The Organisational Dynamics of University Reform in Japan

International Inside Out

Jeremy Breaden

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• eBook ISBN: 9781136189449
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education Administration

For several decades internationalisation has been a cornerstone of both Japanese government higher education policy and approaches to reform at an institutional level, but Japan has still not managed to lose its reputation as a somewhat reclusive member of the global academic community. Consensus on the potential of internationalisation to reinvigorate Japanese higher education is matched by the depth of recognition that universities have, to date, failed to internationalise successfully.

This book offers a new approach to Japan's internationalisation conundrum by proceeding from the 'inside out'. It presents an extended case study one university organisation that has been changed through its adoption of a radical program of internationalisation. Through this case study Jeremy Breaden identifies patterns by which internationalisation is situated in administrative discourse and individual action, and determines how these patterns in turn shape organisational practice. The result is a multi-dimensional narrative of organisational change that advances our understanding of both the dynamics of university reform and the concept of internationalisation, one of the most durable yet contentious themes in the study of contemporary Japanese society.

With detailed analysis and an in-depth case study, this book will be of interest to students and scholars of Japanese studies, sociology and anthropology. It will also prove valuable to professionals and policy makers working in higher education, both in Japan and around the world.

1 Japanese higher education reform

Adaptation and alignment

Kokusaika – ‘internationalisation’, the particular focus of this book – is both an issue demanding a response from universities and a strategy formulated autonomously by universities to deal with the range of other challenges confronting them. It is impossible to isolate it from either the specific circumstances of university reinvention or the broader social and political context for its rise to prominence several decades ago. Kokusaika entails far more than a linear process of ‘becoming international’, and we must therefore look beyond the immediate subject matter of internationalisation if we are to understand it. It is on this premise that I begin by presenting an overview of the current state of university reform in Japan.

The Japanese higher education system is massive and extremely diverse: it is difficult to generalise, and impossible to do full justice to every aspect of university activity or the full array of theories that have been developed to explain it. In order to make sense of the processes of university reform today, in this chapter I propose that the development of Japan’s modern higher education system has been a process of adaptation: to models introduced – sometimes intentionally, sometimes involuntarily – from overseas, to new political priorities, and to changing macro-social conditions. Today, however, universities are engaging with challenges more complex and broad-ranging than ever before, and simple adaptation is no longer feasible. I suggest that confronted with the impossibility of resolving all the problems entailed in the current ‘crisis’ of hyper-competition, neo-liberalist structural reform and re-evaluation of educational values, universities are seeking at least to achieve alignment of these different themes and priorities into a coherent operational paradigm. As I will show subsequently, kokusaika is one of the key tools used by universities to effect this alignment.

Development of the Japanese 'university'

The subject of this book is the type of institution known in Japanese as daigaku. This term most often refers to two of the four basic categories of higher education (HE) institutions in Japan. The first is the type popularly referred to simply as daigaku, or, when distinction from the second category is necessary, as yonen-sei daigaku – institutions offering four-year undergraduate programmes and sometimes, but not necessarily, postgraduate programmes as well. There were 780 of these in Japan in 2011, with 2,893,489 students enrolled in total, 89 per cent of whom were undergraduates (MEXT 2011b). This is both the largest category of HE institutions in Japan and arguably the pinnacle of the education system, the place where the majority of Japan’s elite are educated and the bulk of scholarly knowledge in the country is produced. A subsidiary category, not discussed directly in this book, is tandai, a contraction of the phrase tanki daigaku – junior colleges awarding two-year Associate degrees. Like yonen-sei daigaku, tandai offer academic as opposed to specialist vocational courses and they employ teaching staff with advanced academic credentials. Tandai, however, have quite a different gender and disciplinary profile: almost 9 in 10 students are female (as against 42 per cent in yonen-sei daigaku), and more than half the degree programmes are in education or domestic science (MEXT 2011b).

The other standard categories of HE institution are kōtō senmon gakkō (kōsen for short) – higher technical colleges providing specialist qualifications in science and technology-related areas predominantly; and senmon gakkō – institutions running specialised post-secondary courses as part of a larger senshū gakkō or ‘vocational school’ system which provides an alternative to the regular upper secondary school system. Both of these categories intersect with daigaku to a certain degree: many daigaku students are enrolled concurrently at senmon gakko- to earn specialist vocational qualifications, while close to half of all ko-sen graduates go on to enrol in daigaku (MEXT 2011b).

