Handbook of Higher Education in Japan 9789048559275

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Handbook of Higher Education in Japan Edited by Paul Snowden

Amsterdam University Press

Originally published 2021 by Japan Documents, an imprint of MHM Limited, Tokyo, Japan Special edition licensed to by Amsterdam University Originally published 2021 Japan Documents, anPress imprint of MHM Limited, Tokyo, Japan Special edition licensed to Amsterdam University Press

Cover design, layout, and typography: TransPac Communications, Greg Glover Cover design, layout, and typography: TransPac Communications, Greg Glover ISBN 978 94 6372 4678 NUR 692 94 ISBN 6372 4678 e-ISBN 978 90 4855 927 5 NUR 692 © The authors / Amsterdam University Press B.V., Amsterdam 2021 © The authors / Amsterdam University Press B.V., Amsterdam 2021 All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this book mayrights be reproduced, stored inlimiting or introduced intounder a retrieval system, or transmitted, anyofform by All reserved. Without the rights copyright reserved above, noin part this or book any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, or otherwise) without the permismay be reproduced, stored in or introduced into arecording retrieval system, or transmitted, in written any form or by sionmeans of both(electronic, the copyright owner and the author ofrecording the book.or otherwise) without the written permisany mechanical, photocopying, sion of both the copyright owner and the author of the book. Every effort has been made to obtain permission to use all copyrighted illustrations reproduced in this book. Nonetheless, whosoever to have rights to this material is advised to contact the publisher. Every effort has been made to believes obtain permission to use all copyrighted illustrations reproduced in this book. Nonetheless, whosoever believes to have rights to this material is advised to contact the publisher.

Table of Contents Contributors. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .v Abbreviations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ix Foreword . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xiii Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .xv 1

Universities in Modern Japan: A Historical Outline Mito Takamichi . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1

2

From Showa to Heisei: The Formation of Japan’s Contemporary Higher Education System Jeremy Breaden . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13

3

The Heisei Period: Plus Ça Change? Jeremy Breaden . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32

4

National Universities: Autonomy in Their Governance; Ideology and Practice Kawano Mako and Gregory Poole . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 47

5

Public Universities: Prefectural, Local Higher Education Bruce Stronach . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 65

6

Private Universities: Diverse and Adaptable Jeremy Breaden and Roger Goodman . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 78

7

Foreign Universities in Japan: Opportunities Taken and Missed Andrew Horvat . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 90

8

The Financing of Higher Education in Japan Fukui Fumitake . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 109

9

Undergraduate Admissions: Shifting Trends Ishikura Yukiko . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 122

10 The Hensachi: Its Dominant Role in University Rankings Roger Goodman and Chinami Oka . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 133 11 Self-Assessment: How Japanese University Students Assess Their Learning Outcomes Yamada Reiko . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 143 12 Policies for Hosting International Students: Issues for the Post-300,000 International Students Plan Era Ota Hiroshi . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 161 13 Regional Cooperation in East Asia: Shifting Reality Christopher D . Hammond and Ashizawa Shingo . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 176 14 International Students: Inbound Mobility at “Elite” and “Mass” Universities Shimauchi Sae . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 188

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15 Academic Support and Advising: Historical and Contemporary Issues Shimada Norihisa . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 204 16 Women’s Universities in Japan: Life Choices Shima Sonoko . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 219 17 Junior Female Academics: Experiences and Challenges Kim Yangson and Sato Machi . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 234 18 Women of Color Leading in Japanese Higher Education Jennifer Yphantides . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 247 19 International Faculty: Increasing Mobility Thomas Brotherhood . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 261 20 Research Universities: Science, Technology, and Innovation Policy Fukui Fumitake . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 275 21 Liberal Arts Education: The Japanese Way Morita Norimasa . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 290 22 The English Language in Japan: A Historical Overview 1809–2020 James C . House . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 309 23 Languages Other Than English: Mysterious Eclipse Francisco Naranjo-Escobar . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 330 24 Critical English Curriculum Enactment: A Policy Planning Perspective Robert M . Higgins . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 350 25 The Dawn of Reiwa: Waves, Revolutions and an “A.I. Society” Ian H . Frank and Malcolm H . Field . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 362 Appendix 1 Chronology of Japan . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .379 Appendix 2 Japanese National Universities, by Prefecture . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .382 Appendix 3 Japanese Public Universities, by Region . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 384 Glossary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .386 Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .392

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Contributors Ashizawa Shingo, professor at Toyo University, Tokyo, conducts comparative studies of higher education management and quality analysis of the internationalization review process. He leads a joint research project supported by the Japan Society for Promotion of Science focusing on foreign credential evaluation and digital student data portability. Publishing widely on related topics, he acts as an advisor for MEXT on UNESCO’s Tokyo Recognition Convention Committee, and has been Deputy Secretary General for UMAP (University Mobility in Asia and the Pacific) since 2016. Thomas Brotherhood, a doctoral candidate at the University of Oxford, works as a research assistant at the Centre for Global Higher Education. Inspired by his experience on the JET Programme, he is primarily interested in research into international higher education in Japan, with a particular emphasis on the relationship between educational mobility and migration. He has recently written on student migration, international faculty mobility, and international research collaboration. Jeremy Breaden, Senior Lecturer and Convenor of the Japanese Studies program at Monash University, Australia has authored several articles and book chapters on higher education and employment in Japan as well as the monographs The Organizational Dynamics of University Reform in Japan (2013), Articulating Asia in Japanese Higher Education (2018) and, with Roger Goodman, FamilyRun Universities in Japan (2020). Malcom Field, with a PhD from the School of Education at the University of Cambridge, has worked for more than 20 years in Japanese higher education. He has published papers on technology in education and on learning with/through technologies, many with his collaborator in this work. He has conducted educational and leadership training in Vietnam and collaborated with universities in Thailand. Current passions: community development through education, and educational policies vis-à-vis institutional practices as a means to alignment, focusing on realizing future possibilities. Ian H. Frank, with a PhD in AI from the University of Edinburgh, has published extensively on games, and teaching AI and programming through creative pedagogy. Working in Japan for more than 25 years, both at a government research institute and at Future University, Hakodate, he has conducted workshops and presentations in numerous countries, including Japan, Vietnam and Australia. He also works for local communities in Japan as president of an NGO that promotes and manages various international and local festivals. Fukui Fumitake, Associate Professor at Kamakura Women’s University, received his PhD in higher education from The University of Tokyo in 2014. He was Assistant Professor at National Graduate Institute for Policy Studies and Fulbright visiting scholar at Teachers College, Columbia University. His book The Growth of Individual Donations in US Higher Education (in Japanese) won two book awards. His latest article in the International Journal of Higher Education Research is titled “Do government appropriations and tax policies impact donations to public research universities in Japan and the USA?” Roger Goodman, Nissan Professor of Modern Japanese Studies and Warden of St Antony’s College, Oxford, includes in his publications three monographs (all published by Oxford University Press): Japan’s ‘International Youth’ (1990), Children of the Japanese State (2000) and, with Jeremy Breaden, Family-Run Universities in Japan (2020), as well as many edited volumes and articles on Japanese education and social policy.

