名古屋高等教育研究 第 23 号 （2023）

Special Essay

Japanese Higher Education as Myth Revisited:
Can We Learn Nothingfrom Japanese Universities?
Jeremy RAPPLEYE*
KOMATSU Hikaru**
Received: 23 November 2022 / Accepted: 14 December 2022

＜Abstract＞
The view of Japanese higher education remains largely negative.
Based on highly-cited works such as McVeigh’s Japanese Higher

Education as Myth (2002), the general consensus remains is that there
is little to learn from Japanese universities. Our piece attempts tothink differently; to challenge this taken-for-granted assumption of
deficit. To do so, we argue that marked changes in the landscape ofglobal higher education over the past two decades prompts us toreevaluate Japanese higher education. These changes include theaccelerated marketization and neo-liberalism managerialism
prominent in Anglo-American universities, commodification ofinternational student flows, the emergence of ‘competition’ in research,the dominance of for-profit publishing, and the politics of knowledge
production.

These changes push us to pause, rethink and reevaluate,

shifting away from a view of Japanese higher education as lagging
behind, toward recognition of perhaps different priorities at play there.
The larger contribution we seek to make in this piece is to find ways
to create a more equal dialogue, replacing the current one in which ‒due to international rankings and other recent developments in global*Associate Professor, Graduate School of Education, Kyoto University
Visiting Associate Professor, Center for the Studies of Higher Education,
Nagoya University**Associate Professor, College of Science, National Taiwan University279

higher education ‒ Anglo-American universities are viewed as thesole global standard, a stance which leaves little space for nuance,alternatives, or learning from others.

1．Introduction
Viewed from abroad, the image of Japanese universities remains largely
negative. One leading scholar of higher education ‒ someone otherwise
generally favorable to an “East Asian” model, its context, and its strengths‒ recently expressed explicit concern for the “current stagnation” ofJapanese universities (Marginson 2011: 609). Globally minded, Englishlanguage news outlets covering Japan frequently carry negative headlines
such as “Universities’ Failing Grades” (Japan Times 2016), “Failing
Students: Japanese universities facing reckoning or reform” (Japan Times
2012), “Japan bets on $ 90bn fund as universities lose ground to the West”(Nikkei Asia 2021), and “Japan falls out of the top 10 nations with most-citedscientific papers” (Asahi 2022). From this, it appears that Japanese
universities are in decline, and the past three decades of earnest attempts
to reform ‒ e.g. incorporation (hojinka), improvements in teaching andlearning, accelerating internationalization, strengthening research capacity,and raising a new generation of leading researchers ‒ has failed. Nor arethese English-language works out of sync with a similarly critical view
within Japanese domestic research circles.

The works of leading scholars

such as Ikuo Amano from the 1980s-1990s also subscribed to the view that
the Japanese university was beset by “crisis” (Amano and Poole 2005).
The current piece dares, in the face of such an overwhelming collective
consensus, to think differently about Japanese higher education. Whatmight be some of its strengths? What practices and priorities might forma counterpoint to currently dominant Anglo-American models? What might
we, not just Anglo-American researchers, but those in other parts of theworld too, learn from Japan? Quite honestly, we are not sure that such adefense can be made, particularly in the current climate of the policy
discourse in Japan of an imminent massive 25-year reform (for details, see

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Japanese Higher Education as Myth Revisited
the Nikkei Asia piece above). But we believe it worth trying, as one of ourtasks as scholars is, as we understand it, to challenge our taken-for-granted
images of our contemporary world.
As an entry point, we want to begin by reexamining Brian McVeigh’s(2002) influential Japanese Higher Education as Myth. The work is, by far,the most widely read and cited work on Japanese higher education in the
English-speaking world. Published 20 years ago this year, it argued thatJapanese universities, whilst successful in occupational selection, labormarket regulation, and socialization functions, failed miserably in their corerole of “education”. Japanese higher education was not substantial (i.e. real),
but instead “simulated” education: “a grand spectacle of smoke and mirrors
afforded a sense of reality” (McVeigh 2002: 237) among those seduced by
the “myth”. Embellished with strong rhetorical flushes, McVeigh’s point
was serious: Japanese society was set to pay a heavy price in raising its
students in “simulated” education. By leading off our piece with McVeigh’s
late 1990s critique, we want to zero in on several key questions: What are
the specific foci of these sorts of negative accounts? What sets ofassumptions or theories undergird them? Which might have changed? Does
empirical data exist that either corroborates or challenges McVeigh’s
claims (and those like it) of the “smoke and mirrors” nature of Japanesehigher education?
Having critically examined the previous ‘negative consensus’ on Japanesehigher education, we then turn to recontextualize Japanese higher
education within a changed landscape of higher education globally, focusing
on (i) accelerated marketization and neo-liberalism managerialism of AngloAmerican universities over the past two decades, (ii) commodification ofinternational student flows (i.e. fee-paying foreign students), (iii) emergenceof a notion of competition in research (e.g. UK’s REF; university rankings),(iv) debates over for-profit publishing and dissemination of research
conducted under public grants, and (v) politics of knowledge production.
Our argument is both that McVeigh’s view of Japanese higher education
was crafted out of a comparison with Anglo-American universities before
the neo-liberal turn. But the subsequent changes in higher educationworldwide, but especially in Anglo-American countries, push us to revise281

our overall image of Japanese universities: away from a view of Japan as
lagging behind; toward recognition of a different approach. Is the purported“stagnation” of Japan a failure to reform, or instead perhaps the persistenceof a different set of priorities?
Against this new backdrop of (partial) endorsement, we then turn in thethird part, to lay out a list of potential areas in which Japanese higher
education has something to ‘teach’, including: (i) lower tuition rates, (ii) ahigh degree of freedom in research, (iii) lack of full-scale marketization andcommodification of foreign students, (iv) a locally-run, open accesspublishing system, (v) investment and attention to local knowledge andlanguage, (vi) copious amounts of research funding, (vii) increasing focus on
and resources directed toward younger faculty. In the fourth concluding
section, we step back, think globally, and underscore why this morebalanced approach to viewing Japanese higher education may be important.
The point, again, is not to deny some negative aspects of Japanese
universities. But so much has been written on this already. Instead it is topoint out some potentially positive aspects, in the interest of building up a
new, more balanced perspective. This allows us to make a modest
contribution to building the sort of creative, active, and globally-engaged
response currently being demanded of Japanese university researchers
today, those who we imagine ‒ given the publishing venue ‒ will be theprimary readers of the current piece. That is, a sole focus on the negative
aspects of Japanese higher education hinders global engagement, as
domestic images come to reinforce the ‘negative consensus’ dominant
globally. We return to this point in conclusion.

