A comparativist’s predicaments of writing about ‘other’ education: a self-reflective, critical review of studies of Japanese education

Abstract

This self-reflexive essay teases out the predicaments that I have encountered through my past publishing experience, while situating them in a critical review of the existing English-language studies of Japanese education. Drawing on postcolonial theoretical insights and recent critical sociology of academic knowledge production, I use my personal experience as a starting point to identify the particular discursive structure of comparative education that constrains the articulation of ‘other’ education in the field. My critical review of comparative studies of Japanese education demonstrates that many of them, including my own, unreflexively accept the subject positions offered by this discursive condition and thus further constrain space for those who write in English about ‘other’ education and Japanese education in particular. In conclusion, I discuss recent studies of Japanese education that partially address the dilemmas raised in this paper and the wider implications of this study for the field of comparative education.

Notes

Following Befu (2001b), I use the term ‘centres’ in the plural form to recognise the multiplicity in centre–periphery relationships. While Japan can be one of the centres with its own peripheries in cultural and economic spheres (Befu 2001b), the nation’s scholarly communities continue to be marginalised in the academic world system in social science dominated primarily by the United States and Great Britain (Alatas 2003; Kuwayama 2004; Connell 2007).

See also many chapters written by leading Japanese education scholars in Shields’ (1993) edited volume on Japanese schooling.

For instance, see how Cowen (1996, 164) uses the English-language translation of Horio’s (1988) work among others to advance his ‘theoretical’ argument.

This quote is inspired by Dale and Robertson’s (1997, 209) assertion that ‘it is not possible to make sense of New Zealand education policy in terms of New Zealand alone’.

‘Japanism’ is a term that Brian Moeran created after Said’s Orientalism (see Nozaki 2009, 485).

This issue of ‘essentialism through comparison’ is not specific to the comparative studies of Japanese education. As many leading comparativists claim, ‘only by seeing the uniqueness in the way others carry on education can one genuinely appreciate the distinctiveness of education at home’ (Mallinson in Epstein 1988, 9, my emphasis added; see also Rohlen and LeTendre 1998, 3; Crossley 2001, 45; Bray 2003a, 7). None of these scholars discuss the problematic inclination of cultural relativism towards cultural essentialism (see McConaghy 2000).

More recent studies (e.g. Tsuneyoshi 2001; Sato 2004; Cave 2007) attempt to diversify the rather monolithic representation of the earlier ‘foundational studies’ with their explicit focus on gender (Cave), class (Sato), and ethnicity (Tsuneyoshi) in their discussion of Japanese schooling. However, as I have discussed elsewhere (Takayama 2011), their treatment of domestic diversities is often localised in particular sections of their books, while leaving intact the conventional ‘contrasting’ representation of ‘Japanese’ and ‘Western’ pedagogic practices and theories in the remainder of the books.

My review of the Japanese critical education scholarship in International Handbook addresses this concern (see Takayama 2009a, 364).

The same issue of ‘not naming the centres’ is seen in the following fact: while the comparative and international education societies around the world use a national or geographical identifier (e.g., the Japan Comparative Education Society), the US-based CIES is the only exception to this rule, calling itself the ‘CIES’. Here, I depart from Manzon and Bray’s (2006, 71) apolitical explanation on this phenomenon.

See books edited by Anderson-Levitt (2003), Steiner-Khamsi (2004), Baker and Wiseman (2005), and Popkewitz (2005) for the same problematic division of intellectual labours.

See Ohnuki (2005) for a critical discussion of the notion of ‘hybridity’.

This expression is inspired by Restrepo and Escobar’s (2005) article titled ‘Other anthropologies and anthropology otherwise’.