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Christopher D. Hammond, with a DPhil in Education from the University of Oxford, an MA in Comparative Education from University College London, and a master’s in teaching from the University of Washington, has over 13 years of work experience in the field of international higher education. His research focuses on studies of higher education internationalization and regionalism in the context of East Asian international relations. Robert Higgins, teaching in Japanese higher education for 15 years, currently lives and works in the Kansai area. His research interests relate to the cosmopolitan realization of the internationalization of Japanese higher education as it is conceived in relationship to the ecology of language policy planning, specifically through the lens of linguistic citizenship. Andrew Horvat, born in Hungary, grew up in Vancouver, Canada, where experience as a child learning English sparked a lifelong interest in language-related issues. After an MA in Japanese at the University of British Columbia, he worked for 25 years as a Tokyo-based news correspondent. Covering US-Japan trade disputes in the 1980s gave him an interest in linguistic competence as a determinant of trade success, an issue he followed up at Stanford and the National Foreign Language Center in Washington, DC on an Abe Shintaro Fellowship. Directing Stanford University’s overseas studies program in Kyoto from 2008 to 2013, he taught translation and modern Japanese history, which he continues to do at Josai International University. He has published papers on language policy, modern East Asian history, and journalism. James C. House is at present lecturer in Speech & Performance for Presentation at the School of Governance, Meiji University and formerly professor of English Studies in its School of Information & Communication. Forthcoming publications include: Modern Britain for Shohakusha (2021) and League of Blood for Nippodemia (2022). Ishikura Yukiko, associate professor at the Center for International Education and Exchange, Osaka University, gained her PhD in internationalization of higher education at the Graduate School of Human Sciences there. Her research interests lie in the field of internationalization of higher education, college admissions, and student teaching and learning. Kawano Mako, with a master’s in management from the University of Leeds, has been engaged in international admissions, Global 30 and Top Global University Projects, and institutional research (IR) at several Japanese universities over the past 15 years. Presently she is a senior international educational administrator (IEA) in the International Strategy Office at Kyoto University and also a doctoral student at the Graduate School of Education, Kyoto University. Kim Yangson, lecturer in the Research Institute for Higher Education at Hiroshima University, received her PhD from the College of Education, Seoul National University. She has held research posts at the Korean Council of University Education, the Education Research Institute at Seoul National University, and the Center for Innovation, Technology and Policy Research at Instituto Superior Técnico, Universidade de Lisboa. Special interests: internationalization of higher education, academic profession, research productivity and collaboration, institutional context and governance, and comparative higher education in Asia-Pacific countries. Mito Takamichi, Professor of Global Studies in the School of Law and Politics, Kwansei Gakuin University (KGU) and Chief Academic Director, Cross-Cultural College of KGU, Mt. Alison University, Queen’s University and the University of Toronto, is an international education expert and has academic and/or senior management experience at Cambridge, Harvard, Kyushu, Lund, London (SOAS), Monash, Queen’s (Canada), Southern Methodist and Waseda Universities, the University of Toronto and the Chinese University of Hong Kong as well as the University of South Australia. A recent publication is “University Reform in Japan” in Mark Williams and Toshiko Takeda (eds.) Handbook of Contemporary Japan (Routledge, 2020).

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Morita Norimasa, Professor in Film Studies, has been teaching at the School of International Liberal Studies, Waseda University since it was founded in 2004. While researching world cinema and world literature and being involving in school and university administration, he has been invited to give papers on liberal arts education by institutions such as Amsterdam University College, Yale NUS College and Seoul National University, and to contribute articles on the same topic by various journals and newspapers. Francisco Naranjo-Escobar, a graduate of Santiago University, Chile, with a postgraduate qualification at Melbourne University, Australia, has interests in Language Policy, Evaluation, and Education. He currently teaches Spanish at Lakeland University Japan in Tokyo and works on test development. Chinami Oka, DPhil candidate in History and Swire scholar at St Antony’s College, Oxford, completed her MSc in Modern Japanese Studies at Oxford as an Oxford Kobe scholar. Her main research is on the transnational, intellectual, and religious history of modern Japan. She is particularly interested in local, non-state thinkers and their ideas forgotten in lacunas of taken-for-granted narratives. In the field of Japanese education, she published the article “The Invention, Gaming, and Persistence of the Hensachi (‘Standardised Rank Score’) in Japanese Education” with Roger Goodman in the Oxford Review of Education 44, no. 5 in 2018. Ota Hiroshi, Professor at the Center for General Education, Hitotsubashi University, coordinates international education programs. His research primarily focuses on higher education policies and practices related to internationalization and international student mobility from a comparative perspective. Prior to his current position, he worked for Toyo University and the State University of New York at Buffalo, where he received his EdM and PhD. Gregory Poole, DPhil is a professor of social anthropology at the Institute for the Liberal Arts, Doshisha University. Over the past two decades he has held faculty positions at four private and national universities in Japan. His books include Foreign Language Education in Japan: Exploring Qualitative Approaches (2015), Reframing Diversity in the Anthropology of Japan (2015), The Japanese Professor: An Ethnography of a University Faculty (2010), and Higher Education in East Asia: Neoliberalism and the Professoriate (2009). Sato Machi, associate professor in the Center for Promotion of Excellence in Higher Education at Kyoto University, received her DPhil in Education from Oxford University. Her areas of interests include academic identity, academic profession, professional development of academic & graduate students, and higher education policy in Asia-Pacific countries. Shima Sonoko, MA in International and Cultural Studies from Tsuda College, also completed the doctoral program there. Her special topics are International Relations and Baltic Affairs. She has done long-term research in Marburg and Stockholm. A professor at Showa Women’s University in Tokyo, she has been Vice-President since 2019. Shimada Norihisa, with a BA from SUNY Potsdam and MHEdAdmin from J.F. Oberlin University, served as the Director for Academic Advising at Temple University’s Japan Campus (TUJ) for about 10 years. He oversaw TUJ’s professional academic advising center and all advising initiatives provided to their approximately 1,200 undergraduate students. In December 2019, he assumed a new role as the academic advising administrator at Ritsumeikan University. Shimauchi Sae, born in Yokohama, attended Waseda University, gaining a BA and MA in International Relations, and a PhD in International Studies. She is working at Tokyo Metropolitan University as an Associate Professor and is in charge of the Global Education Program. Her research interests lie in the area of higher education internationalization (familiar with Japan, Korea, and the Netherlands), global sociology, and transnational cultural studies, ranging over both theory and practice.

