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This personal, tentative, self-reflective essay explores some Japanese ways of conducting comparative educational research. In this essay, I not only describe a Japanese style of conducting comparative education research but also do so in a Japanese way. The four key elements I discuss are: daijini (taking care), soboku (simplicity), nagaime (long perspective) and shuudan-sei and kanjin shugi (collectivism and contextualism). Like Rappleye's and Takayama's recent contributions in the 2020 special issue of this journal, my paper challenges the taken-for-grantedness of the Western philosophies, theories, and methods characteristic of Anglophone comparative educational scholarship. Like those contributions, this paper argues for the value Japanese perspectives hold for comparative educational research. For me, this means arguing for the value of research methods that are not inseparable from my being Japanese.

In this paper, "Teaching Expertise in Three Countries" project is used as an example to show the significance and contribution of international comparative research and to think about the possible implications for policy in early childhood education. The project studied the development of expertise in preschool teaching in Japan, China, and the United States by employing 'video-cued multivocal ethnography' to explore how teaching expertise is defined in each of these countries and what processes help teachers acquire advanced teaching skills. This project has shown similarities and culturally specific notions, in what the participants have to say about characteristics of less and more experienced teachers. These research findings raise issues and challenges in early childhood education that resonate with the situation not only in the three countries but also possibly in other countries, such as problematizing the role of remembering and reflection in professional practice and the value of experience.

International comparative ethnographic studies of ECEC (Early Childhood Education and Care) are difficult to conduct but worth the effort. Comparative studies featuring thick description and polysemic interpretations can challenge taken-for-granted assumptions, expand the menu of the possible, expose the provincialism of national approaches, and illuminate the global circulation of ECEC practices and ideas. Based on reflections on four major comparative international studies I have led, in this paper I describe effective strategies for conducting comparative ethnographic research in ECEC settings, explicate the rationale for doing so, and provide examples of how this approach can impact research, practice, and policy. Issues I address include the rationale for selecting countries for comparison, the formation of a research team, and distributing interpretive voice and power.

The Japan Comparative Education Society (JCES) was founded in 1965 with its flagship Japanese-language journal "Hikakukyoikukenkyu" ("Comparative Education Research") first published in 1975. The organisation currently has around 1000 members, making it the second largest comparative education society in the world. Though JCES members have long engaged in methodological and theoretical debates, their insights are hardly acknowledged in the English-language literature. Drawing on a review of the Japanese-language literature and semi-structured interviews with 25 JCES members, this paper identifies a particular intellectual tradition within JCES, often referred to as the area-studies approach to comparative education. This approach, often practised by JCES researchers specialising in developing countries in Asia, has long constituted the mainstay of comparative education scholarship in Japan. This paper traces the formation of this intellectual tradition, and focuses on its complex relationship with the dominant paradigm of "paradigmatic" English-language comparative education scholarship. The paper shows how "other" comparative education societies--such as the JCES--can be looked to as a resource with which to "provincialise" the way comparative education research is conceptualised in English-language academia, and to cross-culturalise the field of comparative education.

In this paper, I reflect upon my journey of learning to do comparative education research over the last decade and half. It involves transnational moves from Japan, Canada, US, Australia and back to Japan where I encountered numerous 'others'. I use my story of a series of relocations as an entry point for theorising what I mean by 'negative' comparative education. Drawing on Andrea English and the Kyoto School of Philosophy, I use the term 'negativity' in the philosophical sense. That is, it refers to affective experiences of discomfort, perplexity and confusion as an important catalysis for generative learning and unlearning. It is a story of learning to let go of the familiar language and frame of seeing the world and embracing disruption as a critical moment for new learning. In conclusion, I argue that negative comparative education offers a methodological stance that enables us to undertake comparative research in a manner that challenges the Eurocentric geopolitics of knowledge and hence to contribute to the pluriverse world.

This paper examines how social isolation in a non-Anglophone context where English is not the main language of instruction for local students but is for international students, has unintended consequences for social capital formation among the latter. What factors influence international student network formation in such places where linguistic barriers are institutionalised and what are their consequences not only during college but beyond, in shaping students' career plans? Using qualitative interview data with 67 international (originating from Asian countries) and domestic students in Japanese universities, we find that such institutional barriers negatively promote greater isolation of international students but positively encourage the formation of diverse multinational ties -- a process through which international students gain ideas, confidence and direction regarding their post-graduation career plans to work transnationally.

In this paper I argue that when a researcher is a research instrument, it is likely that the researcher would develop a heightened awareness of his/her own cultural conditioning, especially in the case of cross-cultural studies. And that such awareness would make him/her realise that one's own cultural background may indeed have an influence on formulating his/her research methodology. The paper is based on my own research project on development cooperation between Japan and Cambodia, whereby I examined the perceptions of Cambodians and Japanese on what an appropriate power relationship between donors and recipients should be. At the outset of my research project, I paid little attention to my own cultural condition and the role it might play in my study, though I was aware that being Japanese I was a cultural outsider in the context of the study. However, through the process of studying both Japanese and Cambodian cultures, I acquired a heightened sense of awareness of my own culture, with its roots in Buddhist and Confucius traditions. Such heightened awareness made me realise that my own culture had indeed played a role in shaping my research methodology.