2 ． Starting Point: Brian McVeigh’s (2002) Japanese Higher

Education as MythFor a non-Japanese audience, McVeigh’s (2002) provocative critique ofJapanese higher education has been decisive in setting the ‘negative
consensus’ around Japanese universities. The crux of McVeigh’s argument
was that Japanese universities were aimed at political and economic goals,
rather than educational ones:

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Japanese Higher Education as Myth Revisited
Japanese education is still very much governed by a state-managed
technocratic view of education that works in tandem with powerfulbusiness interests and is driven by a fair measure of socioeconomic
Darwinism. Culturally sanctioned notions, such as “shyness” anddeference to those in power, legitimize the interests of those who
administer the educational system. Together, state machinery, economic
interests, and social norms work to produce obedient and efficient
workers. In order to weed out those who lack the powers of memory andthe psychological stamina required to succeed in the Japanese work
world, the educational system has been constructed along the lines ofan elaborate testing mechanism whose function is to evaluate and place
individuals at the appropriate level (McVeigh 2002: 116)
Resolutely dismissing “misty cultural theorizing” (ibid. 115), McVeigh
instead echoes, and then extends to the level of higher education, a realist(power) argument of the state of Japanese education. In doing so, it follows
in a line of critique first laid out by prominent sociologist Ronald Dore.
Dore’s (1976) famous remark about Japanese education was, of course, that:“The system works well enough ‒ provided one thing of it as an enormously
elaborated, very expensive intelligence testing system with someeducational spin-off, rather than the other way around. One suspects thatJapan’s more conservative leaders, though they are prepared to shake theirheads over the system with those who deplore it, are secretly well satisfied”(48-9). Following Dore, McVeigh praises ‒ in a tongue-in-cheek sort of way‒ Japanese universities for their role in occupational selection, labor market
regulation, and socialization functions (producing ‘shyness’ and ‘deference’to power).
McVeigh’s main critique is reserved for what he views as the complete
lack of “education” function of Japanese universities. So lacking in the‘learning’, McVeigh argued, that Japanese higher education was simply a“myth” ‒ it did not really exist. It is highly likely that McVeigh drew
inspiration for his thesis from reflections made by American scholars in
the 1980s trying to get their heads around the Japanese educational‘challenge’. For example, a piece in the New York Times in June 1983

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provocatively entitled Japan’s Noneducation argued that:
Although Japanese students demonstrate superiority in certain
elementary and secondary school tests, their advantage slips drasticallyat the university level. It’s something of a secret in the West, but awide-open truth here that Japanese universities are a disgrace. As
research institutions or instructional forums, as training centers in theliberal arts, science, education, or even in engineering, Japanese
universities are a travesty ‒ indeed, an embarrassing joke (Zeungner
1983)
Throughout his book, McVeigh uses “daigaku” in romanji to differentiate
the way this poor Japanese copy differs from Western universities/colleges.
Elsewhere he opts for the word “simulation”, a situation where rhetoricand reality do not match; where people or institutions say one thing andyet do something completely different. He gives repeated examples of thisgap, often in table form, as reproduced here (Table 1).
Table 1 Examples of Disconnections Between Rhetoric and Reality at Daigaku
Rhetoric
Reality・Re-examination for those who fail exam ・ Must pass students who sit for reexamination
・Do not fail students
・Maintain high standards
・Daigaku offers quality education
・Daigaku acts as employment agency
・Small classes
・Large classes
・Professors express interest in teaching ・Professors show up late for class, missclasses, rarely prepare, use old notes
・Daigaku for students
・Daigaku for administrators/professors
・Daigaku for teaching and learning
・ Daigaku for making profits (private
schools)・Treat students as adults
・Treat students as immature
・Treat students as learners
・Treat students as obtuse
・Students attend daigaku
・Some students simultaneously attend
vocational school and daigaku
・“Free to study what I want”
・ Rigid rules and curriculum designedwith administrators’ convenience in mind
Resource: McVeigh (2002: 146)

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Japanese Higher Education as Myth Revisited
As shown here, McVeigh’s focus was largely on teaching and learning,and his critique is equally directed at students, professors, and university
administrators alike. All these parties conspire to make Japanese
universities low quality.

It is worth noting that McVeigh’s reflections

derived largely, although not exclusively, from his work in a private
university, where research functions would have been less emphasized.
Based on this diagnosis, McVeigh suggests the consequences for Japan’s
future. To do so in a systematic way, McVeigh references Trow’s (1986)
article entitled The State of Higher Education in the United States, a piecethat attempted to outline the benefits a given society stands to gain froma substantive (real) higher education systems. McVeigh first enumerates
Trow’s potential benefits, and then explains where contemporary Japanesesociety falls short (Trow in quotes, our paraphrasing of McVeigh
thereafter):1.

“A positive effect on social attitudes,” including appreciation of othercultures ‒ In the case of contemporary Japan, however, McVeigh assertsthat there persists “a passive, sometimes even ‘polite discrimination’against outsiders…such sentiments are often legitimatized by culturally
deterministic viewpoints that are deeply embedded in Japanese society.
What would be called racism, ethnocentrism, bigotry, or ignorance
elsewhere, are often referred to as “custom”, “tradition”, “culture” and“misunderstanding” in Japan (241).

2.

“A more sophisticated perspective of time” ‒ McVeigh follows Trow
here, a point the latter apparently derived from Modernization Theory.
Here McVeigh has trouble turning the critique to Japan, admitting thatthe “Japanese apparently have no problem with this point.” But
McVeigh hastens to add that Japan’s success with modern time does
“not necessarily translate into other forms of knowledge that are justas valuable to the health of the society and that find their mostconvenient expression at the higher education level.” We confess that
we find McVeigh’s point muddled here.

3.

Citizens “learn how to learn” ‒ McVeigh suggests that Japan’s daigaku
fails “to build upon the knowledge forms required for advanced285

thinking and learning.” Here the implication is that in Japan there isno continuation of learning made in high school, and the lack of
substantive higher education hinders “lifelong learning” across Japan.
McVeigh attempts to further extend this point to its “political
implications”: “the student is not trained to be a motivated, inquisitive
learner, a good speaker, one attuned to the significance of controversial
issues and current events.” (243)4.

Higher education has two key political functions, first as a “radical
critic of the established political order” and “undermine thebelief[s]..that merely serve the ‘cultural apparatus’ of the ruling elites
to ensure the passage of power and privilege across generations” ‒Here on the first point, McVeigh’s inclination to view Japanese higher
education as detrimental to politics is fully elaborated here: the “lackof solid higher educational training has not adequately politicized the
populace” (243). On the second point, McVeigh claims that the mass ofJapanese youth are simply lethargic, and have been convinced by thesystem to follow the dictates of the ‘ruling classes’.

5.

Higher education aids “secondary education through teacher training
and by conducting educational research” ‒ McVeigh elaborates thatcolleges are where students “how to conduct basic research; how toutilize the resources of a library; how to write and articulate one’s
thoughts coherently and effectively; how to listen, appreciate, andintellectually digest what others say; how to formulate convincing
arguments; and how to debate without debasing” (245). Yet, the problem,
according to McVeigh, is that “many Japanese students, even at thebest daigaku, have not had such skills usefully honed.” (245).
To sum up then, McVeigh argues that the extremely poor quality ofJapanese universities will bring a range of consequences for Japanesesociety: an insular mentality, low-levels of lifelong learning, citizens who failto question the political order, and students who cannot conduct even themost rudimentary thinking/research tasks.
McVeigh’s critique has by now been widely accepted, as judged by levelof citations (admittedly citations is a rough index, but his work is among286

Japanese Higher Education as Myth Revisitedthe most cited work on Japanese education over the past two decades), andby the sheer dearth of critical argument against his central claims.

This‘negative consensus’ appears widespread and deeply embedded now,
uncritically accepted by university researchers around the world. But isJapanese higher education really so bad? Is there really nothing to learn
from Japanese universities?

