Risk management by a neoliberal state: construction of new knowledge through lifelong learning in Japan

Abstract

This article examines the current developments in Japan's lifelong learning policy and practices. I argue that promoting lifelong learning is an action that manages the risks of governance for the neoliberal state. Implementing a new lifelong learning policy involves the employment of a political technique toward integrating the currently divided and polarized Japanese population – popularly called kakusa – into the newly imagined collective, namely, atarashii kōkyō or the New Public Commons. Examining the macro policy discourse on Japan's educational policy, this article demonstrates Japan's inflections of neoliberal governmentality with the new distribution of responsibility between the state and the individuals through the construction of new knowledge supporting the New Public Commons. In fact, new knowledge is the epicenter of the national educational policy discourse aiming at generating social solidarity in local communities.

Keywords:

• lifelong learning
• risk
• kakusa (socioeconomic divide)
• neoliberalism
• local communities
• Japan

Acknowledgements

I appreciate Jeff Kingston, Hideko Mitsui, Roger Goodman, Takehiko Kariya and two anonymous reviewers of Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, for their insightful suggestions for revisions. This research was assisted by a grant from the Abe Fellowship Program administered by the Social Science Council and the American Council of Learned Societies in cooperation with and with funds provided by the Japan Foundation Center for Global Partnership.

Notes

Except where indicated, all quotations are taken from my field notes and all translations are my own:

1. One of the most comprehensive risk scholarships on Japan and East Asia has recently been published. See Chan, Takahashi, and Wang (2010).

2. The survey is conducted every three years, and the figures for initial income were 0.5263 in 2005 and 0.4983 in 2002.

3. A recent work by Ishida and Slater (2009) shows that this dividedness predates the neoliberal reform in Japan. My point here, however, is that such dividedness has intensified under Koizumi politics.

4. Modeled on the UK's system of a board of governors (as a governance structure for the school), a community school was introduced in 2004 as a new educational institution, which enhanced the involvement of parents as well as local communities in school management.