Cambridge Companion to Modern Japanese Culture

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104 Kaori Okano

. . . it was “cool” to be engaged in oppositional activities in a “tactful”

ory

ogaii) way without being caught. They enjoyed testing school

authority to see how far they could “bend the rules”, but always to the

extent that they did not face confrontation with teachers. The capacity

to estimate the “right” extent was important, and was the essence of

“tactful” strategies.

One of the few open confrontations that I witnessed was when a male stu-

dent almost punched a teacher in an argument during a class – his close

friends, sensing what was about to occur, quickly restrained him. The cul-

prit not only received a one-week suspension from school, but also serious

advice from his close friends that he was not ‘playing the game’ well. Student

counter culture can be seen as young peoples’ deﬁance against adults’ con-

trol,

but I see it more as ‘playful’ activities that students create to entertain

themselves and which, from their perspective, give meaning to their time at

school.

One could see this counter culture as a process of learning useful

skills for adulthood.

Finer variations within similarly labelled schools

Within similarly labelled schools, ﬁner variations of school culture are

noticeable to astute observers and experienced by students and parents.

A case in point is the elite academic high schools – the top 10 per cent of

all academic high schools. Within this category, there are widely acknowl-

edged differences between long-established schools (dent

o) and relatively

newer schools. The term dent

o refers to academic high schools established

under the prewar education system, which maintain a legacy of cultivating

well-balanced ‘enlightened’ all-rounders. In contrast, the relatively newer

academic high schools, ﬁrst established during the 1960s, have a narrow

instrumental focus on success in entrance examinations to top universities.

A case study of leadership change in the latter type of school

reveals

that these differences were clearly understood by all the teachers. On his

arrival the new principal stated his intention to transform this ‘elite’ school

into a ‘traditional elite’ one (dent

o), and set out to implement concrete

measures to achieve this. A study of teachers’ life histories

also docu-

ments this widely held perception. Indeed, the meaning of ‘elite’ school

seems to have changed during the postwar period, in response to a rapid

rise in the retention rate to post-compulsory schools and tertiary institu-

tions.

The term ‘elite’ high school was used to denote a school of pre-

war origin for producing cultured elites, but has now come to mean any

School culture 105

school which sends a large proportion of their graduates to the nation’s top

universities.

Amongst what are popularly called ‘educationally difﬁcult schools’

(ky

oiku kon’nank

o) or ‘bottom-line schools’ (teihenk

o) within the cat-

egories of non-elite academic high schools and vocational high schools,

diverse pictures also emerge. These schools are often located in disadvan-

taged localities characterised by, for example, a high proportion of low-

income families, high unemployment and people of minority backgrounds,

or in the case of senior high schools, accommodate children with disad-

vantaged backgrounds. At one end of the continuum, some schools are

seen as managing children with an authoritarian hand by enforcing rules

about student behaviour in an oppressive manner.

At the other end of the

continuum, some schools are seen as attempting to offer a very inclusive

culture, precisely because of the family disadvantages which have caused

students to suffer low self-esteem, low academic achievement and a sense

of alienation from schooling. A teacher who was recently transferred to an

‘educationally difﬁcult high school’ in Osaka commented:

Shortly after being transferred to my present school (with a reputation

of being the most difﬁcult school in the region until a few years ago), a

group of six students were caught smoking on the school grounds.

Seeing their rough appearance and disrespectful manners, I had expected

the head teacher would be angry and give them a pep talk. I was taken

aback. He asked questions like “Is being at school tough for you?”, and

“When did you begin to feel lost in classes? At middle school, or

primary school, in grade four or ﬁve? Or was it grade two or three?”

When a student nodded, the teacher said, “Have you been sitting in

class without understanding lessons for nine years? It must have been

terrible experience for you. You have made a great effort and persisted a

lot (ganbaru).” The students started shedding tears.

Other studies of ‘difﬁcult schools’ also depict school culture that is more

complex and nuanced than that of autocratic authorities managing unmoti-

vated and sometimes difﬁcult students with oppressive measures.

Changes over time

School culture changes over time, at the level of the individual school, the

local area and the school system as a whole. Changes in school culture can

result from individual schools taking initiatives to resolve emerging needs

106 Kaori Okano

at the microscopic level. They can be induced by local-level institutions

such as local governments and their education boards, and by local civil

activism.

We can see overt changes in school culture when a prewar single-sex

government academic high school renewed its ‘traditions’ and transformed

itself into a postwar high school over the period 1941–55.

Amongst forces

guiding this transformation were radical institutional changes imposed by

the postwar education reforms, renewed expectations from students and

parents for ‘democratic education’ and the community’s growing stability

and afﬂuence.