3．“Japanese Education Isn’t That Bad”: Can the Approach Be
Extended to Japanese Higher Education?
Before pursuing these questions, it is important to pause briefly to
explain our interest in this topic and the perspective we bring. For roughly
the past decade, we have been engaged in research that attempts tounderstand Japanese education, largely policy and practice at thecompulsory level. This work culminated in a popular book we co-authoredentitled Japanese Education Isn’t That Bad: Reimagining ThroughInternational Data (Komatsu and Rappleye 2021). Our attempt in that book
was to challenge the widespread popular belief that Japanese compulsory
education was beset by a range of problems, including: lack of creativity,
declining academic achievement, old-fashioned style of lessons, boring
schools, bullying and so on. Through the use of a range of new large-scaleinternational comparative datasets (e.g. PISA), international comparative
surveys (e.g. National Institute for Youth Education, 国立青少年教育振興
機 構 ), and rigorous academic comparative studies (e.g. Stevenson andStigler’s The Teaching Gap (1995)), we critically engaged with the ‘negative
consensus’ that dominates domestic discussions of Japanese compulsory
education. Although the use of international comparison in the process ofreflecting on Japanese education is arguably a method as old as Japanesemodern education itself, our approach perhaps brought an element ofnovelty in that it used comparison not to further a discourse of deficit, butinstead to challenge the deficit discourse.
However, that book and other papers included no mention of higher
education. Our personal engagement with higher education had been
limited to hands-on policy work in Cambodia (Rappleye and Un 2018) and287

Rappleye’s reflections on his position as a foreign scholar in the Japanesesystem (e.g. Rappleye and Vickers 2015). Moreover, cross-country
comparisons complexify as one moves ‘higher’ up an education system. In
truth, when we wrote the 2021 book, we had not contemplated much how
far ‘up’ our argument applied. The English-language academic literature on
Japanese compulsory education had, in contrast to McVeigh’s scathingassessment, been more favorable to the Japanese approach. So, in a sense,
we started with more confidence that there was sufficient evidence tosupport our claims that ‘Japanese education isn’t that bad’. In this context,
the invitation extended by Nagoya University’s Center for the Studies ofHigher Education to explore how far this research paradigm might add a
new dimension to research Japanese Higher Education was both welcome
and daunting at the same time. It started with less of a conviction thatJapanese higher education was ‘not that bad’, more of an experiment inthinking differently. We would like to underscore here that it remains verymuch an experiment, for reasons we enumerate below.
Perhaps the biggest obstacle to extending our work on Japanesecompulsory education to higher education was a lack of comparative data.
Global higher education rankings, such as the Times Higher Education(THE) exercise, do collect comparative data across various categories:
Teaching (comprised of (i) reputation surveys, (ii) staff-to-student ratio, (iii)
doctorate to bachelor ratio, (iv) institutional income), Research (comprisedof (i) reputation survey, (ii) research income, and (iii) research productivity),
Citations, International Outlook (comprised of (i) proportion of international
students, (ii) proportion of international staff, and (iii) institutional
collaboration), and Industry Income. Based on this, some rudimentarycomparisons are possible (e.g. proportion of international staff). But, ofcourse, whether or not international staff ratios are a good proxy for quality
is open to considerable debate. Moreover, there currently exists nooutcomes-based comparison, a perspective that would help us understandif, say, international staff does in fact raise student outcomes. Composite
indices like THE fail to provide this sort of information. In short, there isno consensus that the currently dominant quantitative comparative
measurements and indices capture a shared notion of a ‘good’ university.

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Japanese Higher Education as Myth Revisited
Perhaps for that very reason, the OECD has been attempting to extend
a PISA-like comparative exercise to the level of higher education. The
Assessment of Learning Outcomes in Higher Education (AHELO) project
was piloted from 2011-2012, and attempted to develop comparative
indicators in the fields of Generic Skills, Civil Engineering (Science), andEconomics (Social Science). Japan participated in AHELO, alongside 8 otherOECD countries. Since the data was anonymized and restricted, it makes
secondary analyses difficult. However, Fukahori (2014) who works for the
National Institute of Education Research (NIER), a research divisionattached to Japan’s Ministry of Education, did have access and was able toconduct some comparative analyses. Interestingly, his data-driven findings
revealed

somethingunexpected,

with

its

obviousconclusionsforpolicymaking:
These results show that students in the Japanese universities
surveyed, as compared with students in the other two countries, indeedreceive lessons that are more centered on “lectures”, and thepercentage of those receiving “interactive seminar and personal
instruction” and “group activities” is relatively low. [Yet] In looking at
the test scores, the Japanese students who received a higher percentage
of “lectures” scored higher, while “interactive seminar and personal
instruction” and “group activities” scored lower. From these results, it
is not necessarily desirable to make the shift to lectures centered on
student participation (Fukahori 2014)
Here, based on OECD-AHELO data, Fukahori suggests that Japanesequality is not lacking, and the rush to shift pedagogy makes no sense, atleast from the perspective of achievement (outcomes). It is possible toimagine that AHELO, had it continued, would have generated a range ofcomparable data that could be used, as we had done at the compulsory
level, to examine the accuracy of the negative consensus that engulfs
Japanese higher education. However, AHELO quickly encountered heavy
critique ‒ rightly so, we feel ‒ from leading scholars like Altbach (2015)
who accessed the AHELO pilot as follows: “proceeding to a full-scale AHELO
project seems like an extraordinarily bad idea. There is far from a consensus

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or even a significant number of countries interested…The costs are quite
high ‒ in the millions of dollars.” Organizations like the American Council on
Higher Education (2015) echoed this criticism. So it seems unlikely that wewill ever see a “PISA for University” that would help us verify or challengethe ‘negative consensus’ through comparative data.
As such, currently the only way to use comparative international data toaccess Japanese higher education appears to be linking PISA and PIAAC
scores.

PISA tests students at the end of the compulsory cycle, while

PIAAC allows us to see outcomes in numeracy and literacy at, say, age
25-29 years old. We ran a preliminary analysis, as follows. First, we
calculated relative differences between PIAAC and PISA scores. Manyof those participated in PIAAC at the age of 25-29 also participated in
PISA 2000 and PISA 2003. Differences between PIAAC and PISA scores
would represent students’ skill improvement after the age of 15. Morespecifically, we standardized PIAAC and PISA scores for a given country
using standard deviations for PIAAC and PISA scores for the sample
countries. The difference between these standardized PIAAC and PISA
scores was defined as the post-PISA improvement for a given country.
The results are as follows. Among 28 OECD countries that had data forboth PIAAC and PISA, Japan ranked 10th in PISA literacy and 1st in
PIAAC literacy (Figure 1). Japan ranked 1st in PISA numeracy and 2nd in
PIAAC numeracy (Figure 2). We observed substantial ‘skill’ improvement
for Japan, but only for literacy. In fact, literacy improvement for Japan was
the greatest among all the countries (Figure 3). In numeracy, theimprovement for Japan was intermediate, compared to other countries.
Here we can also see that while universities in the US and UK rank highin various global rankings, the improvements in literacy and numeracy forthese countries were not particularly outstanding. In fact, in the case ofEngland, a regression in scores was among the largest of any OECD
country.

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Japanese Higher Education as Myth Revisited
PISA (points)
400

420

440

460

480

500

PIAAC (points)
520

540

560

220

240

260

280

300

320

Austraila
Austria
CanadaChile
Czech Republic
Denmark
England (UK)
Finland
Flanders (Belguim)
FranceGermany
GreeceHungary
IrelandIsrael
Italy
Japan
Korea
MexicoNetherlands
New Zealand
NorwayPolandSlovak Republic
Spain
SwedenTurkeyUnited States

Source: Data were derived from OECD’s PISA (https://www.oecd.org/pisa/data/)and Education GPS websites (https://gpseducation.oecd.org/Home).