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Paul Snowden studied Modern and Medieval Languages (not including Japanese) at King’s College, Cambridge. Apart from the first five years of his career, he has lived and worked in Japan as a university teacher and administrator, and author or editor of numerous dictionaries, textbooks and other Japan-related works. He worked longest (30 years) at Waseda University, where he served two terms as Dean of the School of International Liberal Studies—the first foreign national to hold such a post at that university—and has been Emeritus Professor since 2014. His most recent post was Vice-President of Kyorin University. He retired in 2020 and now acts as a director for the Japan campus of Lakeland University, Wisconsin. Bruce Stronach, a native of the State of Maine, USA, has his MA, MALD, and PhD from Tufts University Fletcher School. Starting at Keio University in 1976, he was a faculty member in the US and Japan, before moving to administration. He was COO and Provost of Becker College in Worcester, MA, and is the only foreigner to have been President of a Japanese public university, Yokohama City University.  He served as Dean of Temple University’s Japan Campus 2008-20. Yamada Reiko graduated from Doshisha University and received her MA and PhD from the University of California, Los Angeles. She is a professor at the Faculty of Social Studies at Doshisha University, and a former dean of the Faculty of Social Studies. She is the author of Outlook for University Education in 2040, Toshindo, 2019 and the editor of Measuring Quality of Undergraduate Education in Japan, Springer, 2014. Jennifer Yphantides, EdD has worked in higher education  in Japan for 15 years and is currently a tenure-track lecturer at Soka University in Tokyo. She conducts research on diversity and inclusion in Japanese higher education, focusing mainly on women working in Japanese universities and accommodations for learning-disabled students in the EFL classroom.

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Abbreviations AAC ACT AGI AI AIU ALT AO APJLE APNNIC APU APUJ ARWU ASEAN CAAP` CALL CAMPUS Asia CBI CBT CCP CEFR CIE, CI&E CIRP CLA CLIL CNU CST CSTI CUNY DARPA DL DPJ EDGE EFL ELF ELSI EMI EPA ETS FCE FD FLA FOMHEI

Contributors

Association of American Colleges American College Testing (Program) Artificial General Intelligence Artificial Intelligence Akita International University Assistant Language Teacher Admissions Office Association for the Promotion of Japanese Language Education Asia-Pacific Region Network of National Information Centers (Ritsumeikan) Asia Pacific University Association of Private Universities of Japan Academic Ranking of World Universities Association of South-East Asian Nations Collegiate Assessment of Academic Proficiency Computer-Assisted Language Learning Collective Action for Mobility Program of University Students in Asia Content-Based Instruction Computer-Based Test Chinese Communist Party Common European Framework of Reference for Languages  Civil Information and Education (section of GHQ) Cooperative Institutional Research Program Collegiate Learning Assessment Content and Language Integrated Learning Corporatization of National Universities Council for Science and Technology Council for Science, Technology, and Innovation City University New York Defense Advanced Research Project Agency Deep Learning Democratic Party of Japan Enhancing Development of Global Entrepreneur (Program) English as a Foreign Language English as the Lingua Franca Ethical, Legal, and Social Issues English Medium Instruction Economic Partnership Agreement Educational Testing Service Foreign Credential Evaluation Faculty Development Faculty of Liberal Arts Family-Owned or -Managed Higher Education Institution

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FY GGJ GHQ GOFAI GPA GRE GTEC GTM G30 HE HEI IB iBT ICL ICT ICU IELTS IoT IPS IRET IRLT IS ISA ISP JACET JACUE JAHER JALT JANU JAPU JAPUC JASSO JET JFA JLS JMI JSPS JTE JUAA JUAM KCJS LAS KPI LDP LEAD LEADER LEAP LOTE

x

Financial Year Go Global Japan General Headquarters (of the American Occupation in Japan) Good Old-Fashioned AI Grade Point Average Graduate Record Examination Global Test of English Communication Grammar-Translation Method Global 30 (project) Higher Education Higher Education Institution International Baccalaureate Internet-Based Test(ing) Income-Contingent Loan Information and Communication Technology International Christian University International English Language Testing System Internet of Things International Students Plan Institute for Research in English Teaching Institute for Research in Language Teaching International Student Immigration Services Agency International Students Plan Japan Association of College English Teachers Japan Association for College and University Education Japan Association of Higher Education Research Japan Association of Language Teaching Japan Association of National Universities Japan Association of Public Universities Japan Association of Private Universities and Colleges Japan Student Services Organization Japan Exchange and Teaching (Programme) Junior Female Academic Japanese Language School Japanese Medium Instruction Japan Society for the Promotion of Science Japanese Teacher of English Japan University Accreditation Association Japan Association of University Administrative Management Kyoto Consortium for Japanese Studies Liberal Arts and Science Key Performance Indicator Liberal Democratic Party Link, Enhance, Assure, Develop Leading Initiative for Excellent Young Researchers Long-term Educational Administrators Program for International Exchange Language Other Than English

Handbook of Higher Education in Japan

LUJ MAPP MCC METI MEXT MGP MIC MIT MOF MOJ NACADA NASAP NCUEE NDS NET NGO NIAD NIAD-QE NISTEP NPM NRI NSSE NU NUCA NUS ODA PMC OJT PTC QS R&D RU11 SAC SD SDG SGU SIH SILS ST STEP STEM STI TEAP TEFL TESOL TGUP THE THES