Changes in school culture can also be triggered by mundane processes,

such as the arrival of a new principal and regular changes in the composition

of teaching staff (for example, the departure of union-involved teachers and

the replacement of retiring teachers by younger teachers).

The system of

recruiting principals from non-teaching backgrounds, introduced in 2001,

is a case in point. By April 2006, 107 of these principals had been appointed,

many from the corporate sector.

School reactions have been mixed. Some

schools saw the beneﬁts in having a principal with a fresh outlook, while

others could not reconcile a different style of leadership. Some principals

saw their assignment as being successful in bringing desirable changes to

their schools, while others faced strong resistance and failed to bring about

reforms, with one case resulting in suicide.

These consequences highlight

signiﬁcant differences between school and corporate culture, and emphasise

that new principals possess the potential to implement signiﬁcant change.

Accommodation of diversity

Two dominant changes in school culture are currently observable nation-

wide. One is an increasing tolerance towards the diverse backgrounds that

students bring to school. Some schools even go further in their efforts to

build a more inclusive school culture. This trend began in the 1960s with

Japanese families returning from lengthy postings overseas, which led to

the creation of special transition classes catering for their Japanese language

needs and ‘cultural adaptation’.

More recent arrivals of new migrants with

little Japanese language proﬁciency has also led schools to set up similar

‘international classes’ and forced schools to adopt a philosophy which cel-

ebrates diversity.

Teachers at schools with new migrants no longer adopt

the long-held assumption that has underpinned Japanese schooling: that

all students are ‘Japanese’, speak Japanese as their mother tongue, and have

been socialised in mainstream Japanese lifestyles. The number of students in

School culture 107

government schools who require Japanese as Second Language was 22 500

in 2006, an increase over the last two decades.

Within this general trend towards tolerance and inclusion there are

regional variations due to differences in the size and composition of migrant

populations, and the activities of local governments, schools and activists.

The constitutions of migrant populations vary: metropolitan centres where

the long established minorities and newcomers co-exist such as Kawasaki,

Tokyo, Osaka and its neighbouring cities; regional manufacturing cities

with a large number of South Americans of Japanese descent; and other

locations where newcomers reside in small numbers. How localities have

responded to increasingly diverse students differs from place to place. Over

50 local governments have developed multicultural education policies

and

provide concrete measures to accommodate, and beneﬁt from, what these

students bring to school, with varying degrees of success.

Localities with

buraku and ethnic Korean minority activism

have built such measures on

existing human rights-focused institutional infrastructures.

School cul-

ture is thus forced to adapt according to particular local conditions, such

as population diversity.

Education is an area where globalisation impacts

very much at a grass roots, bottom-up level.

Waning aspirational culture

The other trend to note is that schools no longer offer the kind of strong

aspirational culture that they did before the late 1980s. Even in its heyday,

some no doubt questioned this aspirational culture on the grounds that not

everyone beneﬁted equally from schooling. The majority, however, felt that

their improved life chances and lifestyles derived at least partially from their

achievements in school.

Since the 1990s expectations of schools gradually became more diverse.

Schools were pressed to provide opportunities for students to achieve ‘self-

realisation’ and to be a place where young people feel comfortable.

Stu-

dents increasingly seek more diverse post-school destinations in order to

achieve self-fulﬁlment, and take diverse paths to reach them. Kariya

argues

that this represents an ‘incentive divide’, that is, class-speciﬁc differences in

the level of children’s aspirations to gain worldly success. Takeuchi

sug-

gests that increasingly diverse aspirations (in terms of destinations in the

adult society and how one gets there) have resulted at least partially from

the afﬂuence and maturity of Japanese society as a whole.

In a study of senior high schools covering 1979–97, Hida and his col-

leagues

revealed that, regardless of the school’s ranking, students became

108 Kaori Okano

less committed to academic study and their school lives and less motivated

by competitive examinations over time. At the same time, teachers became

more tolerant of ‘problematic’ students and students expressed less overt

dissatisfaction with, and less enthusiasm for, their schools.

These trends

were conﬁrmed by Ito,

who suggests that schools are now less interven-

tionist in various aspects of students’ education and more concerned with

providing a ‘comfortable’ space for students in comparison to thirty years

ago when schools tried to inﬂuence students to conform more closely to

societal norms.

Recent national reforms have tried to address these new circumstances

in several ways,

which I suspect will in turn affect the culture of schools.