Figure 1 Literacy Scores: PISA (the mean of PISA 2000 and 2003 scores) and PIAACPISA (points)
380 400 420 440 460 480 500 520 540 560

PIAAC (points)
200

220

240

260

280

300

Austraila
Austria
CanadaChile
Czech Republic
Denmark
England (UK)
Finland
Flanders (Belguim)
FranceGermany
GreeceHungary
IrelandIsrael
Italy
Japan
Korea
MexicoNetherlands
New Zealand
NorwayPolandSlovak Republic
Spain
SwedenTurkeyUnited States

Source: Data were derived from OECD’s PISA (https://www.oecd.org/pisa/data/)and Education GPS websites (https://gpseducation.oecd.org/Home).

Figure 2 Numeracy Scores: PISA (the mean of PISA 2000 and 2003 scores) and PIAAC

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Literacy
-1.5

-1

-0.5

0

0.5

Numeracy
1

1.5

-1.5

-1

-0.5

0

0.5

1

1.5

Austraila
Austria
CanadaChile
Czech Republic
Denmark
England (UK)
Finland
Flanders (Belguim)
FranceGermany
GreeceHungary
IrelandIsrael
Italy
Japan
Korea
MexicoNetherlands
New Zealand
NorwayPolandSlovak Republic
Spain
SwedenTurkeyUnited States

Resource: Authors※ Improvement = (PIAAC score ‒ mean PIAAC score)/SD ‒ (PISA score ‒ mean PISA score)/SD
An improvement was defined by the difference between the PIAAC score for a given country
and PISA score divided by the standard deviation of

Figure 3

Improvements in Literacy and Numeracy

Still, it is clear that PISA-PIAAC comparisons such as these are fraught
with problems: Are the gains (literacy) a result of high school, college, oron-the-job training? In the end, we cannot go very far with this, and havelittle confidence in the analysis.

Unfortunately, recent work that is moresophisticated (Loylaka et al. 2021), e.g. looking at skill gains in STEM
education in several major countries, does not include Japan. It remains tobe seen whether these studies will be extended to Japan and/or whether
Japanese scholars will produce similar comparative studies in coming years.
In the end, the point we wish to underscore here is that the data necessary
to replicate our approach of our 2021 book to critically access the claims ofMcVeigh are, at least at present, impossible.

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Japanese Higher Education as Myth Revisited

4．Another Approach: A Changing Global Context
How then to proceed? We propose that, while we await robust
comparative data, one way to take up this problem is push data to one side,and instead focus on a changed context. One’s view of whether somethingis “good” or “bad” depends upon, of course, what one is comparing a given
phenomenon with. Instead of measuring the distance from a utopian idealof a ‘perfect’ higher education system, we are better to compare withdifferent versions of higher education worldwide. Our claim in this sectionis that Japanese higher education may not look so negative if we draw
comparisons with the contemporary situation in the ‘leading’ AngloAmerican systems.
McVeigh’s research on Japan was conducted in the 1990s, and he drewon academic works like Trow (1986) and Hall (1975) and popular works like
Zeugner (1983) that were comparing against higher education in AngloAmerican contexts of the 1970s-1980s. Under normal circumstances, thiswould pose little problem. But the 1980s were extraordinary in the level of
dis-continuity from the past. The rise of Regan and Thatcher administrations
inaugurated a period of policy shift, wherein the state’s role was reduced andhigher education was increasingly seen as a private good and/or motor for
economic growth. The rise of neo-liberalism in the 1980s had major impacts
on policy in the 1990s. We assume all readers will be aware of this, so weneed not rehearse all the details here. But in the UK, for example, there
were moves to ‘audit’ research activity (the first research assessment
exercise was conducted in 1986 under Thatcher, and has since become
institutionalized), and look upon international students as a lucrative ‘market’
rather than a cultural and academic enrichment opportunity (home student
fees were subject to caps, but higher fees could be charged of international
students to increase revenue), among other shifts.
In the United States, public funding to universities was reduced, in partas ‘punishment’ for critical scholarship. In California, when Reagan was
Governor (1967-1975), he reduced public support to the flagship Universityof California system. This was widely regarded as retaliation for criticalstudent activism in the late 1960-1970s (e.g. the Vietnam War, the Counter

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Culture Movement), particularly at the UC Berkeley campus. Marginson(2016) has recently contributed a highly insightful analysis of how the‘California Dream’ envisaged by its prime architect Clarke Kerr was
dismantled by these Reagan’s policies. It is worth quoting at length:
The shift in the political economy led by Clark Kerr’s nemesis, Ronald
Reagan, proved to be as influential in its own way as Roosevelt and the
New Deal, and it has lasted almost as long. This shift has reshaped, andin some respects decisively limited, the economic and social potentials
of American higher education. If the California Idea of higher education
was partly utopian, then the Reagan-era political economy hasheightened the utopian element, pushing further from reach the 1960s
egalitarian vision. But at the same time, the alternative utopia, that of
the market society driven by ever more unequal competition in society
and higher education, has failed… In higher education, on all of theindicators except high-research performance (where the multiversity
has been protected from wholesale privatization by intrinsic market
failure, federal research funding, and academic cultures), American
higher education has declined. Higher education is less well funded andless affordable, participation is wavering, academic learning is inquestion, and quality below the top institutions appears to be fallingwithout limit. (Marginson 2016: 124)
The notion that the vaunted University of California system is now in“decline” often comes a surprise to Japanese scholars who, apparently like
McVeigh, is comparing Japan with the pre-1980s context. But the change
is real, and must be recognized. Take, for example, the rate of tuition riseat the UC’s: in 2004-2005 it was roughly USD$ 5000, but in 2019-2020 it
topped more than USD$ 15,500 ‒ a rate far outpacing inflation. As shown
In Figure 4, not only has per pupil expenditure decline overall, but thepercentage of that expenditure covered by tuition and fees increased. In
other words, state support has been drastically reduced.

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Japanese Higher Education as Myth Revisited$25,000＄22,390$20,000$2,810$2,060＄21,860＄20,510$4,110$5,080$2,010$15,000$1,960＄18,450＄16,890$5,630$2,240$8,360$10,000$17,520$15,740$13,470$2,340$10,580$5,000$6,190$01990-91

1995-96

State General Funds

2000-01
UC General Funds

2005-06

2012-13

Student Tuition & Fees

Resource: University of California (2015)

Figure 4

Per Pupil Funding by Source for the UC System (Inflation Adjusted)

The situation is so bad that UC Berkeley ‒ the flagship campus of theUC system ‒ is at an “existential tipping point” (Douglass and Bleemer2018). Faced with budget deficits due to declining state funding, and yettrying to keep research capacity and instruction high, UC Berkeley hastaken a last-ditch strategy: rapidly increasing student enrollment. Moretuition paying students means more money. Without doing so, the budget
crisis of Berkeley would be wholly unmanageable: the institution is nearbankruptcy, as one former UC Berkeley Vice-Chancellor told one of us overdinner last fall in San Francisco. Yet facing anger from citizens of the townof Berkeley for crowding, the California Supreme Court recently ruled thatUC Berkeley could not keep increasing enrollment indefinitely.