Although the term daigaku is rendered in English most commonly as ‘university’, it is important to understand that the Japanese institution of daigaku does not correspond directly to Western notions of university. Some of those writing in English on the Japanese HE system have preferred to use the indigenous term daigaku in recognition of this fact (see, for example, Kinmonth 2005; McVeigh 2002; Schoppa 1993). In this book, however, I follow the more widespread convention, rendering daigaku as ‘university’ except when explicitly problematising the term itself – as I do in the paragraphs immediately below. My general preference for ‘university’ over daigaku reflects aesthetic considerations rather than expressing any conclusion regarding the nature of the institution in question.

Scholar of comparative higher education Philip Altbach has observed that HE systems in Asian nations share two fundamental features: ‘the foreign origin of the basic academic model and the indigenization of the universities as part of the development process’ (Altbach 1989: 9). This observation is readily applied to the Japanese context, where the development of the modern institution of daigaku is usually described by reference to the two major phases of social and political transformation – the period following the Meiji Restoration which ended Japan’s feudal era in 1867–68; and the Allied occupation following World War II. The establishment of state-run universities and other structures for both governance and educational practice in the latter half of the nineteenth century is often viewed as a classic case of ‘policy borrowing’ (Shibata 2004). Fuelled by the imperative of catching up with the West, the leaders of Meiji Japan sought non-indigenous models for their new social and economic institutions. These models were gathered most famously by the ‘Iwakura Embassy’ to Europe and the United States in the 1870s, which, ancillary to its diplomatic purposes, was charged with the task of collecting ideas to inform the building of a modern Japanese nation (Beasley 1995; Kume 2002). Following the standard pattern, Meiji leaders examined concepts and practices from various Western nations, before finally choosing the German model as the major point of reference for their new national university system. This system incorporated both Humboldtian ideas regarding academic freedom and the use of research as the foundation for teaching, as well as an emphasis on state control in preference to the private-sector centred American model.

The Teikoku Daigaku Rei (Imperial University Ordinance) of 1886 was the first formal application of these new concepts of university. It established a new teikoku daigaku (imperial university), funded and run by the national government. This is the institution now known as the University of Tokyo, which had actually been founded upon the merger of two specialist schools some ten years before the Ordinance was enacted. This was the first time the title of daigaku had been used to describe a modern educational institution in Japan. Reflecting the national priorities of modernisation and industrialisation along Western lines, the first Article of the Teikoku Daigaku Rei stated the purpose of teikoku daigaku in instrumental terms as ‘to provide instruction in the arts and sciences and to inquire into the mysteries of learning in accordance with the needs of the state’ (Nagai 1971: 21). Other teikoku daigaku were established in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (Bartholomew 1989: 89–124). This, however, was not Japan’s only higher education ‘system’ at that time. A variety of private institutions existed in parallel to the teikoku daigaku, most notably the private academies or shijuku which catered to the increasing demand for modern, particularly Western, knowledge. Some were founded by prominent liberal thinkers of the time. Two of the most well known are Fukuzawa Yukichi, an influential proponent of Westernisation and founder of Keio Gijuku - the academy out of which Keio University was born – and Joseph Hardy Neesima, the Christian founder of Doshisha University.

The relationship between these private institutions and the state remained uncertain until the early 1900s. Many of them registered as higher vocational schools (senmon gakkō) under the Senmon Gakkō Rei of 1903, and some were even permitted to call themselves daigaku, but they could not gain full university status until after the promulgation of the Daigaku Rei (University Ordinance) in 1918. Even after this time, private institutions received no government funding and were generally left to pursue their own agendas, which ranged from liberal to highly conservative. Such institutions were necessarily subject to market forces, and often found themselves in financial difficulty. At this stage universities were still generally beyond the reach of the general public, participation rates being well below 10 per cent (Kaneko 2004: 130).

Thus, although the institution of daigaku was established in the Meiji era as an adaptation of the Western concept of ‘university’, it was by no means a complete replica of the German or any other Western system. There were at least two major strands to Japan’s system: the teikoku daigaku – ‘imperial universities’ – an adaptation of certain European concepts of university to the needs of Meiji Japan as perceived by its leaders; and the private institutions, representing a wide range of ideas and objectives, including concepts of higher education pre-dating Meiji, and gradually drawn into the new teikoku daigaku-centred university system.