One such reform is the ‘slimming of schooling’ – a reduction in the school

week from six days to ﬁve and in the coverage of the curriculum. This

was expected to lessen the role that institutional schooling plays in chil-

dren’s overall education and provide children with more time to explore

interests outside school. Another reform is an increased level of auton-

omy granted to individual schools and teachers to design curricula which

build on and suit speciﬁc local conditions and their particular student pop-

ulations. This has resulted in greater diversity across schools in terms of

subjects offered and their content. The recent diversiﬁcation of upper sec-

ondary schooling also addresses increasingly varied student interests and

aspirations. Unit-based high school courses were introduced in 1988, allow-

ing individual students to create their own curriculum by selecting from a

wide range of subject units, rather than following a prescribed course with

a few electives. Other new types of high school courses and high schools

include integrated courses which combine academic and vocational courses,

six-year secondary schools and specialist high schools (science/technology,

English). The culture of these new high schools encourages exploration of

students’ own interests from a diverse range of options, rather than pursuit

of a single track aspirational goal.

Conclusion

This chapter has answered the following questions: What forms of school

culture have been experienced and observed in Japan? How have they been

formed, experienced and modiﬁed, and with what consequences?

There are features of Japanese school culture that are distinctive, or

more widely prevalent in Japan than in the Anglo-West. School culture

School culture 109

is diverse in terms of the extent and the ways these (and other) features

are manifested, and in how they affect students. There are also patterns

of variation identiﬁed across: (1) regions, in terms of the nature of the

community, including socioeconomic context and local history, the urban-

rural divide and Tokyo versus Osaka; (2) education levels such as primary,

middle and senior high schools; (3) school types such as elite academic,

non-elite academic and vocational high schools; and (4) between individual

schools. School culture has undergone changes over time, and continues to

be modiﬁed and renewed in response to changing circumstances at the levels

of individual schools, localities and society as a whole. School culture has

become more diverse due to increasing diversity in the student population,

their aspirations and parental expectations. Recent institutional initiatives

to make schools more accommodating of such diversities are, in turn, likely

to inﬂuence school culture.

In order to understand both synchronic and diachronic variations, it is

helpful to think of school cultures as being created and constantly modiﬁed

through the process of interaction between participants, institutions – both

internal and external to schools – and the community and other external

factors. Seen in this framework, I suspect that in the coming decades school

culture will continue to evolve into even more diverse forms, perhaps still

maintaining ‘Japanese’ features to differing degrees. I remain unsure as to

whether this evolution towards diversity will enhance the potential for all

students, regardless of background, to beneﬁt from schooling.

Notes

1. See, for example, Terada (2006); Aramaki (1990).

2. End

o(2002).

3. Since this book is published in English, I also assume that its readers are more

familiar with schooling in the Anglo-West and their own societies, than elsewhere.

When discussing education reforms, the distinction (‘Anglo-West’ rather than ‘West’,

which would include the disparate continental European nations) is highly signiﬁcant.

Although I remain uneasy about making the Anglo-West a global reference point, I

consider it is better than having this deliberate choice unstated and ambiguous.

4. See, for example, Cutts (1997); Horio (1988); Shoko Yoneyama (1999); Yoder (2004).

5. Duke (1986); Nancy Sato (2004); Lewis (1995); Stevenson and Stigler (1992);

Tsuneyoshi (2001); Peak (1991).

6. See, for example, Shefﬁeld (1990); Films for Humanities and Sciences (2003).

7. Hiroshi Usui (2001: 288–9).

8. See, for example, Vogel (1979); Duke (1986); Stevenson and Stigler (1992).

110 Kaori Okano

9. Ikeda (1985); Okano (1993); Rohlen (1983); Ii (2003); Shimizu and Tokuda (1991);

LeTendre (2000).

10. See, for example, Rohlen (1983); Okano (1993).

11. See, for example, Ikeda (1985); Shimizu and Tokuda (1991).

12. Apple (1979).

13. See, for example, Apple (1979); Bourdieu (1984); Okano and Tsuchiya (1999); Urabe

(1999).

14. Miyazaki (1993); Kiyoshi Takeuchi (1993); Hasegawa (1996); Price (1997).

15. See, for example, Willis (1977); Walker (1988).

16. See, for example, Tsuneyoshi (2001); Duke (1986); Nancy Sato (2004); Lewis (1995);

Stevenson and Stigler (1992).

17. Nancy Sato (2004); Lewis (1995).

18. Shimizu and Tokuda (1991); LeTendre (2000).

19. See, for example, Hargreaves (1994); Lacy (1996); Imazu (2000).

20. See, for example, Lacy (1996).

21. Kihara, Mut

o, Kumagai and Fujita (1993

22. See,

for example, Inagaki and Kudomi (1994); Kudomi (1988); Sawako Y

u(1993); Arai

(1993); Shinchika Yamazaki (1996); Imazu (2000).