UC

Berkeley was thus forced into the odd step of “taking back” (rescinding)
5,100 offers for admissions it had already made for the 2022 September
start. This “frozen enrollment” will exacerbate the already looming budget
crisis. Although the political and economic situation is highly complex, thesimple point here is that even here at UC Berkeley ‒ perhaps America’s
premier public land-grant university and located just a few minutes’ drivefrom a fabulously wealthy Silicon Valley ‒ the policy shifts of the past three
decades have completely changed the landscape of higher education there.
‘Participation is wavering’, ‘academic learning is in question, and ‘quality’295

is ‘falling without limit’. This is the new reality of Anglo-American higher
education three decades on from the 1980s neo-liberal revolution.
Shifting our gaze from budgets to what it ‘feels like’ to learn, teach, andresearch in these new neo-liberalized systems, the changes are arguably
just as drastic. Selingo (2013) details a “drop out” crisis in the United States,
where some 400,000 students decide to leave the system every year, inlarge part due to the increasing tuition costs discussed above. The key
question is whether or not an expensive degree is worth it at all: “Is adegree from Podunk U worth $ 50,000 a year? Even if you go $ 30,000 to$ 40,000 into debt to get a diploma and then have trouble getting a job?”(26) (Podunk is a colloquial term used in American English for ‘not-famous’and ‘low-quality’). In an era of tuition hikes, students are saddled with more
and more debt. Simultaneously, the “credential race” takes center stage,
with institutions responding in ways that treat students as “customers”.
Put simply, American higher education has shifted away from cultural andacademic goals, toward economic ones. But, of course, this should not be a
surprise: this is precisely what neo-liberal policies were designed to do.
Selingo (2013) seconds Marginson’s diagnosis:
For most of the twentieth century, the United States bragged it had
the best colleges and universities in the world ‒ and rightfully so…. Not
anymore. Over the past thirty years ‒ and particularly in the first decadeof the new millennium ‒ American higher education has lost its way. At
the very top, the most elite and prestigious institutions remain the
best…. But at the colleges and universities attended by most American
students, costs are spiraling out of control and quality is declining justas increasing international competition demands that higher education
be more productive and less expensive (Seligno 2013: 40).
To support his argument, Selingo cites the work Academically Adrift:

Limited Learning on College Campuses (Arum and Roska 2011). We wonder
aloud: How many Japan-based scholars are aware of this work? The bookpaints a dismal empirical picture of the quality of American higher
education: almost half of American college students show no gains in
critical thinking in the first 24 months of college; fewer than half of 2nd

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Japanese Higher Education as Myth Revisitedyear students had taken a class that required 40 pages or more of readinga week. Put simply, as opposed to the image of hardworking elite students
reading all night and debating all day, the reality of most American higher
education today is poor and declining quality, despite the skyrocketing
price tag.
Turning to research and teaching ‒ the role usually assigned toprofessors ‒ there are increasing signs that research is declining.
Marginson (2016) highlights a decline in the growth of science papers in
the United States beginning in the 1990s, a fall centered primarily on the
public research universities ‒ such as Berkeley ‒ that were subject todeclining public financial support. This decline happened despite a growthin federal research grants overall in the 1990s, and comes at a time when
China has overtaken the US in the category of highly cited scientific papers(2018-2020). Attempting to produce the same amount of research, yet withfewer resources and with many more students (the earlier point about UC
Berkeley increasing enrolments), has naturally led to the sudden
acceleration of the life of the professoriate in Anglo-American circles.
Shahjahan (2015) points out: “In the neoliberal academy, time is meant to
be used to accumulate grants, publications, and patents, as well as improveteaching evaluations, and structure service commitments: these are themarks of a ‘good academic citizen’” (492). In other words, shifts in AngloAmerican institutions have accelerated the professor’s life in ways that are
not always conducive to quality, even if ‒ on paper ‒ these look like
‘improvements’ (e.g. more papers published, more grants acquired). It islittle wonder then that recent years have seen the rise of the “SlowProfessor” movement, an explicit attempt by professors to challenge thespeed of the neo-liberal Anglo-American academy:
If there is one sector of society that should be cultivating deep thought
in itself and others, it is academia. Yet the corporatization of thecontemporary university has sped up the clock, demanding increased
speed and efficiency from faculty regardless of the consequences foreducation and scholarship (Berg and Seeber 2016: back cover)
So popular has the “Slow Professor” movement become that it has been

297

featured in a variety of popular news outlets and praised as the key tobringing creativity back to universities, improving teaching, and fostering
greater trans-disciplinarity and collegiality.
Our point of this section of the piece has been to show a drasticallychanged context for higher education in Anglo-American contexts. The
neo-liberal reforms of the 1980s have rippled down to today in the form of
higher tuitions, fewer resources, more students, lower quality, less research
output, and a heightened pace of work that some believe hinders creativity.
It is these Western contexts which remain ‒ following the catch-up patterninaugurated in Meiji ‒ overwhelmingly the reference point for drawing
comparisons of relative strengths and weaknesses of Japanese higher
education. Yet, at least in the English-language literature, the existing
comparisons oddly seem to draw comparisons between the 1970s AngloAmerican situation and the contemporary Japanese situation.

This stems,

in part, from the fact that the “classic” works ‒ e.g. Trow ‒ do not include
discussion of what happened recently. It also stems, in part, from thetendency for postwar Japanese scholars to inflate the strengths of AngloAmerica and imagine Japan as “catching up” (Rappleye and Kariya 2011).
Our analytical point here is that such comparisons are distorting. They
distort because they hold up an idealized image of Anglo-America to the‘ugly’ face of Japanese higher education. This may serve its purposes forscandalizing the Japanese system domestically, a common strategy in Japan(and not just Japan, to be fair) to push for, say, additional funding or
advancing political positions. But when viewed internationally, this moveproduces a distorted image of weaknesses of Japanese higher education.
As such, we propose a different set of questions: What might come intoview if we, instead of comparing Japanese universities with AngloAmerican ones prior to the 1980s, and compared them Anglo-American
universities today? Would we still argue that Japanese higher education is
simply a “myth”?

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Japanese Higher Education as Myth Revisited

5 ． Daring to Think Differently: Potentially Positive Aspects ofJapanese Higher Education
Thus far we have argued that the ‘negative consensus around Japanesehigher education entrenched over the past few decades is not easy to
examine ‘objectively’, given the lack of robust comparative data. As analternative approach, we argued that we may start by recognizing that thelandscape of Anglo-American education has changed dramatically in theintervening decades, and thus it is necessary to reconceptualize thecomparison. Refusing the utopian nostalgia of the past, we should insteadask:

Does Japanese higher education share the same negative aspects

generated by neo-liberal policies in Anglo-American higher education?

Inthis section, we turn to enumerate how some of the ‘strengths’ of Japanesehigher education have been generated by Japan’s ‘failure’ to follow trends
outlined above.
1. Japanese higher education has not been marketized to the same
extent, allowing the system to retain a primary focus on education
As discussed earlier, the neo-liberal induced shift towards marketization
has lowered quality in the Anglo-American systems, particularly in the‘middle’ and ‘lower’ institutions of United States. Japanese higher education
has not been marketized to the same extent. Today, students remain
overwhelmingly ‘students’ rather than customers. This keeps the focus ofhigher education on teaching and learning, as opposed to focusing on‘improvements’ in the student experience, it prevents grade inflation, andallows professors to maintain standards, pursue knowledge (as opposed to
student satisfaction), and ‘fail’ students if necessary. In other words, thestandards remain resolutely academic in Japan, as opposed to being turned
over, at least in part, to a market mentality (e.g. ‘I am paying so I deservea degree’). This point suggests that the underpinning logic of higher
education has not shifted to become entirely economic. We do not want toexaggerate this, as surely there has been economic rationales given forvarious reforms (e.g. global human resources). But within universities
themselves, one rarely finds professors, students, and/or administrators299

discussing markets or using a market-based language. Admittedly,
declining birth rates give rise to some of this language among Japanese
private universities. But that is contextually-rooted response; quite
different reason from neo-liberal logics.
2. Tuition payments are manageable, and virtually no Japanese students
are in serious student debt
Closely related to the previous point, the lack of marketization and themaintenance of the ‘basic’ student experience has kept tuitions manageable.
Under 50% of Japanese undergraduates attending 4-year colleges take out
loans (the figures is also under 50% for Master students). Among Japanese
students obtaining a Master’s degree, only 35% ended with debt, of which
17% owned more than 3 million yen (approximately US$ 20,000) (Nippon DC2021).