If the establishment of formal structures for HE in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries can be seen as the first stage in the development of the modern university in Japan, the second stage began after World War II and extended through the years of high economic growth up to the 1970s. As part of a broader renovation of social institutions following Japan’s surrender in 1945, the United States-led occupation forces brought about the adoption of a new Fundamental Law on Education and School Education Law in 1946. Informed by the overriding mission to instil democratic and egalitarian ideals into Japanese society, the US Education Mission sought to improve access to higher education, raise standards and encourage greater diversity in scholarship and freedom of academic discourse (United States Education Mission to Japan 1977). The pre-war multi-track system – which consisted of institutions such as kōtō gakkō (‘high schools’) and shihan gakkō (‘normal schools’–for training teachers) in addition to the daigaku and senmon gakkō described above – was replaced by a simplified system that divided institutions broadly into universities (daigaku) and junior colleges (tanki daigaku), offering four-year Bachelor and two-year Associate degrees respectively. It was also at this time that universities adopted degree structures and educational vocabulary in many ways similar to the US system (Haiducek 1991; Tsuchimochi 1993). By the early 1950s, the pre-war daigaku sector of 49 institutions had grown to 201 (Okada 2005: 38).

This era is often described, borrowing Martin Trow’s (1974) terms, as a stage of development from an ‘elite’ to a ‘mass’ HE system. Statistics certainly show striking increases in HE enrolment rates, supported principally by growth in the private sector. In 1955 the percentage of high school graduates going on to university study was around 10 per cent, and 60 per cent of university students were enrolled in private institutions. By 1980 these percentages had risen to 37 per cent and 75 per cent respectively (MEXT 2008a). The national government, seeing the development of human resources as vital to Japan’s continued economic progress, worked to establish universal access to primary and secondary education while concentrating limited funds for HE in a public sector charged with training elite personnel and developing research capacities for industrial development (Amano 1986; Okada 2005). National universities (kokuritsu daigaku), the extension of imperial universities of pre-war times, were also charged with the missions of maintaining academic standards and ensuring equity of access across different disciplines and geographical regions (Kaneko 1997).

As Japan emerged as an economic superpower and became more aware of its place in the global community, the faults of its HE system became more apparent. ‘Mass’ higher education had been realised, but in a way that tended to overlook educational needs and failed to respond to the changing nature of Japan’s society. It was during the term of Prime Minister Nakasone Yasuhiro in the 1980s that the long process of overhauling Japan’s higher education system was launched formally. Nakasone convened a special advisory council on education (rinji kyōiku shingikai – commonly abbreviated to rinkyōshin), which quickly identified several key problems with university education: a lack of flexibility to respond to individual student needs, inability to offer a diversity of educational pathways, and an overly domestic focus. The rinkyōshin’s findings clearly reflected the prevailing ‘new right’ ideology at the time, and accorded with many earlier assessments of Japanese HE made by both academic and lay critics within Japan, and international observers (Hood 2001). Eventually the rinkyōshin recommended the establishment of a University Council (daigaku shingikai) to produce policies that would give shape to the reform priorities it had identified. The University Council proceeded to issue a series of policy papers through the 1990s which set the agenda for the new-look university of today.

The first and perhaps the most significant of the reforms was the relaxation of standards for university establishment and curricular restructuring (daigaku setchi kijun) in 1991. The old system of undergraduate degree structures based on a strict distinction between general education (ippan/ kyōyō kyōiku) and specialist education (senmon kyōiku) was abolished, and universities were given the freedom to develop their own four-year undergraduate degree programmes. The most visible impact of the 1991 reform was major expansion in the range of undergraduate programmes available, as private universities in particular sought to differentiate their offerings in order to take advantage of and further fuel the burgeoning demand for HE among Japan’s increasingly wealthy population.

Much of this new diversity was, however, driven by fairly cosmetic changes rather than fundamental reform to curricular content. The removal of restrictions of faculty/department and degree names as part of the 1991 reform package prompted a plethora of new and sometimes perplexing names for undergraduate major...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on style
• Introduction: internationalisation from the inside out
• 1 Japanese higher education reform: adaptation and alignment
• 2 Making sense of university internationalisation
• 3 Inside the Academy
• 4 Managing the global campus
• 5 Organising internationalisation
• 6 Administrators and administrated
• 7 Mobilising conflict
• Conclusion: winners, losers and internationalisation reconsidered
• Bibliography
• Index