Other Japanese educations and Japanese education otherwise

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Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Brian Lagotte for his editing, Jeremy Rappleye for our ongoing conversation about the state of comparative scholarship on Japanese education, and Dennis Kwek for his trust in my scholarship.

Notes

 1. In fact, the Japanese-government-affiliated Japan Foundation (an organization that plays a similar role to the British Council, Maison Francaise, and the Goethe Institute) provided generous funding for some of the “foundational studies” and distributed them to many higher education institutions in Western, English-speaking nations (e.g., Finkelstein, Imamura, & Tobin, 1991; Lewis, 1995; Shields, 1993).

 2. Jeremy Rappleye helped me develop the points raised in this paragraph (personal communication, December 19, 2009).

 3. “Newcomers” refers to recent migrant workers many of whom are Japanese descents born and raised in South America. They are contrasted with “oldcomers” which includes long-time residents of Chinese and Korean descents (Tsuneyoshi, p. 121).

 4. In describing the considerable impact of Benedict's work on the post-war social science discourse on Japan, Robert Smith maintains that “there is a sense in which all of us have been writing footnotes to [The Chrysanthemum and the Sword] ever since it appeared in 1946” (in Ryang, 2002, p. 88).

 5. Anthropologists specializing in Japanese culture and society widely espoused this approach as challenging the Western-centric and racist discussion of Japanese society still prevalent in popular media and academic discourse at the time (Lebra, 1976, p. xiv).

 6. See for instance how Cave (p. 31) and Tsuneyoshi (p. 6) discuss Benedict's classic work and how Cave (pp. 32–33) and Sato (p. 23) draw on Doi and Nakane's studies.

 7. Though his discussion challenges the binary framing between things Japanese and Western, it still over-privileges culture and remains unreflexive about the West-Japan binary discourse that shapes some of the discourses of Japanese self that Cave identifies.

 8. Among the three researchers, Tsuneyoshi is the only one who shows her awareness of the partiality of the “truth” about Japanese education that she constructs (p. 10) which is also hinted in her book's subtitle, Comparisons with the United States. However, her acknowledgement quickly disappears as she gets back to the “business as usual” in the remainder of the book.

 9. The equivalent figures for earlier “foundational studies” on Japanese schooling by White (1987) and Lewis (1995) are 1.5% (1 out of 66) and 4.7% (8 out of 169). These earlier studies hardly cite any Japanese scholarly writings.

10. While Cave draws on many more Japanese scholars than Sato, both hardly uses Japanese scholars' writings in their conceptual discussions. For instance, see Cave's discussions of socio-cultural pedagogy in Chapter 1 and gender in schools in Chapter 5.

11. Another factor to this lack of communication is the dismissive attitude among Japanese scholars that says “we Japanese understand our education the best” (Manabu Sato & Kariya Takehiko, personal communication, June 17, 2010). Kuwayama (2004) identifies a similar obstruction to constructive communication in anthropology where, he explains, Japanese anthropologists tend to assume “only they can fully understand Japan” (p. 22).