Using the political-economic analysis of globalisation and education as well as a culturalist approach to education policy borrowing, the paper analyses the role of local actors, specifically, national newspapers and the Ministry of Education, in mediating the potentially homogenising curricular policy pressure of globalisation exerted through the PISA league tables. Using the recent Japanese education policy debate as a case study, the author demonstrates how the Japanese media interpreted the PISA 2003 findings in a way that resonated with the specific cultural, political, and economic context of the time and how the Ministry used the findings to legitimise otherwise highly contentious policy measures. Questioning the conventional interpretation that the PISA 2003 shock caused the Ministry to redirect its controversial "yutori" (low pressure) curricular policy, the paper reconstitutes the Ministry as an active agent that capitalised on an external reference (PISA) to re-establish its political legitimacy in a time of increasing neo-liberal state-restructuring. (Contains 10 notes.)

This paper examines educational policies toward indigenous minorities in Japan and Canada during the period of nation-building, from the latter half of the nineteenth century to the first half of the twentieth century. Both Japan and Canada first segregated indigenous children into separate educational institutions and then tried to assimilate them into mainstream society. Beneath these broad policy similarities, however, lie different rationales, with substantially different implications for education and social policy in diverse societies. In Japan, national integration was promoted through a cultural or ethnic rationale, a socially coherent approach that nonetheless allows little room for minorities. Canada approached national integration using a notion of citizenship that both allows considerable space for minorities but is challenged by unity. These two strategies can be seen in two polar models of the state--a civic-assimilationist approach of the "French model" and an ethnocultural exclusionist model of the formation of the German state. The paper argues for a multicultural pluralist model including both civic and cultural/ethnic identities. (Contains 22 notes.)

This paper examines interactions between the global and the local in the context of Japanese mainstream schooling, by focusing on the development of local government policies to manage diversity in schools. This paper reveals how local governments developed education policies in interaction with grassroots professional groups, activists and schools, and by selectively incorporating national policies. These local policies are multicultural education policies but differ in two significant ways. The first is their predominant concern with human rights education, leaving celebration of cultural diversity as a marginal consideration, and the other is the official use of the term "foreigners" in the title of these policies; both of which reflect the pre-existing local context. The paper demonstrates that new immigrants do not unilaterally impact on supposedly ethnically homogeneous Japanese classrooms, but that the pre-existing local contexts (national, local and institutional) have mediated global forces in effecting changes. (Contains 9 notes.)

Although separate schooling for cultural minorities is not usually favored in Western societies, a strong case can be made for recognizing the legitimacy of Korean ethnic schools in Japan. The oppression of ethnic schools has resulted from a discriminatory assimilation policy, not the application of liberal principles intended to achieve greater equality and justice. (Contains 50 references.) (TD)

This paper explores how bureaucracy impedes the implementation of higher education (HE) policy at Japanese universities. Administrative systems employ Weberian legal-rational bureaucratic practices that are central to the institutional identity of a university. Rather than the means to internationalisation and reform in general, these systems themselves become the end, usually in direct opposition to not only innovation and change but, indeed, the university mission itself. After first outlining the macro-level processes and policies of the internationalisation of Japanese HE, I take an ethnographic approach to illustrate the micro-level administrative practices and assumptions at the university, framing them within the social theory of bureaucracy to allow for comparison with HE in other parts of East Asia and worldwide. As a way forward, I propose we borrow theories on social entrepreneurship to potentially resolve the challenge of embedded administrative practices and static institutional identities, a bureaucratic "utopia of rules" [Graeber, D. 2015. "The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy." New York: Melville House].

Seeking to contribute to recent attempts to rethink the deepest foundations of the field, this paper offers news ways of contemplating time, specifically its relations to self, nihilism, and schooling. We briefly review how some leading Western thinkers have contemplated time before detailing Japanese scholars who have offered divergent, original, and arguably more sophisticated, theoretical accounts. We then illustrate these ideas by sketching how Japan "borrowed time" following the abrupt political rupture of 1868, showing how "Linear Time" came to be disseminated and diffused, largely through modern schooling. Last, we spotlight the nihilism that has arisen as consequence. Our primary aim is not empirical elaboration, however, but instead disclosure of a complex of relations that the field of comparative education has yet to discuss. We offer both the experience-cum-thought of Japan and this complex itself as reconstructive resources for the field which remains shallow in its parochial presumptions and unwillingness to engage ontologically.

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. (Contains 12 notes.)

