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1 Introduction
At least from the times of Socrates, the youth has been a disappointment. Around 450 BC, he lamented the love of luxury, lack of respect, laziness and bad behaviour of the youth at the time. New generations have always been seen as problematic by the older, and Japan is no exception. In 1958, Osada Arata, President of the Japan Pedagogical Society, made the following analysis of this seemingly eternal conflict:
According to [proponents of the morals courses], children have bad manners, speak impolitely, are egoistic and selfish, do not listen to their parents or teachers, are immodest and lack self-criticism and introspection. But the reason that the critics are making such an outcry is that they are measuring today’s children with yesterday’s yardstick. […] The members of the older generation […] are too quick to equate the idea of ethics with the outmoded forms of loyalty and filial piety pursued in the pre-war period.
(Osada in Marshall, 1994, 179)
Here Osada is talking about the assumed loss of pre-war Japanese values, but the criticism he quotes on the part of the older generation is remarkably like what Socrates in classical times and countless after him have pointed out to be the problem: self-centeredness, lack of modesty and respect and bad manners. Correcting this is one of the important tasks of upbringing and educating the child, and parents and educational systems look to impart on their charges the moral upbringing they find suitable for the society in question. While Osada may be quite right, that lamentations over the state of the youth today are based on outmoded ideas of ethics and good behaviour, it is no less true that much discourse on morality and moral education takes as its point of departure problems with the way things seem to be at the time the argument is made and compares them (unfavourably) to the ‘good old days’. Grimes-MacLellan (2011) very vividly describes the contemporary Japanese discourse on childhood and youth, where a few but very brutal cases contribute to a general fear of what is to become of the country given the out-of-control youth of the time (60–63).1
In our times, moral education does not exist on a national level alone. Globalization poses new challenges to any country and its ideas of identity and morality, both in terms of global pressure to align with international standards and in terms of inflows and inspirations from other countries. This is no less the situation in Japan than in other societies, and while the main focus of this research will be behaviour within the normal and non-criminal range, fears of a detrimental influence of international phenomena can be found in, for example, the thinly veiled accusations that ‘modernity’, mostly in the shape of modern media or foreign influence, is behind atrocities committed by youngsters in Japan. One of the more extreme examples of this type of accusation against modernity and foreign influence is the case of the high school student who murdered his mother in 2007, where the media noted that the boy had listened to hip-hop prior to the murder (Grimes-MacLellan, 2011, 60–63).
This research attempts to trace a specific part of the history of global influence on Japan and will focus on Japanese education, using moral education as a case to show how global flows and pressures are reacted to and taken into account by those in charge of imparting morality on Japanese elementary school pupils on the practioners’ level as well as on the administrative and official level, mainly represented by the Ministry for Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (Monbu Kagakushō, hereafter MEXT). I am aware that the MEXT policies are the sum of the opinions and inputs of many individuals and sometimes also organizations. Nevertheless, I shall talk about MEXT as ‘doing’ things and ‘sending signals’ and so forth as if it is one agent in itself. This is not because I assume this to be the case; it is because I take the official material emanating from MEXT as representing a consensus within the institution, and it is in order to make the language, when I write about MEXT policies, simpler. I hope the reader will understand and forgive me for this.
Morality and moral education have often been seen in terms of religion, and behaviour based on a moral judgement has been interpreted as manifestations of religious doctrines. This is no new phenomenon; indeed Nitobe Inazō relates how he was asked, in the late 19th century, by a Belgian legal scholar how on earth the Japanese could learn about morality when religion was not taught in Japanese schools (Nitobe, 1969, xi). Nitobe failed to come up with an answer at the time, but after giving it some thought, found that Bushidō (the way of the warrior) was the answer, as described in his famous book on the subject. The expectation of a religious basis for morality has been consistent and can also be found in, for example, Klaus Luhmer’s 1990 article analysing Japanese moral education in terms of religion. Such analyses, while they may make sense in a discussion of religious doctrine and how to develop it, in my opinion miss the more important point of moral education in Japan as elsewhere. Morality, I would argue, also exists as a non-religious or pan-religious phenomenon, a stance for which I find good arguments in some of the thinking concerning cosmopolitanism, globalization and values by, for example, Kwame Anthony Appiah and Ulrich Beck. Rather than placing ourselves in a spot where we cannot discuss values without insulting religious practioners or questioning the basis of religions, thereby foreclosing any productive conclusions across opinions and especially beliefs, I would prefer to try to find common ground not clad in the vocabulary of religion, but that of values, which may be variously termed universal or cosmopolitan values and locally dominant values.