Note

that

this

includesstudents

inmedical,dental,andpharmaceutical schools. The comparison in costs for a 4-year degree
between, say, UC Berkeley and Tokyo University is stark: four years at
the University of Tokyo at a cost of ￥2,425,000 (2019, at current exchange
rates USD 16,000), while UC Berkeley costs $ 152,264 dollars for California
residents ( ￥ 22,680,103) and $ 268,232 for non-California residents(￥42,652,250) (Jweekly 2019). That is 10x times the amount, despite bothbeing public universities. Meanwhile, for graduate school education, thecosts differentials are even more stark, as US institutions often look upon
Masters degrees as a major source of revenue, and rarely offer financial
aid.
3. Drop-out rates remain low, suggesting satisfactory quality and lesswaste
As discussed above, drop-out rates in US colleges are extremely high.
As shown in Figure 5 below drawn from OECD data, the gap in dropout
rates between the US and Japan is stark (as cited in Martini and Fontana(2015)). Although it is impossible to draw a straight line from low-drop out
rates to quality, following the logic of Seligno (2013) above, we can at least
surmise that Japan’s university quality is not so low as to end in drop-out.
Drop-outs always entail enormous waste as well ‒ administrative, financial,

300

Japanese Higher Education as Myth Revisitedand logistical. But Japanese universities with among the lowest drop-out
rate in the world arguably have less ‘waste’ of this sort.
0%

Italy
United States
New Zealand
Hungary
MexicoEstonia
United Kingdom
PolandSlovenia
NorwayCzech Republich
Portugal
SwedenIceland
Slovak Republik
Switzerland
Austria
Netherlands
Australia
Finland
Canada (Quebec)
Germany
Russian Fereration
FranceBelgium
Denmark
Japan

10%

20%

30%

40%

50%

60%

OECD Average

Resource: reproduced from Martini and Fontana (2015: 9)

Figure 5

University Drop-Out Rates for OECD Countries

4. Virtually unlimited freedom in research, without government-led
assessment and/or disciplining around citation indices ( e.g . SSCI)As a foreign scholar working in one of Japan’s flagship research
universities, Rappleye has been constantly amazed at the absolute lack ofpressure/incentive/discussion around publication. To what degree this is
unique to Kyoto University is something we wish to explore further. It isclear that this freedom traces roots, in part, to the postwar reconstruction,
when the Allied Occupation made an effort to increase university autonomy,
particularly in academic matters (in English: Cummings and Amano (1977)).
However, it is clear that national policy does not strongly promote research
production through assessment, review, and particularly sanctioning.
Evaluations are usually self-evaluations that, at least in our experience, few
professors take seriously. In Japan, there is nothing like the UK’s Research
Assessment Exercise (RAE), nor is there any serious movement towards
quantifying quality through use of measurements like, say, the Social
Science Citation Index (SSCI). We acknowledge that this may soon change,

301

and a few research universities are already experimenting with these sorts
of indices. Nevertheless, the effects of this loose, virtually non-existent,
approach are enormous: scholars are free to pursue scholarly themes,
rather than focus on ‘impact’ (recently added to the RAE); free to engage
in long-term projects and book writing, as opposed to pursuing a harriedstrategy of publishing smaller articles to fulfill external requirements
within given time frames; free to attempt projects that have a small chanceof success, but if successful would be paradigm shifting in their implications(more on this below). We do not want to romanticize this, but the freedom
in Japanese universities is genuine and worth considering following therush to audit university research since the 1980s.
5. Research funding remains generous, particularly for topics that are
not immediately ‘relevant’ to economic needs
Closely related to this, research funding remains generous in Japan. The
Japanese Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS) is one of the largest
public research funding agencies in the world. JSPS funds are allotted fromthe government’s annual budget, and have steadily increased, adding some
￥2.73 billion yen since 2011 (Kodera 2015). In other words, research funding
is both generous and it is growing in Japan. Moreover, JSPS is managed byscholars: once the funding allotment is made from the National Treasury,
the administration of the system (review, screening, allotment categories,etc.) is made by scholars, as opposed to bureaucrats. This ‘independence’has been in place since 2003, when JSPS was re-established as separate
from MEXT. Perhaps for this reason, there has not been the characteristic
drift in research funding priorities towards market or policy relevancewitnessed in Anglo-American contexts. Connected to this, there has
actually been a proliferation in research funding categories designed tointentionally break the existing paradigms of research and society: the“Transformative Research Areas” category aims of JSPS to “create
research areas that will lead to radical transformation of and change in theexisting framework and/or direction of research”, whilst the “Challenging
Research (Pioneering/Exploratory)” category aims at a similar “radicaltransformation” of existing approaches.

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Japanese Higher Education as Myth Revisited
6. Publication has not been marketized, as many university departments
and academic societies continue to produce in-house journals
Over the past decade, an increasing number of scholars based in AngloAmerican universities have pointed out the way that for-profit publishingcompanies (Routledge, Springer, Elsevier, and others) have profited
handsomely from the combination of publicly-funded research andincreasing pressures on scholars to publish. Moreover, there are concernsthat potential contributions are locked behind paywalls that few nonacademics can access. As a result, there are increasing calls to publish
open-access or create, utilizing new digital media, scholar-run journals.
The Educational Policy Analysis Archives (EPAA) established in 1993
which is peer-reviewed and fully open-access is often held up as one
positive model in the field of education. EPAA was established by scholars
at Arizona State, its editors are professors there, and its modest production
costs are covered by the College of Education there. What is fascinating
here is that this ASU model is basically the KIYO (紀要) model thatJapanese universities have traditionally had. Nearly all departments inresearch universities across Japan, and sometimes each course within eachdepartment, have their own journals. This is particularly true for thehumanities and social sciences. The journal in which the current article
appears is one such in-house journal. At the same time, most Japanese
academic societies run their own journals as well. Virtually all of thesejournals now post all articles online. All this is done without paying
exorbitant fees for an “open access” option. Some leading Western andJapanese scholars writing in the 1980s-1990s (e.g. Cummings and Amano
1977: 213-214), derided this in-house publishing system, arguing it “inhibited”
production and distribution of new ideas. McVeigh (2002) was also negative
about the system of daigaku kiyo, arguing it prevented peer review (140).
Here again though, the strengths of the KIYO system made now need tobe re-accessed, now that we recognize the failings of an overly marketized
and monetized system of research dissemination in Anglo-American circles:
this ‘cutting edge’ of the US is, surprisingly, already present in the‘traditional’ Japanese context.

