Shakaijin, shadow education, & the entrepreneurial self: fabricating personhood in neoliberal Japan

Abstract

Under the neoliberal vision for free-market capitalism, discourses validating meritocratic competition reproduce homo œconomicus, narrowly self-interested human capital seeking to maximise its economic utility. Against this background, juku, Japan’s network of for-profit, deregulated shadow education institutions, eases educational transitions for enterprising citizens seeking advantage within the nation’s highly competitive exam and graduate recruitment systems. However, while ‘rational’ investments in juku aid neoliberal biographical projects (youth→adolescence→adulthood), they do so through panoptic systems of tension and accommodation, with pivots to individualistic self-interest producing docile entrepreneurs of the self. More damagingly, ‘agentive’ and ‘rational’ decisions to engage with juku anchor to transmissible cultural patrimony, creating opportunities to blame those who, through no fault of their own, lack the financial means to self-commodify within Japan’s enterprise society. The association between economic output and entrepreneurial selfhood shapes notions of ‘worth’ in increasingly neoliberal terms. Thus, only by relating juku investment to its social origin may we appreciate the corrosive impact of economic liberalisation on Japan’s learning ecology.

Keywords:

• Neoliberal personhood
• social reproduction
• Foucault
• Bourdieu
• Japan
• shadow education

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Supplemental data

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/09555803.2024.2368863.

Notes

1 However, given the noted decline in birth per capita and long-term recession brought on by the collapse of Japan’s bubble economy, this is changing.

2 Original emphasis.

3 Emphasis added.

4 Emphasis added.

5 Original emphasis.

6 Emphasis added.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Michael D. Smith

Michael D. Smith is an associate professor at Kobe University, Graduate School of Intercultural Studies, Japan. A doctoral candidate at the University of Bath, he holds a postgraduate teaching license specialising in adult education, an MA in Applied Linguistics, and is an alumnus of University College London Institute of Education, where he gained an MA with distinction in Technology and Education. Michael’s research interests include the sociology of education, language policy, neoliberal governmentality, and the social and pedagogical implications of educational technologies. Email: [email protected]