Globalisation and convergence in educational policy worldwide has reinvigorated, while rendering more complex, the classic theme of educational transfer. Framed by this wider pursuit of new understandings of a changing transfer/context puzzle, this paper explores how an ethnographic "thick description" might complement and extend recent research. Specifically, it relates findings from extended ethnographic work on an attempt by a prominent Japanese university to "import" the Council of Europe's Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR). This rare case of explicit "borrowing" from a supranational space directly to the domestic institutional level, when approached in such a way, suggests new insights to help the field refine understandings of the processes, "shape-shifting", and "success" of international policy migration. (Contains 3 notes and 1 figure.)

This paper notes that universities are mobile. That is, models of universities are transferred or borrowed or move around the world and in the process of moving or being moved they tend to change or be changed from the kind of university they were--either in practice or as ideals at the point of origin. To explore these themes the article discusses the mobility of "the German university" with special reference to the creation of Japanese and American universities in the late nineteenth century. Different social actors undertook the "transfer" of the German university in both cases for somewhat different reasons, and the mobility took place at different speeds and with different kinds of struggles. The ways in which "the German university" was fitted into its new contexts was also different, and by the time the mobility process was well underway, it had become clear that it was not the same version of "the German university" which was being "borrowed" in the two places. In its new contexts, the new university later helped to shape the emergent systems of higher education in Japan and the United States and, much later, its political and social roles also diverged.

A variety of perspectives exist on the evaluation of Japan's educational reform of 2002, which has evolved since the 1980s. However, thus far, little attention has been paid to the emerging influence of civil society on educational policies and practices. This paper shows that the origin of the current educational reforms can be traced to reports prepared by various neo-liberal/conservative business leaders and politicians. Further, it shows their privatization and decentralization principles happen to coincide with the increasing interest of progressive citizens' groups and educators. Their impact on the Japanese education system remains latent, especially as more scepticism grows towards progressivism as a philosophy behind the current educational reform. However, the expanding civil society and new progressive education movements in Japan are trends worth exploring in the context of globalization at the grass-roots level.

The focus of this paper is on Japanese philosophy of education in the post-war period. We begin with a historical account, concentrating on developments in ideas and their interrelation with policy, and then go on to discuss aspects of the contemporary scene. Central to our concerns here are the ways in which there has been an impoverishment of the public and private realms, especially with the collusion of private and national interests under the sway of neo-liberal and neo-conservative ideologies. We conclude our discussion by identifying some current trends in Japanese philosophy of education, highlighting ways in which new developments in the subject may lay the way for restoring and enhancing the relationship between the private and the public.

In our internationalizing world, even countries that have had a reputation of being so-called "homogeneous" are facing cultural diversification within. Though Japan is a country often described as homogeneous or, at least, homogeneously minded, with the inflows of new types of foreigners, it is presently experiencing what has been dubbed the process of "internal internationalization." Such new forms of diversity trigger the formation of new social alignments, and challenge existing categories of the Different. This paper takes the Japanese example as a case in point to re-examine the social nature of the construction of difference.

The economic, social, and educational history of the Burakumin--a Japanese minority group--is traced since 1603. The role of Burakumin activism--plus increased national awareness and economic well-being--in promoting economic, social, and educational improvement is reviewed. It is noted that Burakumin progress toward further social and educational equality remains to be seen. (BRR)

Notes the factors preventing the progress of internationalization in Japanese society in general and in the educational system in particular. Topics include traditional attitudes towards other countries, the prevalence of economic strength as a national goal, and the school system's preoccupation with preparation for entrance examinations. (JHZ)

Provides historical background for understanding social changes and the resulting problems facing Japan's schools. Topics include resistance of youth to society and its schools, the breakdown of regional communities, the impact of competition for grades, and the changing role of teachers. (JHZ)

Democratization of education in Japan is still recent, and women continue to lag behind men in higher education. However, women's expectations of social participation are increasingly higher, and in another 10 years women graduates of the mass stage of higher education will reach the age for influential decision-making positions. (JHZ)

Considers the inclusiveness of Japanese commitment to education and the intensively educative society's influence on schools. Notes global interest in Japan's self-appraisal of education, pointing out that it will shed light on the question of how far school systems devised for more limited purposes can measure up to today's requirements. (JHZ)

In spite of the current great interest in educational reform and the calls for fundamental change, history suggests that the liberalization of Japanese education will follow the lines recommended by the Ministry of Education--painstakingly planned and slowly and cautiously implemented after lengthy experimental studies. (JHZ)

In the debate on educational reform in Japan, the government's version of free choice would lead to commercialism and privatisation of education and an even more competitive system creating technocratic elites. In contrast, the Japan Teachers' Union has proposed reforms based on the people's right to justice in education. (JHZ)

This paper, based upon the author's research in Japan during 1976-77, discusses the pressures for shaping the socialization of Japanese adolescents and secondary schools to meet the requirements of high school and college entrance examinations, which are a common source of chronic anxiety for students, parents, and teachers. (Author/KC)