Abbreviations

Lakeland University Japan Measure of Academic Proficiency and Progress Microelectronics and Computer Technology Corporation Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology Mid-term Goals and Plans Miyazaki International College Massachusetts Institute of Technology Ministry of Finance Ministry of Justice National Academic Advising Association National Association for Student Affairs Professionals National Center for University Entrance Examinations non-degree-seeking Native English Teacher Non-Governmental Organization National Institution for Academic Degrees National Institution for Academic Degrees and Quality National Institute of Science and Technology Policy New Public Management Networked Readiness Index National Survey of Student Engagement National University National University Corporation Act National University of Singapore Overseas Development Assistance Prime Minister’s Commission (on Japan’s Goals in the 21st Century) on-the-job training Professional Training College Quacquarelli Symonds Research and Development Research University 11 Sapporo Agricultural College Staff Development Sustainable Development Goal Super Global University Strategic Fund for Establishing International Headquarters in Universities School of International Liberal Studies (Waseda University) Staff Development Society for Testing English Proficiency Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics Science, Technology and Innovation Test of English for Academic Purposes Teaching English as a Foreign Language Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages Top Global University Project Times Higher Education Times Higher Education Supplement

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TITP TLO TMU TOEFL TOIEC TORFL TPR TUJ TUMSAT TUSW TWCU UMAP URA WPI WTO YCU

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Technical Intern Trainee Program Technology Licensing Organization Tokyo Medical University Test of English as a Foreign Language Test of English for International Communication Test Of Russian as a Foreign Language Total Physical Response Temple University Japan Tokyo University of Marine Science and Technology Tokyo University of Social Welfare Tokyo Woman’s Christian University University Mobility in Asia and the Pacific University Research Administrator World Premier International Research Center Initiative World Trade Organization Yokohama City University

Handbook of Higher Education in Japan

Foreword Paul Snowden It is to be hoped that readers will gain much from these 25 chapters, which range widely but admittedly cannot cover every single aspect of HE in Japan. Readers are encouraged to engage in further investigation of any item that is included, or not included, here. It is also to be hoped that this book will reach a wide range of readership, from expert scholars to those with a less profound but equally curious interest in things Japanese. Here are a few words about how the book is put together. • Each chapter has its own endnotes, followed by a bibliography in alphabetical order of author’s or institution’s name. • Before this Foreword, after the list of contributors, comes a list of abbreviations with a direct connection to HE in Japan; toward the end of the book are three appendices: one in the form of a short essay on the chronology of Japanese history, and two lists of national and public universities respectively. Then follow a glossary of Japanese expressions, and the index. • The Roman alphabet is used throughout. For the Japanese language, Hepburn romanization is standard in this book (e.g “Shinjuku Nishiguchi,” not “Sinzyuku Nisiguti”). • In principle, Japanese words appear in italics, while proper nouns do not. Japanese personal names are generally given in the conventional Japanese order of family name first (e.g., “Okuma Shigenobu,” not “Shigenobu Okuma”)—except by request or in other special circumstances. The name order in the Notes and Bibliographies is as in the original publications. Length marks when necessary appear over the vowels in Japanese words, but not in proper nouns. • Some statistics, such as numbers of private universities, may vary slightly from chapter to chapter. This is due to fluctuations in those statistics, and the various timings or sources on which each author has chosen to concentrate. • Plans for the book were made before the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, and little mention is made here of its effects on what was the “normal” of Japan’s HE. It remains to be seen how long-lasting those effects will be, and indeed what shape they will take. The authors of these chapters come from a multitude of cultural, linguistic and national backgrounds; there are females and males, young and old, all sharing the knowledge and enthusiasm that are demonstrated here. I am grateful to them all. Moreover, I must express particular gratitude to Mark Gresham at MHM Limited for his successful attempts to persuade me to start this whole work, and subsequently for his invaluable advice and support. We have spent many hours together on matters of editorial policy both major and minuscule, and discovered new ways to work with (or against) the latest hi-tech that is required even of dinosaur editors these days. Finally, please permit a few lines to the memory of Leonid (“Leo”) Yoffe, who had planned to contribute on “the English Language in HE” for this volume, but passed away unexpectedly in Toronto on March 17, 2020 at the age of 57. His last correspondence about his chapter had been by e-mail on March 14, promising to edit up his notes once he was able to return to Japan, where he was on the faculty of the School of Commerce, Waseda University. Leo had first come to Japan as an early ALT, posted to Nagano Prefecture, and afterwards moved to Gunma Prefecture to teach in higher education. He ever after retained a close connection with both of those prefectures. Later serving in the Canadian diplomatic corps, he continued his contribution to cultural, educational, and linguistic

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links with Japan before committing himself once more to HE at Waseda. His writing and lecturing with JALT and many other organizations spanned fields as diverse as language testing, multiculturalism, and language acquisition both inside and far away from Japan—natural in a way for one originally from a Russian-Canadian multilingual environment. Leo’s wife Midori has given her approval for this paragraph, writing, “It is a very appropriate way of remembering his life and dedication in EFL in Japan.” May he rest in peace.

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Introduction Paul Snowden On the surface, Japan’s higher education (HE) system looks much like that of any other modern nation: various institutions where young people who have completed a dozen or so years of elementary and secondary education may study for further qualifications that may be useful to them in their careers . The current system was, after all, introduced (some would say “imposed”) during the American Occupation 1945–52 . As in every other nation, though, there are major and minor details that serve to make Japan’s system “unique”—to use a word that Japanese people love both in English, and in Japanese, as “yunīku .” As someone who has spent the years 1978–2020 at the chalk-face in HE in Japan, I have sometimes consciously, but more frequently unconsciously, lived through innumerable major events for HE . While still a young conversation teacher in the late 1960s I witnessed the extremism of the student movements, and was present 30 years later when the last remaining radical sect was finally ejected from one major university . On joining Tsukuba University in 1977, I witnessed faculty meetings where some of the faculty remained nostalgic for the old-style universities that had been replaced under the Occupation in 1949; I witnessed petty faculty rivalries between those who had graduated from one university and those from another; I witnessed the hesitancy with which universities approached the new law permitting tenure to non-Japanese citizens . At Waseda University between 1983 and 2013, I experienced the second baby boom, with tens of thousands of young people desperate for admission in order to slide into a good career; I experienced the confusion caused by the Ministry suddenly relaxing the rules concerning the apportionment of credits, so that suddenly the Ministry could no longer be blamed for excessively strict regulation, though faculty were unprepared to deal with their new freedom; I experienced, and had the honor of joining in, the long-awaited, at last energetic, moves toward internationalization, which suddenly gained a new, trendy name—globalization . At Kyorin University 2013–2020 I became one of a growing number of non-Japanese university vice-presidents, enjoyed the generosity of government grants to the university for both global and local projects, and participated in the flight from a remote campus to a new one in a more accessible part of suburban Tokyo . Throughout those four decades and a bit, I have seen women break into male-dominated areas of study and employment; overseas citizens break into over-protected personnel environments; students break into careers and lifestyles unknown to previous generations . Yet somehow it all remains very Japanese . As the editor of this work, I have finally had the pleasure and privilege to become more closely acquainted with the community of scholars worldwide who specialize in studying education as a topic in its own right . I have been impressed by the breadth and depth of research that is being done to create the solid scholastic foundation for the simple teaching that I myself have blithely done in universities and colleges in Japan without sparing a thought for these beavers behind the scenes . Editing this book has brought into greater focus many facts and ideas of which I have previously been half aware but not sufficiently conscious .