23. K

okichi Shimizu (2002: 6).

24. Stevenson and Stigler (1992); LeTendre (2000); Nancy Sato (2004); Imazu (2000).

25. Nancy Sato (2004); Manabu Sato (1992: 164–5); Imazu (2000).

26. Yasuhiro It

o(1994: 151–2).

27. LeTendre (2000).

28. Shimahara and Sakai (1995: 187); Nancy Sato (2004); Yasuhiro It

o(1994); K

okichi

Shimizu (2002); LeTendre (2000).

29. Shimahara and Sakai (1992: 156–7).

30. Shimahara and Sakai (1992: 157).

31. Shimahara and Sakai (1995: 154).

32. Y

asuhiro It

o(1994: 150).

33. Descendants of a feudal outcaste population who still suffer from marginalisation.

34. Takayoshi Doi (1998).

35. Ikeda (1985); Okano (1993).

36. Nait

o(2006).

37. Yoshio Murakami (2004: 30).

38. K

okichi Shimizu (2005: 180–95).

39. See, for example, Fujita (2000).

40. Cities with populations over 1 million.

41. Yomiuri Shimbun (19 January 2007).

42. See Okano (in press).

43. Fukuzawa and LeTendre (2001); Shimizu and Tokuda (1991).

44. Le Tendre (1994: 47).

45. Okano and Tsuchiya (1999: 64).

46. Rohlen (1983); Okano (1993); Okano and Tsuchiya (1999: chapters 3 and 4).

47. Okano and Tsuchiya (1999: 104–7); Rohlen (1983); Okano (1993).

48. W

illis (1977).

49. Okano (1993: 198).

50. Yoder (2004).

51. Okano (1993: 198).

School culture 111

52. Hiroki

Ono (1998).

53. Tsukada (1998).

54. Inoue and Yasuda (2002).

55. Yoder (2004); Shoko Yoneyama (1999); Cutts (1997); McVeigh (2000).

56. Ii (2003: 139–40).

57. Ikeda (1985); Shimizu and Tokuda (1991); Okano (1993).

58. Oh (1998: 200).

59. Tsukada (1998).

60. End

o(2004).

61. ‘Shir

ızu: Minkanjin shusshin k

och

o ga yuku (Series: Experiences of principals recruited

from non-teaching sectors)’, Yomiuri Shimbun (2–13 May 2006: 2 May).

62. Goodman (1990, 2003).

63. Tsuneyoshi (2004); Nukaga (2003).

64. Ministry of Education (2006).

65. Okano (2006a).

66. Tsuneyoshi (2004); Nukaga (

2003);

okichi Shimizu (1998); Watabe (1998).

67. Minority activism in education has long existed in modern Japan. In the postwar

period, the most notable and successful activism has been conducted by the Buraku

Liberation League in pursuing a living standard comparable to the rest of society,

human rights and the elimination of discrimination. It lobbied for legislation (The

Special Measures for Regional Improvement Law, effective 1969–97) on one hand, and

adopted the radical tactics of denouncing those deemed to have engaged in discrim-

inatory activities on the other. So called ‘D

owa education’ was introduced, initially

focusing on buraku injustices and marginalisation, and later on human rights in gen-

eral. Activism by long-established ethnic Koreans (descendants of formal Japanese

colonial subjects) was inﬂuenced by the buraku activism both in terms of philosophy

(e.g. human rights focus rather than celebration of cultural diversity) and concrete

tactics; and was also built on infrastructures already existing for buraku education.

For example, buraku education sections of local education board secretariats took on

ethnic Korean issues, and then more recently, newcomer minority children’s educa-

tion. Positions of teachers initially in charge of buraku education at individual schools

became inclusive of ethnic Koreans and then newcomers. Localities without a history

of minority activism have not had the beneﬁt of such infrastructure and experience

in coping with inﬂuxes of newcomers (e.g. South American car industry workers in

Aichi prefecture).

68. Okano (2006b).

69. Shimizu and Shimizu (2001); Tsuneyoshi (2004).

70. Okano (2006b).

71. Satoshi Suzuki (2002).

72. Kariya (2001).

73. Y

o Takeuchi (1995).

74. Hida, Mimizuka, Iwai and Kariya (2000: 125–8).

75. Hida, Mimizuka, Iwai and Kariya (2000: 191).

76. Shigeki It

o(2002: 95).

77. See Okano (in press).

78. The details are reported in ‘Shir

ızu: Minkanjin shusshin k

och

ogayuku(Series:

Experiences

of principals recruited from non-teaching sectors)’, Yomiuri Shimbun

(2–13 May 2006: 2 May).

112 Kaori Okano