Education Reform in Japan

A Case of Immobilist Politics

Leonard James Schoppa

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• eBook ISBN: 9781134865161
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Studi sull'etnia

The Japanese education system, while widely praised in western countries, is subject to heavy criticism within Japan. Education Reform in Japan analyses this criticism, and explains why proposed reforms have failed. The author shows how the Japanese policy-making process can become paralysed when there is disagreement, and argues that this `immobilism' can affect other areas of Japanese policy-making.

1
Introduction and theoretical background

Today on the eve of the twenty-first century we are facing an age of transition—transition to an internationalized society, transition to an information-centred civilization, and transition from a fifty-year life span to an eighty-year life span. The further advance of science and technology in the twenty-first century will require a re-examination of our way of living and a careful effort to maintain our humanity. Education must respond to these requirements of the new age.

The Ad Hoc Council on Education, 1985¹

Japan is known as an adaptable nation—famous for its success in achieving two great transformations in its modern history. First, following the Meiji Restoration in 1868, a cadre of reformists were able to transform feudal Japan into a fast-growing modern nation state by directing all of the nation’s energies toward the goal of catching up with ‘the west’. Then, after the Second World War, Japan was able to adjust equally efficiently to a new world order dominated by the United States —incorporating new democratic institutions and continuing its campaign to achieve economic parity with the western powers. In each of these great transformations, education reform played a central role. In the Meiji period, the reformist leaders’ decision to institute universal primary education and a meritocratic system gave Japan an educated and trainable workforce and a talented elite at a time when the nation needed to make maximum use of its human resources in its effort to catch up. Later, following the war, the reforms carried out under the Allied Occupation succeeded in creating a more egalitarian and democratic education system, making it even more efficiently meritocratic at a time when the nation needed skilled workers to power its post-war recovery.

By the beginning of the 1970s, however, Japan found itself at another critical juncture in its history. It had succeeded in its ‘catch up’ campaign, but having pursued the goal of economic growth relentlessly for some one hundred years, it was faced with the task of adjusting to a new role as one of the leading economic powers in a fast-changing and competitive world. Among the many demands for change which accompanied this new status were a need to adjust the nation’s industrial structure to emphasize industries on the cutting edge of scientific and technological change; demands that the government stop emphasizing growth at the cost of damage to the environment; demands that Japan open up its markets to international competition; and demands that the nation assume more of the burden of its own defence. In addition, the government was forced to look once more at its education system. Successful though it was in terms of past performance, it had been designed for the catch up phase of Japan’s development—structured to produce a large number of workers of a standard quality and to emphasize the selective function of examinations. With the Japanese economy increasingly dependent on international business and fast-changing science and technology industries, therefore, the government faced demands from many quarters calling on it to reform its education system to bring it into line with the growing need for more diversely talented and creative workers and a ‘life-long learning system’.

In many areas the government adapted once again with efficiency: through an effective industrial policy, it was able to take the lead in several high-technology areas;² reversing its growth-at-all-costs position, it instituted firm anti-pollution laws in the early 1970s;³ and by the mid-1980s it had opened many of its markets to international competition.⁴ In the area of defence and in the case of certain market-opening disputes, the government was hampered to a greater degree by ‘immobilist’ forces. Nevertheless, it was able to achieve some change.⁵

In one area, however, the Japanese government’s inability to achieve reform was particularly conspicuous. Twice in the twentyyear period between 1967 and 1987, it embarked on major education reform initiatives. The first reform campaign, culminating in the publication of a comprehensive programme for reform in 1971, sought to introduce a greater degree of diversity into the education system. The second, centred on the activities of a cabinet-level advisory body set up in 1984, similarly tried to achieve a freer and more flexible education system capable of producing the type of workers required for the next stage in Japan’s economic advance. As indicated in the passage cited at the beginning this chapter, the aim of both initiatives was to create an education system in line with the transition to a ‘new age’. Though both of these initiatives were accompanied by great fanfare and backed by the authority of the full government, however, neither produced significant changes in the education system. It is this failure of the government to achieve its objectives in the area of education reform which serves as the focus of this case study in Japanese policy-making.

THE FIRST INITIATIVE

The first of the two recent attempts to transform Japan’s education system began when the Minister of Education, Kennoki Toshihiro, made a little-noticed ‘request for advice’ from the Central Council on Education (CCE, Chukyoshin) in 1967. Kennoki and the Ministry of Education, Science and Culture (MOE, Mombusho) wanted the council to examine the whole school system—pre-school through to higher education—and produce ‘basic guidelines for the development of an integrated educational system suited for contemporary society’. Despite its grand mandate, however, the 1967 CCE would probably have had little publicity or impact were it not for the university disturbances which suddenly put education reform at the top of the political agenda in the late 1960s. After making an emergency recommendation on how to resolve the university crisis in 1969, the council went on to produce a comprehensive, high-profile set of ‘basic guidelines’ for reform in June 1971.