Japan and the “outside” world For Japan, peaceful overseas exchange with the West may be said to have begun in the second half of the 16th century, when the first Japanese individual and the first missions visited the Vatican and other Christian-related locations in Mediterranean Europe. A mural in the Vatican Library dating back to

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1585 still records their presence in Rome. Those first few decades when the Spanish and Portuguese dominated European activities in the Orient brought new ideas and items which many Japanese people adopted with enthusiasm: Christianity to begin with, and in addition new foods, clothes, and weapons in the shape of firearms. Some things now regarded as “traditionally Japanese”—tempura, kasutera cake, the Ponto-cho area of Kyoto, and so on—actually reflect the influence of the “southern barbarians” (nanbanjin) as the visitors were known, since they had arrived from the south, where Spain and Portugal had already set up trading posts. The missionaries also introduced a type of Western Higher Education: seminaries to train Japanese priests in the liberal arts as well as theology. Four centuries later in the 21st century, the “southern barbarians” remain familiar only in the name of a dish of fried chicken (chikin nanban)—though of course Jochi (Sophia) and Nanzan Universities in Tokyo and Nagoya respectively continue the long-interrupted presence of the Roman Catholic church. For Japanese people now, the global role not of Latin but of the English language, which is used worldwide in their daily activities by more non-native than native speakers, tends to make the concept and the word “foreign” synonymous with “English” or “Anglophone.” This is the case with HE in Japan, where the foreign-influenced universities that date back to the Meiji period, and have survived, all came with close connections to the US or, to a lesser extent, Great Britain. From the 1860s, English rapidly took over the role of leading foreign (i.e., European) language from Dutch, which had held a monopoly since the 1630s, when Spanish and Portuguese withdrew after a presence of nine decades. In this book, Chapter 1 reviews some of those early footholds by Christian organizations, while Chapter 7 reveals further developments in their evolution. Now, items of vocabulary from those early times have survived as relics in Japanese in katakana form, but the days when they were primary languages for international communication in Japan are long gone. Indeed, many ordinary Japanese people will not be aware of the unexpectedly polyglot origins of some of the loanwords that they use daily, and may simply assume that they all come from English. The word kōhī, for example, resembles the English “coffee” well enough, once the limitations of transcription to the katakana syllabary are understood, but the drink reached Japan many years before any English influence, and the spoken word is based on the Dutch koffie—though the kanji characters that are used should strictly speaking be read kahi, which suggests a Spanish or Portuguese derivation. Japanese buriki for “tin” reflects Dutch blik: Dutch merchants were responsible throughout most of the Edo period for introducing many new items of simple technology. There are sometimes doublets: kirishitan and kurishichan for “Christian” from Spanish/Portuguese and English respectively; sukoppu from Dutch schop and shaberu or shoberu from English “shovel,” both meaning the same. Japanese botan for “button” does look similar to the English word, but if it were really to follow the regular rules for transcription, it would surely be “baton”; it is actually a very early borrowing from Portuguese botão . In this way, the Japanese language is surprisingly rich in non-English loanwords, reflecting a longerthan-expected tradition of “global outreach.” The names of nations and major cities are sometimes taken from the English names, sometimes from that nation’s language. English-based names include: Supein for Spain, not the Spanish España; Sue-den for Sweden, not the Swedish Sverige; Kopenhāgen for Copenhagen, not the Danish København. Names that reflect that nation’s language rather than English include Pari from French; Itaria and Rōma from Italian; Mosukuwa from Russian; Warushawa from Polish; Myunhen from German. For a while during and after the Meiji period, the German language had a foothold in university education, especially in medical schools. Medical students who did part-time work to support themselves used the word arubaito—from the German Arbeit, for English “work”—which persists today, often abbreviated to baito. Some basic medical vocabulary in common use in Japan derives from German: gibusu (German Gips, English “plaster cast”); karute (German Karte, English “medical record”); rentogen (from the name of the German inventor Röntgen for “X-ray”) and so on. Some

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names of long-established companies use a “z” in their Romanized spelling to indicate the German pronunciation “ts,” for example Mazda automobiles, Matsuda in Japanese. The pronunciation with a voiced “z” of zemināru for “Seminar” is evidence for the German, rather than English provenance of the Japanese word; Chapter 10 and several others use the word in meanings more or less exclusive to Japanese education, too. German has, of course, survived at many universities and colleges as a daini gaikokugo (second foreign language) that students may select in addition to English. There are on the other hand very few institutions in Japan’s mainstream HE system that offer German, or any other foreign language for that matter, as the daiichi gaikokugo (first foreign language). In recent years, with the rising popularity of Spanish, and the neighboring languages of China and Korea, German has suffered something of a decline as a second foreign language, but does still attract attention on account of Germany’s economic and scientific successes. When Dutch was the only foreign language officially permitted in Japan, the relationship was a two-way one. Japan was studied at the University of Leiden from the 17th century, only a few decades after the university’s establishment in 1575; the world’s first department of Japanese studies was set up there in 1855—ironically in the same decade as English began its takeover. Since 2012, the University of Leiden has run its own office at the University of Tokyo. In the reverse direction, for two centuries or more Japan studied Western knowledge through the Dutch language, the most famous instance being Kaitai Shinsho, the translation by Sugita Genpaku in 1774 of the manual of anatomy Ontleedkundige Tafelen. Many of the first dictionaries of English that appeared in Japan were Dutch-English, EnglishDutch volumes; early locally produced manuals of English revealed a prior knowledge of Dutch orthography and phonology; early teachers of English were Dutch. Chapter 22, in its historical review of how English spread, touches on the influences of Dutch in the first half of the 19th century. Another European nation that had an early interest in Japanese studies was Russia, which through Siberia can claim to be Japan’s closest European neighbor. Japanese was taught in Moscow from the very early years of the 18th century, initially by a reluctant Denbei, a Japanese merchant who had been shipwrecked and was ordered by Peter the Great to teach his language to a few Muscovites. This exploitation of Japanese castaways continued into the 19th century: after the sakokurei—the Shogunate’s edicts of the 1630s to isolate the nation from foreign influence—such unfortunates had been forbidden to return. It was not until 1898, however, with the creation of the Department of Japanese Philology at  Saint Petersburg University, that formal studies began. In Japan, perhaps recently on account of political and diplomatic circumstances, as well as a reputation for being grammatically extremely complex, the Russian language has not attracted large numbers of university students. In those universities where it is offered as a subject, it is not one of the most popular—despite the geographical proximity of the nation and its language. Some cultural and linguistic exchange can be noted, however: the large domestic stove in Hokkaido’s older houses, pechika, derives from the Russian pechka; Russian ikra for “caviar” has given the Japanese ikura. See Chapter 23 for an appeal to recognize the importance, and vitalize the policy-making and pedagogical priorities for LOTE (Languages Other Than English) in Japan’s HE in the face of the strong dominance of English. One distinction can be claimed in the 21st century by a branch campus in Japan of a Russian university. Established in 1994, the Hakodate branch campus of the Far Eastern Federal University in Vladivostok received official recognition by MEXT as a branch in Japan of a foreign university. This was in 2006, two years after such recognition became legally possible, and just one year after similar recognition was granted to the US institutions Temple University and Lakeland College in Tokyo. The Hokkaido city of Hakodate, with its Orthodox church (Japan’s oldest, founded in 1858) and other evidence of cultural influence from nearby Russia, is certainly an appropriate location for the Russian college. Russian vessels had been attempting to gain trading access there for several decades before Commodore Perry landed near what is now Yokosuka in 1853, in what is really erroneously seen as an unprecedented attempt to break the sakoku isolation.