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6 ． Beyond the Western Horizon: The View from Non-AngloAmerican Systems
Thus far, we have reviewed the potential strengths of Japanese higher
education by contrasting it with Anglo-American systems, particularly theUnited States. While this may be useful for scholars working in a field of
research dominated by Anglo-American comparisons (i.e. rankings
inevitably lead to a focus on top Anglo-American institutions like Ox-bridge,
Stanford, and the Ivy League), it does leave out aspects of Japanese higher
education that may be recognized as strengths in non-Western contexts. To
gain new perspectives, we need to think beyond a simple comparison with
the Anglo-American countries/institutions and rationales. In doing so, adifferent set of strengths come into focus, including:
1. Manpower planning remains possible to achieve within this system
Before the neo-liberal turn, higher education policy in many parts of the
non-Western world was linked to the manpower planning needs of a given
country. “Manpower planning” was a buzzword of the 1970s, signifying theways that governments could strategically plan the sorts of talents andskills needed in the next generation. In most Western European contexts,
the historically-rooted cultural institution of the university was graduallyreformed to meet manpower needs, then ‒ in the 1980s ‒ shifted again tomeet market needs. Yet, in many non-Western contexts universities were,from the beginning, linked to manpower planning (modernization) (Altbachand Umakoshi 1995). A country like, say, China looked upon the system tocreate the scientists (e.g. engineers) needed for national development, i.e.
the dam and bridge builders, the transport engineers, etc. Although thegovernment-led planning function of higher education has been heavily
critiqued in a neo-liberal era, it is obvious that many non-Western countries
still utilize universities for ‘national development’. The fact that Japanesehigher education, particularly national universities, has not been fully
turned over to the market means that they are still able to fulfill that role.
And, the fact remains that some future social challenges can arguably only
be met by this ‘older’ manpower planning approach. For example, relying304

Japanese Higher Education as Myth Revisited
only on market demand it is unlikely that Japanese universities would try
to expand places for foreign students or hire foreign faculty: there isvirtually no market incentive for that. Similarly, there is little to no market
incentive to open programs in sustainability (Kyoto University recently
opened the School of Human Survivability). Yet, for Japan beset by rapid
population decline ‒ one which needs to create a society open to immigrants‒ these proactive, ‘manpower’ planning moves are necessary; for a worldthat needs to make the turn to sustainability/survivability these forwardlooking programs become possible. Places like Cambodia are now
struggling to recalibrate their universities back to a manpower planning
function, after two-decades of neo-liberal style higher education reforms led
by the World Bank and other donors (Un and Sok 2018).
2. Translation of Overseas Knowledge (Internationalization)
Citing data from the early 1990s, Altbach and Umakoshi (2000) pointed
out that the number of books translated from English to Japanese, wasnearly 1,000 times the number translated from Japanese to English (2,290
books to 33). Unfortunately, we were unable to track down more recent
statistics. Yet anecdotal evidence based on walks through book stores inJapan and the United States suggests these trends have only increased.
Through the lens of modernization theory, this imbalance might be read as‘proof’ of the superior state of Anglo-American research, and prima facie
evidence for Japanese deficiency. Yet, through the lens of learning ‒ i.e. adrive to expand one’s existing thought horizons ‒ these same statistics canbe read as evidence of Japan’s enduring intellectual drive to learn fromothers. One major study from the early 1990s suggested that more
Japanese scholars thought understanding international trends in research
important, as compared with their American counterparts (Boyer, Altbach,and Whitelaw 1994). This points to the role Japanese scholars andinstitutions play in the ‘translation’ of overseas knowledge.

In many

countries around the world, higher education institutions are utilizing old
curricula, as they lack awareness of recent global trends. Or, even if
professors themselves can read the English books, there are few local
language texts to introduce to students. In recognizing that higher

305education in non-Western contexts has always meant, at least to someextent, learning from the dominant discourse of the Western world, we canrecognize that Japanese universities play this role extremely well. In ourcurrent post-colonial mood we may lament the lack of creativity thispurportedly entails. But, in fact, any ‘world leading’ intellectual contribution
from the non-Western world will inevitably come through engagement andfusion with Western knowledge (Rappleye 2018). In the ‘mixing’ process,Japanese institutions have made major contributions that we feel are yet
to be recognized globally, due ‒ in part ‒ to an enduring lack of scholarly
emphasis on learning across cultural/civilization borders.
3. Domestic Language Based Scholarship, providing access to domestic
policy and public
Related to issues surrounding translation, we must recognize theJapanese achievement of an entire higher education system conducted in
the Japanese language. In virtually all areas colonized by Western powers,
higher education systems remain fragmented between European languages
and local languages. Often, the most prestigious institutions were set-up bycolonizers and European languages remain dominant. One may think hereof Hong Kong, the Philippines, and Singapore. Many scholars in thesecolonial institutions continue to look to Western countries for research
direction and trends, and often publish in European languages. For some,
this seems unproblematic: it leads to greater global connectivity. However,when it comes to translating European-language scholarship into local
languages for purposes of policymaking or shaping public opinion major
problems arise: the already existing gap between higher education andsociety grows even wider due to the language barrier. The ability for
intellectuals to conduct research in one’s own language, write in one’s own
language, and thus appeal to peers in one’s own context is rare among nonWestern countries. To be clear, we are not arguing that Japaneseinstitutions shouldn’t work to improve the foreign language abilities of theirstudents and faculty. We are only seeking to underscore the value of being
able to work in one’s own language, particularly for the more expansive
aims of higher education, e.g. engaging in public debate.

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Japanese Higher Education as Myth Revisited
4. Advancement of ‘Local’ Knowledge
Both of the previous two points support the final, larger point:

Japanese

universities do a relatively good job or preserving and advancing ‘local’knowledge forms. That is, Japanese higher education still shows moreelements of its indigenous intellectual traditions, as compared with other
non-Western systems worldwide. This point may come as a surprise to
Japanese scholars, those who envisage that there is nothing particularly‘Japanese’ about Japanese higher education, except the particularity ofdeficit. But interestingly, many Chinese scholars recognize that Japanese
universities are playing a role in preserving indigenous intellectual traditions.
Yang (2017) argues that Japan “juxtaposed” Western and Japaneseapproaches, as opposed to China which tried to “integrate” ‒ a process thathas not gone smoothly, as Western modernity has dominated. Interestingly,
Yang’s remarks echo a former President of Peking University and former
Minister of Education in the early 1920s, who remarked that “If you want toknow something about Tang civilization, go to Japan. Upon a foundation of
Tang culture, Japan made herself great by the absorption of Western science.”(Jiang 1943). Even Anglo-American scholars recognize the relative
distinctiveness of Japanese higher education (Hayhoe 1998, Altbach andUmakoshi 1995). Logically, the struggles of Japanese universities to accept
non-Japanese and the enduring problems of explaining Japanese scholarshipto non-Japanese audiences also implicitly underscore that indigenous
elements remain strong.

For many scholars operating in a deficit mindset,

the persistence of such differences is troublesome. But within increasing
interesting post/decolonial trends in research (see Takayama 2018, Connell
2007), these same elements can be understood more favorably: thepersistence of differences that ensure the continuation of ‘local’ knowledge
forms; safeguard diversity within a homogenizing intellectual world. At
Kyoto University, where we have been privileged to work, there iscontinued interest in the ‘indigenous’ theories of those like Nishida Kitaro,
Imanishi Kinji, and others.
In concluding this section, it is important to underscore that we are notarguing that Japanese higher education is all good. Numerous problems

307certainly exist. Those should be addressed. Unfortunately, it is too often
the case that only deficits are discussed in the literature. This bias
implicitly reinforces the already dominant ‘negative consensus’ around
Japanese universities. Instead, the points enumerated above are meant tobring nuance back to the discussion; a set of initial suggestions about what
the strengths of Japanese higher education might be, hypotheses that mustbe followed up with rigorous, comparative empirical exploration. Sato’s(2017) recent reflections on his experience teaching at the University ofTokyo and Princeton is a rare, but inspiring example of the balanced
approach we might envisage. It is unlikely that any one system has all
aspects ‘right’, instead ‒ through less biased formulation of researchquestions and more nuanced comparison ‒ we can foster mutual learning,
replacing our current taken-for-granted image of advanced, world-classWestern institutions and backward, second-tier Japanese ones.

