I signed up for a three week course this September and it occurred to me that writing in Japanese using kanji may be part of the course and sure enough, when I asked, I was told it was. I tried to get more specifics on that from the school but I'm still left wondering. Anyone taken Japanese at at one of these schools who can give me an idea of what to expect? I apparently did really well on their online placement test and would go into their advanced course - I was expecting 中級 so that surprised me. But I stink at writing Japanese by hand. I plowed through RTK 1 way back but I didn't keep it up. It was super beneficial for reading Japanese but that's it really. I can't properly write a lot of the words I know by hand except in hiragana. How much writing do they really do at these schools?

I signed up with Genkijacs (their website was the easiest to navigate and the price seemed good and they let you start a course any Monday as opposed to other schools with less flexible schedules).

I'm currently doing language school in Tokyo and we have to write kanji by hand too. Like you writing by hand is not my strong side. There is not much to do other than just buckle up and write those kanji. If I remember a writing but not it's kanji I enter it in my phone first and then write it while looking at the screen. I don't think you should expect to write long essays by hand, so if it was me I wouldn't worry to much.

My experience was that we could not use smartphones or electronic dictionaries in class.

There were three broad areas that we wrote kanji.

1) Studying vocabulary with a textbook that focused on kanji. You could just prepare for that the night before. These exercises disappeared in more advanced classes.

2) Periodic writing exercises in class using that japanese writing paper with boxes for each character. That required strong kanji writing skills and the Chinese kids certainly had an advantage.

3) Miscellaneous homework for which one could use any electronic resource.

Seeing as you have 1.5 months before classes begin, I'm not sure where you should dedicate your efforts; I might put a little time in a broad review (e.g. each of reading, writing, listening, speaking, grammar and vocab...)

I'm studying at an advanced course in a language school in Osaka right now. As you can see from the other responses school policies may differ, but in my school there's no problem with using electronic dictionaries or smartphones in class (as long as you're using them for class-related purposes). There's homework after every class and most of it involves filling in blanks or answering short questions on a handout sheet, but sometimes we do need to write longer texts (nothing longer than one notebook page though). We're also often asked to write stuff on the whiteboard, which makes me self-conscious, since most of the students in this school are from Taiwan and hand-written kanji is the least of their problems. I did a bit of practice before coming here with things like writing out song lyrics from memory or copying hand-written texts by native speakers (this twitter account is a good example), but it's not like I did all this with any sort of consistency, and I don't think this has jeopardized the legibility of my handwritten characters. Writing speed is a bit of a problem, but not a significant one.

If you have a DS/3DS and you can pick up a copy of one of the Kanken games I've found it to be pretty useful for recovering writing ability, after having neglected proper RTK reviews. At least, that's my personal experience.

I'm doing a summer course at KCP in Tokyo at the moment and we also have daily exercises and tests where you write kanji by hand, among other things.