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After the changes in the law governing universities in 2004, by 2019 only six institutions had gained recognition as foreign branch campuses. The first were the two US branches mentioned above; the third was the Russian college in Hakodate. Then in 2006 followed the first of three Chinese institutions, the Sannomiya, Kobe branch of Tianjin University of Traditional Chinese Medicine. Approval was granted in 2015 to the Shinjuku, Tokyo branch campus of Beijing Foreign Studies University. The Tokyo branch of Shanghai University also in Shinjuku, Tokyo received its approval in 2019. Those changes in the law represented the constant moves to keep Japanese HE abreast of worldwide trends—moves which are presented in Chapters 1, 2, and 3, discussed chronologically in shorter and shorter periods the nearer the present is approached. The current “present” neatly coincides with the start of a new regnal era, which is discussed in Chapter 25. For those readers unacquainted with Japan’s pretty unique (if such a concept can exist) calendars, a short essay on Chronography is provided at the back of the book. But what of Japanese HE establishments overseas? Australian universities can operate campuses in Malaysia and elsewhere; American Universities in Beirut, Cairo, etc. are dotted all over the globe; UK universities run branches in China. In what way is Japan involved in such ventures, that could act as vehicles for exporting Japan’s soft power in this technological age? Some Japanese universities collect cooperation agreements with overseas universities like little children collect Pokémon cards—avidly but often to little practical purpose. Many are not fulfilled by any practical educational or research collaboration, but signed certificates of agreement are proudly displayed on the walls of presidents’ offices. Irrational policies may be created: only one university in any one overseas city; only universities above a certain ranking; preferably universities that will accept students with only modest TOEFL scores, and so on. Out of the thousands of individual agreements with overseas institutions, most offer not a full degree program but short courses ranging from a week or so to a single semester; a whole year is termed “long-term” ryūgaku. Of course, there have been some serious attempts at setting up campuses overseas. One major actor has been the Teikyo group. Operating more than three dozen domestic educational establishments covering a complete range from kindergartens to hospitals and several HE institutions (as well as a strong rugby team), it has the resources to support overseas locations. It has its own applied sciences campus in Berlin, and runs another campus in Durham, UK, in collaboration with Durham University (England’s third oldest). On the other hand, six Teikyo-related campuses (five in the US, one in the Netherlands) set up around 1990 have all closed down. Neither Waseda nor Keio, the “top” private universities, operate university-level campuses overseas, though they do have representative offices and various collaborative institutes in many parts of the world. They do operate popular high schools in some major cities overseas, predominantly for Japanese children whose parents have been posted overseas but wish their children to stay under Japan’s education system. In that respect, those overseas high schools might be seen to represent not globalization, but a determined kind of insularity. Chapter 6 examines the strengths of the private universities in Japan, which greatly outnumber the national institutions (see Chapter 4 and Appendix 2) and the local-public ones (Chapter 5 and Appendix 3). National universities account for around two in each of the nation’s 47 prefectures—the local government unit that equates to the British county or the French département. Local public (or simply “public” in the Japanese expression kōritsu) institutions, administered at a prefectural or municipal level, comprise a total of almost 100, while private establishments account for many more: around 600, even without including technical or professional schools for the over-18s. Foreign ownership or administration is rare, but historical links are frequent, with many reputable universities able to trace their roots back to religious founders, or early Japanese educators with experience of overseas study, as described in Chapter 7. As a fundamental feature of governance, whether national, local public, private, or foreign, finance is treated in Chapter 8.

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Independently from official sources, Japanese individual and corporate donors have been generous to many universities and research centers worldwide, to the extent that scholarships, institutes, lecture theaters and so on bearing the name of a Japanese person or company are common in many parts of the world. The Heisei emperor, when crown prince, studied at Merton College, Oxford, and so did the current Reiwa emperor, his son. Empress Masako has studied at both Harvard University and Balliol College, Oxford. In Asia and further afield, closer and closer academic links at various levels are to be expected and welcomed, as Chapter 13 outlines with reference to the region of East Asia.