7．Conclusion: Towards a Wider Horizon for Studies of JapaneseHigher Education
For Anglo-American observers of Japanese higher education, McVeigh’s(2002) scathing critique remains preeminent. From the Japanese Higher

Education as Myth perspective, there is nothing to learn, and every reason
to be pessimistic about Japan’s future. Recall the earlier review ofMcVeigh’s predictions of the ‘price’ Japan would pay for the “smoke andmirrors” show that it confuses for substantive higher education: (i)ethnocentrism, racism, ignorance, (ii) a more sophisticated perspective oftime, (iii) lack of initiative for lifelong learning, (iv) ability for radical critiqueof the established political order, and (v) able to conduct basic research.
Today’s Japanese college students are the children of the college students
McVeigh described. Are they less ethnocentric/racist, more on time, moreinterested in learning, more radical politically, and able to research?
Hampered by the lack of empirical data, we cannot answer this question,
albeit with one significant exception: Japan’s PIAAC scores, which measureachievement levels across the adult population ‒ ‘lifelong learning’ ‒ aresuperior to both the United States and England (Rappleye and Komatsu

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Japanese Higher Education as Myth Revisited
2019, recall also Figure 4). Moreover, it is hard to argue that the ‘leading’systems of Anglo-America have been well-served by their purportedly‘substantive’ higher education systems: in addition to a rising tide ofconservatism, isolationism, and racism (e.g. Trump, Brexit), rising politicalapathy among youth there (e.g. US voters aged 20-30 turn out forpresidential elections at a rate 20-30% points less than older groups, a figure
largely unchanged from the 1980s (Pew 2013), and the lack of literacy inbasic scientific research findings (e.g. mask-use and vaccinations during the
COVID pandemic). Then, of course, there are all the issues that McVeigh’s
analysis misses: skyrocketing tuitions, marketization, declining research
production, drop-outs and low-quality. Scholars tend to use their research
to adjudicate based on utopian ideas about what an “ideal” system shouldlook like. But the point of our “Japanese Education Isn’t That Bad”
(Komatsu and Rappleye 2021) approach was to (re)ground comparison inreality: making judgements, rooted in comparisons based on evidence.
Here is where the deeper contribution we seek to make in the current
piece becomes fully visible. Foreign scholars who favorably cite McVeigh(2002) tend to view Japanese education within one of two horizons:

utopianor cultural. Japan is in deficit either because it doesn’t live up to the idealof a given researcher, or because it looks so different than the culturalmodel the researcher carries around in his or her head. In both cases, there
is an implicit hierarchy ‒ a “better” system that Japan has failed to achieve.
For those working in Japan, for much of the past century, the Westernworld has ‒ even if not viewed as perfect ‒ has been deemed the culturally‘superior’ reference for Japan; the lodestar that orients meaning and reform.
McVeigh’s (2002) analysis is representative of a whole genre of ‘catch-up’
style scholarship (see Kariya 2019, Rappleye and Kariya 2011). Both theutopian and the cultural place Western systems on a pedestal and thenattempt to figure out which levers to raise the Japanese system up to thatlevel. What we have been pushing for in this piece is a new horizon fromwhich to evaluate Japanese higher education. Instead of a hierarchy ofsystems, we need more research that explores which aspects of which
system might offer novel approaches. The point of comparison is notcritique or competition, but mutual learning.

309

In this vein, it may be more useful to rethink Japanese higher educationfrom the perspective a different model rather than a deficit model. The
assumption of universality is already implied in the very term ‘university’.
This creates much confusion but it derives from the historical roots ofuniversities: the assumption was that there was one knowledge universally
applicable the world over. But hasn’t research over the past few decades
disabused us of the notion of context-free, universally “best” models? If so,then isn’t it time we think about how different models, of which Japan isone, solve different problems to a greater and lesser extent? Particularly
now

that

Anglo-Americansystems

have

gone

headlong

towards

marketization, the differences are more apparent. Within this new horizon,
Japanese scholars would have an opportunity to not just ‘learn’ from thestrengths of other systems (something admirable and that should becontinued), but also contribute something to the global conversation. It is
worth noting that Chinese scholars have been quite active in recent years
in developing such a pragmatic, difference-based approach (Yang 2017, 2022,
Marginson and Yang 2022), while Japanese scholars have been largely silent.
One larger contribution we intended in this piece ‒ as we did in our 2021
book ‒ has been to argue for a shift in horizon, from a deficit, ‘negative
consensus’ starting point to a difference, mutual learning approach, andthereby show the path to greater global engagement.
Put more simply, isn’t it time to be critical of all the critique to date,instead asking: What can we learn from Japanese universities? Thequestion is not meant to replace the existing question: What can Japanese
universities learn from elsewhere? But only to redress an imbalance, onethat no longer makes sense after the Anglo-American embrace of neoliberalism, and one that (re)produces a silence that keeps Japan-based
scholars from contributing to the larger global conversation.

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Japanese Higher Education as Myth Revisited
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313

Authorsʼ Contribution
Rappleye, J.: conceptualization, investigation, formal analysis, writing
Komatsu H.: conceptualization, investigation, formal analysis, writing
Both authors contributed equally.

314

Japanese Higher Education as Myth Revisited

日本の高等教育の神話を再考する−日本の大学からは何も学べないのか？−
ジェルミー・ラプリー*
小 松
光**
＜要

旨＞

日本の高等教育に対する見解は依然として概ね否定的だ。ブライア
ン・マクビー（2002）の著書『神話としての日本の高等教育』が頻繁に参照されるため、日本の大学から学ぶことはほとんどないという認識が定着している。本稿は、このような日本の大学の負のイメージに対して、従来とは異なる見解の提示を試みる。この 20 年間で高等教育を取り巻く状況は世界的に著しく変化したため、日本の高等教育の再評価が必要だと著者らは考える。これらの変化には、英米の大学で顕著にみられる市場化の加速と新自由主義的な経営主義、留学生の商品化、研究における「競争」の出現、商業主義的出版社による学術出版の支配、知識生産の政治性などが含まれる。これらの変化があるからこそ、私たちは立ち止まり、日本の高等教育を再考・再評価しなければならない。そのことを通じて、日本の高等教育を英米から遅れたものとする見方か
ら、日本の高等教育を英米とは異なったもの（異なった項目が重要視されている場）とする見方に転換すべきである。この論文で私たちが成し遂げたいのは、より公平・公正な対話を作り出すことである。現在は、世界大学ランキングや他の国際的な高等教育の変化によって、英米の大学が唯一のグローバルスタンダードとみなされている。その結果、細かなニュアンスは抹消され、異なるモデルを見出してそれから学ぶことが不可能な状況である。この状況を変えたいのである。

*京都大学教育学研究科・准教授
名古屋大学高等教育研究センター・客員准教授**国立台湾大学理學院・准教授

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