I therefore propose trying to understand moral education in Japan as a reaction to the challenges of globalization and cosmopolitanism, as a reaction to the risks experienced in a modern globalized society. Moral education is harnessed to try to combat the anxiety born out of such risks and challenges, ‘real’ or ‘imagined’, perceived to be posed by globalization and the increasingly cosmopolitan character of our daily interaction via a diverse array of media. I would further suggest that a productive point of departure would be to look at initiatives concerning moral education as ‘gate-keeping’, where those in a position of influence try to safeguard what is considered basic and inalienable in Japanese culture and morality, while also adjusting to those of the global currents that cannot be ignored.
In 2006 Japan’s Fundamental Law on Education (FLE) was revised, and recently we have seen a proposal to change the weekly lesson of moral education in Japanese elementary and secondary schools so that by 2018 it becomes an ordinary subject, implying that it will have examinations, evaluations and authorized textbooks, something that is not the case at the moment (Kobayashi, 2014; Sawada, 2014). This will mean major changes in the status of moral education in the schools and challenges to the approach employed in schools. Changes in the curriculum guidelines are also being discussed at the moment (in 2015). The curriculum guidelines for moral education (dōtoku kyōiku) were revised to reflect changes to the FLE in 2006, a change made under the same Prime Minister as now, Abe Shinzō, so we may expect many of the same issues to surface this time around. Therefore the revisions related to the FLE change in 2006 are of importance. Those revisions included an emphasis on the qualities of the ideal citizen: individual responsibility, respect for life, environment and the nation, respect for other countries, understanding of differences and a general strengthening of moral values. The revisions appeared to be concerned with the inner workings of the nation as well as the nurturing of outward-directed capabilities for understanding and tolerance of that which is different. While moral education had until then been much concerned with individual and local relations and with what was perceived as a set of moral values necessary for people to function in society, the changes appear to encourage both a more international orientation and, paradoxically, strong notions of patriotism (aikokushin), love of the country and native land. This paradox makes moral education in its present incarnation seem like quite an ambiguous object, and requires an interpretative frame of analysis which can handle such paradoxes within the same object.
It has been a common reaction to view initiatives like these concerning Japanese moral education as conservative or traditionalist attempts to re-introduce pre-war practices, a point of view that tends to eliminate the possibility of dialogue and any attempt to understand the complex concerns of multiple stake-holders. I wish to explore an alternative line: the merits of seeing the contents of moral education as a reaction to the challenges of globalization, to the risks experienced in a modern globalized society and as a reaction to the anxiety born out of the challenges, ‘real’ or ‘imagined’, perceived to be posed by globalization. Moral education is part of the ‘gate-keeping’ in regard to the pressures of globalization.
In this sense what we are looking at is the function of moral education as a key element of Japan’s ‘immunology’, to borrow a term from Cowen (1997), the resistance to influence from what is considered ‘outside’ and the inertia of the system. Yet in doing so the other component of Cowen’s pair of terms, ‘permiology’, which draws attention to influx and degrees of penetration, must also be included. Japan’s ‘gates’ to the outside world are not hermetically sealed: there are cracks and openings allowing for flows from the outside as well as for that which is inside to seep out. Among the regulatory mechanisms for much of the opening or closing are perceived threats or benefits. I say ‘perceived’ since the evaluation of occurrences as ‘threats’ or ‘benefits’ is conducted subjectively. The distinction between what is ‘real’ and what is ‘imagined’ is also highly subjective, and it can be very difficult to distinguish where we can, for example, draw the line between the subjective actions of agents or more diffuse international ‘norms’, pressures, perceived expectations or similar intangible forces and events.
One example of how the intangible issue of ‘globalization’ has been imagined by Japanese policy makers is provided by David Leheny, author of Think Global, Fear Local (2006), who analyses the way in which international issues and trends have created anxiety and influenced decision-making and law-making in Japan (often also referred to as gaiatsu, pressure from the outside), especially with reference to the sexual exploitation of children and to terrorism:
In both cases, officials found it easier to tackle current issues when they could align international pressure with prevailing fears about the direction in which the country was moving. International norms could justify steps that might have been otherwise constitutionally difficult, while their deployment against popularly accepted fears made them politically acceptable.