World rankings Japan was quick to embrace internationalization as the end of the reclusive Edo period approached. A new spirit of international competitiveness took hold after more than two centuries of self-imposed isolation. Foreign technology came flooding in at an ever-increasing pace. Railroads, which arrived in 1872, came almost half a century after the first ones in England, but that time lag soon shrank. A telephone service began in 1877, when Alexander Graham Bell himself brought his invention to Japan only a year after first announcing it to the world. Japan was ready to accept things foreign; foreign parts showed an equal interest in things Japanese. The opportunity to show the country off to the outside world was soon grasped, and the 19thcentury fashion for international exhibitions provided that opportunity. The Bunkyu 2 (1862) Mission to Europe had been carefully planned so that the members, who included Fukuzawa Yukichi (having founded his Keio Gijuku school three years earlier), could attend the Great Exhibition in London, where already there was a display of Japanese items. The Exposition Universelle at Paris attracted a large delegation and display in 1867—the final year of the Edo period. For the first official participation in an international exposition by the new Meiji government, Vienna provided the venue in 1873; Okuma Shigenobu (who had been involved in establishing Japan’s first railroad, and would found the forerunner of Waseda University nine years later) was the president of the committee responsible for a display that initiated Europe’s attraction to japonaiserie. That attraction became a boom at the US Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia in 1876, and at the next Exposition Universelle at Paris in 1878. It was at the 1884 New Orleans World’s Fair that Lafcadio Hearn was stricken by what he saw as the exoticism of the nation at the Japanese exhibit, and made friends with a Japanese official who would later be of help to him when he came to live and work in Japan from 1890 until his death in 1904. Since those decades in the 19th century, Japan has remained a firm supporter of international expositions which have successfully spread its image throughout the globe. The Tokyo Olympic Games, canceled in 1940, were a great success in 1964, followed by the Winter Olympics in Sapporo in 1972 and Nagano in 1998. Unfortunately shelved again in 2020, the Olympics and Paralympics nevertheless retain their popularity for similar reasons of worldwide recognition. There are great celebrations when a Japanese citizen is granted international recognition (whether or not the award-winning work was actually done in Japan) by being selected for a Nobel Prize, which in recent years has become less infrequent. In the 21st century, Japan has pioneered much in hi-tech and has triumphed in space research, too. Several chapters examine recent policies and processes for globalizing the student body and faculty of Japanese HE. In Chapter 12, factors including demographic changes, demand for cultural exchange, and prospects for immigration are discussed, with proposals made for expansion and reform as the Reiwa period proceeds. Chapter 13 looks especially at East Asia, the geographically nearest part of the world to Japan. Japan’s regional role is undergoing change from industrial might to a softer form of influence, in which HE can be expected to wield considerable influence, if the right policies are formulated and instituted. For Chapter 14, a student-focused approach is presented, to make sure that

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international students can benefit from studying in Japan, and simultaneously bring benefit to the campuses where they study. Differences among the varying statuses of colleges are seen to have some effect. A relatively new concept for HE in Japan is introduced in Chapter 15: the concept of “specialist” members of the administrative staff who might take over from faculty members some roles such as admissions and student support. This model is not uncommon overseas, and may become more widespread as Japan’s HE globalizes and the advantages of having a trained and qualified specialist staff are better recognized. The topic of overseas faculty members is further covered in Chapter 19, which attempts to answer some questions about the roles of foreign faculty in HE in Japan, and how such people have changed in numbers, national background, and contribution to expanding globalization. Thus, there were high hopes for the international standing of Japan’s HE system when the publication of international rankings became popular around the start of the century. Initially, they promised a platform for demonstrating Japan’s world-class status in yet another field of endeavor. That, however, was not to be. There are already many domestic rankings, compiled by commercial organizations such as the major newspapers and yobikō, as Chapters 9 and 10 discuss, for Japan as well as for other specific nations. These listings do influence prospective students, their families, and their schools—and later maybe those students’ prospective employers. After all, even those universities and colleges that boast of high proportions of students from overseas could not exist without a majority of students recruited inside Japan by a variety of methods as presented in Chapters 9, 10 and 15, but it is the international or global rankings that attract the close attention of Japan’s top HE institutions. The world being, in terms of volume of internationally distributed academic research, Anglocentric, talk of global rankings for universities may center first on those published by the Times Higher Educational Supplement in collaboration with the educational consultancy Quacquarelli Symonds (QS) between 2004 and 2009, and subsequently as separate bodies with separate parameters for judgment. However, they were preceded by a list first produced one year earlier in 2003 by Shanghai Jiao Tong [Communications] University, published annually as the Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU). In that first year, five Japanese universities, all national institutions, appeared in the top one hundred of the ARWU list: Tokyo at 19th, Kyoto at 30th, Osaka at 53rd, Tohoku at 64th and Nagoya at 68th; the first private university to appear was Keio, in the 251–300 cohort, where institutions are not listed in precise order. The University of Tokyo rose once, in 2004, to 14th, but thereafter fluctuated around 20th, until a slight decline began in 2017, resulting in 26th position in 2020, followed by Kyoto University at 34th. No private university in 2020 reached the top 300, despite official and unofficial efforts in Japan to raise the figures. Thus, there has been a gradual decline, disappointing for the universities themselves and for the authorities. A similar tale can be told for the THES/QS scores in their first year, 2004. There, two Japanese universities appeared in the top 50: UTokyo in 12th place and Kyoto University in 29th; two more also reached the top hundred: Tokyo Institute of Technology (51st) and Osaka University (69th). Next, after a lengthy gap, in 153rd position, came Tohoku University, followed by Nagoya University in 167th. Thus, six Japanese national institutions (all national—none private or local-public) reached the top 200, which gave good publicity to those six, but disappointed (and simultaneously encouraged to greater but frustrating efforts) some of the top private schools. To make matters worse, in 2011, after THE (re-named Times Higher Education in 2008) and QS had parted ways to form separate listings based on some separate parameters, the Times World University Rankings (THE) placed the two top Japanese universities somewhat lower than before, at 26 and 57 respectively. The next three from 2004 slipped out of the top hundred to 112, 130 and 132 respectively, while the last one fell below 200. UTokyo remained around the mid-twenties for the next five years, but in 2016 suffered a sharp drop to 43, and since then has fluctuated, but never above 36. The top private

