Other Japanese educations and Japanese education otherwise

Abstract

Education in the United States was in a state of "crisis" at the time of the 1983 release of 'A Nation at Risk', the landmark report on the US education reform. This was the time when the rising Japanese economy started threatening the post-war US economic dominance and conservative figures such as Ronald Reagan gained popular support. Subsequent US debates over education reform put Japanese education in the spotlight, driving many American education researchers to travel to Japan to learn the "secret" of its educational and by implication its economic success. A large number of books and journal articles about Japanese schooling - or what I have called elsewhere the "foundational studies" (Takayama, 2010) - were published in the 1980s and early 1990s (e.g., Cummings, 1980; Finkelstein, Imamura, & Tobin, 1991; Hess & Azuma, 1991; Lewis, 1995; Peak, 1991; Tobin, Wu, & Davidson, 1989; Shields, 1993; White, 1987). As one observer rightly reflects, "cross-national attraction anywhere in the world has rarely been as strong as was US attraction to Japanese education" (Rappleye, 2007, p. 38) at that time.