Among its numerous recommendations the council proposed that Japan experiment with alternatives to its strictly standardized ‘6–3– 3 system’ (six years of elementary education, three years of lower secondary school and three years of upper secondary school). Pilot projects were to be set up to test the specific ideas of a lower school-starting age and a unified secondary education. In addition, the council proposed to increase the diversity of the school system by making the upper secondary education curriculum more flexible and by allowing streaming and grade-skipping. Aiming to strengthen the management of schools and improve the quality of teachers, the council also proposed to increase the ranks of school administrators, raise teachers’ salaries, create a new salary scale recognizing graduate-trained teachers and require new teachers to undergo a full probationary year before being fully employed. The report’s section on university reform concentrated primarily on a call for administrative reforms aimed at increasing central management authority and responsibility.

While other recommendations calling for increased aid to kindergartens, education for the handicapped and private education were gradually implemented, the more controversial reforms listed above met a stormy response. Although some were implemented over vehement protests from the teachers’ union and other progressive organizations, the central recommendation calling for pilot projects and the most controversial reforms concerning teachers (a reformed salary scale and the probationary year) were abandoned. As the 1970s drew to a close, the most telling sign of the first initiative’s failure was the state of the school system. For all of the CCE’s calls for flexibility and diversity, Japanese students continued to have no alternative to the standard 6–3–3 system. In fact, with more students than ever seeking to enter university, individual teachers and upper secondary schools were given little opportunity to take advantage of more flexible curriculum guidelines: virtually all classes had to be directed towards helping students pass the standard national university entrance examination. Universities, with a small number of exceptions, remained wedded to decentralized forms of administration long criticized as barriers to their ability to adapt to social and economic change.

THE SECOND INITIATIVE

In initiating a second reform campaign in 1984, the Prime Minister, Nakasone Yasuhiro, essentially confirmed that the 1971 reform attempt had fallen a long way short of its goals. The reason the previous initiative had not succeeded, he argued, was that it had been dominated by the MOE. As a single bureaucracy, it could not build the support necessary for more than ‘minor improvements’ in the system, whereas the Japanese education system required major structural and philosophical changes.⁶ Consequently, Nakasone sought and won Diet approval of his plan to establish a supra-cabinet advisory body directly under his office—the Ad Hoc Council on Education (AHCE, Rinkyoshin). Its task, as outlined by the Prime Minister at its inaugural meeting, was to address the immediate problems of growing school violence and misbehaviour as well as the more basic problems of ‘a social climate that places too much value on the academic background of individuals, a uniform and inflexible structure of formal education and a need for internationalizing Japan’s educational institutions’. The challenge, Nakasone concluded, was to ‘create an educational system which copes with the change in times’, one which would help ‘build up a society full of vitality and creativity relevant to the twenty-first century’.⁷

Established at a time of heightened public concern about violence and misbehaviour in the schools, the AHCE started its work in August 1984 with a large majority of the public convinced of the need for some change. Yet, despite such support and the broad mandate it enjoyed from the Diet and the Prime Minister, the council gradually discarded most proposals for real change. The most significant debate concerned suggestions that elements of diversity and competition be introduced into the school system through the liberalization of government regulations. While the council in the end gave the principle some support, it expressly rejected proposals to deregulate textbooks and allow free parental choice in the selection of compulsory (elementary and lower secondary) schools. Even in its comments on the need to minimize the amount of detail in the curriculum and similar regulations, the council left its recommendations vague enough to allow substantial room for MOE non-implementation. While the council considered Nakasone’s suggestion that the national university entrance examination be abolished, in the end it decided merely to abolish the old test and create a new one. The AHCE could not even agree on a plan to shift the starting date for the school year from April to the September start which is most common in the west.

As for the proposals which survived the AHCE debate, the record on implementation up to the end of 1987 was decidedly mixed. Some recommendations—such as those calling for the internationalization of the education system and its adjustment to the ‘information age’ —enjoyed broad support and looked likely to win gradual approval. The council’s more controversial proposal to require a ‘training year’ for all new teachers was in the pilot project stage and appeared likely to be expanded nationwide as funds allowed. Likewise, such conservative-supported proposals as those calling for increased moral education and greater use of the ‘national flag’ and ‘national anthem’ were quickly being written into MOE guidelines.

Other proposals, however, were languishing for a lack of MOE enthusiasm. The proposal to allow prefectures to establish six-year secondary schools—contained in the council’s 1985 report—remained ‘under study’. The vague call for a minimization of regulations was not being taken very seriously by the MOE. Despite broad support, the AHCE’s proposals aimed at reducing the emphasis on academic credentials were simply too vague to produce concrete action: the government itself continued to hire its top bureaucrats almost exclusively from the University of Tokyo. After three years of high-profile deliberations by a powerful advisory body, the state of the education system had changed very little: children still had no choice besides the 6–3–3 system; almost all of the 99 per cent of parents who sent their elementary school children to public schools still had a choice of only one school; and entrance examinations continued to dominate secondary schooling. If it was true—as Nakasone asserted—that Japan was in need of a less standardized and less credential-orientated system to meet the challenge of the twenty-first century, the AHCE reform had not produced it.

EDUCATION REFORM AS POLICY-MAKING

Were this study concerned merely with the content of Japan’s recent reform packages, it would not have to go much further than the above analysis. The results of the initiatives were not very impressive. This book, however, is not a study of educational policies. Rather, as a work which treats education reform as a case study in Japanese policy-making, it is interested not so much in the quality of the results as in the way those results were produced. While the limited nature of the final reform packages might dampen the interest of an educationalist, the fact that so many reformist ideas failed to be implemented actually makes Japanese education reform more interesting as a study in politics.

The primary aim of this book is to explain this failure. It asks: why did the Japanese government fail to achieve its reform objectives in the sphere of education? The study will focus on the nature of education issues, the actors involved in education policy and the education policy-making process and ask what it is about the sphere of education which explains the government’s ‘immobilism’ in that area. The use of such words as ‘failure’ and ‘immobilism’ perhaps produces the impression that this study is based on the idea that education reform is necessarily desirable in Japan. In fact, it seeks to avoid that normative issue. Observers inside and outside Japan have pointed to many strengths of the Japanese education system, and it may be that some of the changes sought by the government were not desirable. Immobilism may or may not be ‘good’ depending on one’s viewpoint. Maintaining a formal neutrality on this normative issue, the study aims to explain empirically the inability of the government leadership to achieve its reform objectives.

While the book is concerned above all with explaining the reasons for immobilism in the case of education reform, it is ultimately interested in the degree to which the Japanese policymaking process in general is or is not adaptable: to what extent are Japanese leaders able to achieve the policy changes they see as necessary? The introductory discussion outlined some of the numerous policy challenges facing Japan in its new position at the forefront of the world economy. In addition, like all nations, Japan faces a continuous stream of policy challenges arising out of a need to adapt to a fast-changing world. While not all of these challenges demand radical policy ‘change’, all of them demand a policy-making process which allows the nation’s leadership, based on a broad view of social and economic needs, to change those policies which need changing. In its response to the policy challenges in the areas of industrial and environmental policy, the Japanese policy-making process has definitely met that test. At other times, however, the system has been characterized by what has been termed ‘immobilism’ — ‘an inability to do more than accommodate competing pressures and effect a “lowest common denominator” compromise between them’.⁸ This study seeks to explain this variation in the Japanese system’s responsiveness.

Japan is, of course, not unique in being more responsive in its approach to some policy challenges than to others. All governments will naturally be able to arrive at solutions to some issues which are ‘dynamic’ while in other cases being totally stymied by immobilism. The government’s responsiveness depends on many factors specific to a given issue. The aim of this book, therefore, is to examine the government’s inability to achieve education reform in an effort to identify at least some of the issue-specific factors which account for the range in the Japanese system’s responsiveness to specific policy challenges. By explaining what factors determine the level of policymaking effectiveness in specific cases, the study aims to locate that point at which the Japanese system becomes ‘immobile’. In other words, the study seeks to locate what can be termed ‘the limits of change in Japanese policy-making’.

This final phrasing of the central question in terms of ‘the limits of change’ points towards the secondary concerns which lie behind it. Ultimately, the study is interested in the issue of ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Figures and Tables
• Acknowledgements
• Glossary of Abbreviations
• Glossary of Japanese Terms
• 1 Introduction and Theoretical Background
• 2 Background to the Recent Debate
• 3 Internal Actors: The Liberal Democratic Party
• 4 Internal Actors: The Bureaucracy
• 5 External Actors: Incorporated Interests
• 6 External Actors: Opposition Groups
• 7 Education Reform in the 1970s
• 8 Education Reform Under Nakasone
• 9 Final Conclusions
• Notes
• References