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universities have suffered disappointing THE results, too, with both Waseda and Keio beginning in 2012 in the 351–400 cohort, but falling by 2020 to 601–800. Similar results for those top national universities appear in the QS listings for 2021, though Waseda (189) and Keio (191) do relatively better. Here it is only fair to note that other nations, too, are suffering declining assessments, as more and more US and Chinese universities rise in the rankings. Only a handful of UK institutions, too, despite their Anglophone advantage, can continue to occupy prestigious high positions. Even the regional rankings for Asia, which the main agencies also publish, do little to encourage Japan. For 2020, THE put UTokyo seventh in Asia, with mainland China, Hong Kong, and Singapore each providing two institutions in the top six, higher than UTokyo; even worse, QS ranked no Japanese university at all in the top ten. Those were major blows. A separate set of rankings just for Japan, the Times Higher Education Japan University Rankings, was instituted in 2017 in collaboration with the Japanese educational corporation Benesse, and soon delivered two more blows to conventional wisdom. In the first, for 2020 Tohoku University was placed at the top, while the UTokyo was reduced to a shared third place with Tokyo Institute of Technology. In the second blow, at number 10 came not a national university but a small local-public one—Akita International University, established only in 2004 in a remote part of the country, whose efforts at Anglophone globalization have clearly paid off. The results, therefore, for Japan, have bewildered and disappointed many, and elicited much selfreflection. One conclusion must be that the Anglophone world is at a great advantage under the parameters of all three ranking organizations, since common factors for judgment include publication in international academic journals and frequency of citations. The very fact that Japanese institutions provide ample internal opportunities to publish in Japanese effectively militates against those articles being widely read or cited in the rest of the world—or even domestically on account of their sheer number. The corollary of that, that Japanese scholars can’t write or present in English is no longer so true, but the very profusion of academic associations and other opportunities to present work in Japanese (often with only cursory peer reviewing) must have an effect. After all, a not inconsiderable number of Japanese Nobel prizewinners have actually had many years of experience working overseas—though all have attended one of the national universities at some time. To be sure, the 16 parameters applied by THE when evaluating Japanese institutions are the same as the ones applied worldwide, which evokes in some quarters the complaint that those parameters don’t suit Japanese circumstances. There may be some truth to this, but the parameters are openly announced for universities to consider, and anyway to introduce Japan-specific parameters would defeat the objects of a worldwide assessment. One thing is certain: one drawback must be the isolation of Japan’s education system. The nation is large enough and prosperous enough to operate an efficient, self-sufficient system. It may well be modeled on a structure imposed in the years of the American Occupation, but after more than 70 years the similarity now is no more than superficial. Some people might blame the shimaguni konjō, or insularity complex, in conjunction with the erroneous belief that Japanese people are “not good at English,” but the fact remains that Japan’s autonomous education system provides the backdrop for the low rankings. Individual “top” universities have made it an important goal to raise their international rankings, but to little effect so far. MEXT’s strategies in the first decades of the 21st century have been underpinned by a desire to raise those rankings, too. After all, one common criterion that the ranking agencies share is numbers of participants (students, faculty, and researchers) from overseas, and through its advertised goals of 300,000 overseas students, programs held exclusively in English and so on, MEXT has made efforts to align Japan with its overseas competitors. Chapter 24 presents a critique of some common approaches and proposes some radically realistic remedies. Nevertheless, even after the 300,000 has been reached, proportions remain low, perhaps prevented from rising sufficiently by such factors as large class sizes connected with poor student-teacher ratios, a national nervousness about admitting

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too many foreigners as either students to study for a limited period or as faculty and staff to reside for the long term, an inward-looking recruitment system that requires fluency in the Japanese language, and a stubborn concentration on English as an academic subject deprived of any practical application. Chapter 22 provides a historical summary of English language education—a subject that has undergone many transformations and often still acts not primarily as a tool for communication but rather as a focus for literary and cultural studies, as well as a simple but possibly over-used indicator of academic competence. Were Japanese children to have the opportunity to learn English early in their lives, when they are capable of assimilating pronunciation and structures, and have not yet been affected by the shyness and social awkwardness that affects teenagers, a degree taught in English might be less of an obstacle, but attempts to introduce English in elementary education have not gone well. Causes for this include an absence of good, qualified, willing teachers at that level, and a common prejudice that children are incapable of assimilating a foreign language before they have completed their studies of Japanese. It is not only foreigners who think that Japanese is “difficult.” With its demographic circumstances indicating a population that is both aging and declining, Japan will need to change its wariness toward both long-term and short-term immigration. That may provide an additional impetus, beyond considerations of national prestige, for opening more and more universities to foreigner-friendly programs, thereby, as a welcome side effect, impressing the ranking agencies and enabling Japan to climb up the ranks at last. Or maybe, on the other hand, ordinary noncompetitive universities in Japan will achieve continued success by realizing that world rankings are not the be all and end all of educational achievement, and will continue to serve their communities by evolving and adapting to the times regardless of what the world thinks.

Along one suburban train line In any case, Japan’s HE is highly diverse and highly adaptable. To focus on domestic circumstances rather than global matters, it may be useful to examine one small geographical area in suburban Tokyo to see how HE operates at the local level. The area selected here is that served by the Seibu Shinjuku railway line, but similar areas are to be found throughout the nation. The Seibu Shinjuku Line serves residents in western Tokyo and southwestern Saitama Prefecture; starting at Seibu Shinjuku station, it runs parallel to the JR Yamanote Line until Takadanobaba, where it turns west, off towards the suburbs, and eventually the countryside. From Kodaira, one of the Tokyo Metropolis’s 26 suburban municipalities (shi), it branches in two major directions: left toward Haijima in Akishima-shi, and right toward Kawagoe in neighboring Saitama Prefecture. Here we look at how HE institutions near to some of the stations along this line have weathered the changing circumstances in HE. All of the factual information can be gained from the relevant web pages, while any conclusions drawn or opinions expressed remain the editor’s own. The train line itself has adapted itself to its times. It developed piecemeal under several names from the 1890s, carrying freight and transporting nightsoil out to what was still a mainly agricultural area, supplying the growing Tokyo. There are still relics of disused lines leading out to what were cultivated fields. In the 1920s, as the area urbanized and commuting to work became common, electrification began. The terminus remained at Takadanobaba until the 1950s, when the line was extended to SeibuShinjuku Station in a move that was intended to be a temporary one before part of the big Shinjuku Station would be occupied after redevelopment in the 1960s. But demands for longer trains to handle increasing overcrowding meant that there would be insufficient space. Older people can remember when Seibu trains had just a few cars, but now most operate up to ten cars long. The 21st century has seen other trends, including falling passenger numbers and demands for greater convenience, which the line has tried to remedy by offering greater variety in express services and other comfortable facilities.

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One feature, typical of many railway companies, that connects the Seibu Line and the universities (as well as other educational institutions) along its routes is the use by universities of advertising in and on the trains. Cards and posters inside the trains announce frequent open days, usually during the summer, while the approach of the entrance-exam season in February sees a further proliferation of advertisements featuring smiling, often multinational, students as enticements to high school students using the line. There are even cases of whole trains of up to ten cars being externally “wrapped” with a university’s name and other information. Cynics might claim that the larger or more numerous the adverts, or the more frequent the open days, the more desperate the university is to attract students. For the universities introduced below, the hensachi is given—the common but often controversial statistical value presented in Chapter 10 whereby university rankings are assessed. