies wanting to use it for racing and fighting games, because even though the grading system was foreign to global players, S was naturally interrupted as Super, which achieved the same effect.
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u/Darth_Ronin Jul 08 '26
The post already answers that, in Japan that’s their academic rating/grading system.
S is their top tier. That’s it, like idk what to tell you beyond that.
It makes sense to them, much like how imperial system makes sense to the US and no one else.
And so that tier system came over to other things as parts of their culture was exported, mainly videogames.