(Leheny, 2006, 47)
Regardless of whether such international norms, pressures and prevailing fears were based on anything ‘real’ or were mostly imagined, the reality of their presence in the discourse is enough to provide a basis for policy and legal action. Although Leheny deals mainly with sex and violence in contemporary Japan, his points about anxiety and the issues he raises in his analyses seem very pertinent to the kinds of problems the Japanese education system is trying to overcome with reforms in, among other areas, moral education. Leheny quotes Kariya Takehiko, for example, who argues that incidents like the Aum sarin gas attack in 1995 were in part a consequence of the Japanese educational system, which fails to teach children to think critically or to question, leaving them helpless against charismatic leaders like Asahara (Leheny, 2006, 39). Leheny thus echoes concerns about the quality of Japanese education and the consequences this might have for Japan’s future in a new global world, a concern which is, to a large extent, shared by those in charge in the Ministry of Education (although the proposed remedies may be very different). It is these concerns, whether founded on ‘real’ or ‘imagined’ causal linkages, which have in turn prompted action in several fields, among them moral education.2
In 2006 we saw the latest revision of the Japanese FLE, and based on this new curriculum guidelines were issued, including one for moral education. Under the present Abe administration (2012–), educational reform has been a key focus, and moral education has been singled out as one of the remedies against what is described as declining public morals reflected in various types of unwanted behaviour, ranging from atrocious violence to bullying and shop lifting. In attempting to understand moral education and why the education of the ideal citizen is conceptualized the way it is in the official discourse, I propose that it is useful to employ theories of globalization and its local ‘consequences’ as conceptual directions. Such theories, articulated by Roland Robertson (1992) on globalization and Ulrich Beck on world risk society and reflexive modernity (1992), will provide a theoretical basis for working with global pressures, influences and their consequences. I will also use work done on cosmopolitanism by Beck (1999, for example) and Appiah (2006) in particular to illuminate the workings of globalization within moral education in Japan.
How can we interpret the changes to moral education guidelines and the discourses on moral education in light of the challenges posed by globalization and the changing social conditions catalyzed by increased perceptions of “risk” and feelings of anxiety brought about by increasing global contacts and exchange? My attempt here is to put forth a general framework for understanding the priorities and discourses in Japanese moral education, how one attempts to implement these priorities and the way the dominant discourses reveal themselves in the officially produced exemplary teaching materials as well as in local teaching practices, which are not always clearly related to the officially produced material. The analysis and the descriptions will show a diverse field; there appears to be much ambiguity in intentions and purposes, but in the final evaluation, I shall argue that moral education as described in the curriculum guidelines and the officially produced text material is an attempt to regulate the ‘gates’ between Japanese society and the ‘outside’: a selective opening of the ‘gates’, which will provide the population with tools to handle global challenges, as well as a ‘closing’ or regulating of ‘gates’ that will maintain what are deemed inalienable Japanese values and identity.
To cast light on these issues and questions, I will first provide an historical overview of main events and issues in moral education in Japan since the establishment of the present system of schooling in 1872. Then follows a description and analyses of the changes of the FLE in 2006 and an overview of the present situation. In order to get a clear idea of the kind of morality and values the official system seeks to promote, I will analyse two series of readers for moral education in elementary school, the Kokoro no Nōto (Notes of the Heart), first published in 2002, and the recent Watashitachi no Dōtoku (Our Morality), from 2014, and I will also look at the educational television programs on moral education. Then follows an analysis of the practical implementation of moral education based on cases primarily collected by myself, so that I can present the reader with specific examples of what can be found to go on in the moral education classes. But first, I will turn my attention to the theoretical framework, which will form the basis for my analysis.
Notes
References
Cowen, R. (1997) Late-Modernity and the Rules of Chaos: an initial note on transitologies and rims in Alexander, Osborn & Philips (Eds.) Learning from Comparing: New Directions in Comparative Education Research (Volume 2 – Policy, Professionals and Development). Oxford: Symposium Books, 73–88.
Grimes-MacLellan, D. (2011) ‘Kids these days …’ Globalization and the shifting discourse of childhood in Japan, Holroyd, C & Coates, K (Eds) Japan in the Age of Globalization. New York: Routledge, 60–78.
Kobayashi, Y. (2014) Dōtokuteki de nai ‘Dōtoku Kyōka Ka’ [Is there moral education which is not moralistic?] in Mainichi Shimbun, Yūkan, 12. November, section 3, 2.
Leheny, D. (2006) Think Global, Fear Local – Sex, violence, and anxiety in contemporary Japan. Ithaca & London: Cornell University Press.
Luhmer, K. (1990) Moral Education in Japan, Moral Education, 19(3), 172–182.
Marshall, B. (1994) Learning to Be Modern – Japanese Political Discourse on Education. Boulder: Westview Press.
Nitobe, I. (1969) Bushido: The Soul of Japan. Tokyo: Tuttle.
Sawada, A. (2014) Kokoro no Kyōiku – Sensei ni Nanmon [Education of the Heart – difficult questions for the teacher] in Tokyo Shimbun, Chōkan 22. October, 29.
Yomiuri Shimbun (2015) Tragic Murder of Kawasaki-Student Opens Door to Juvenile Law Debate, 3. March, http://the-japan-news.com/news/article/0001975825
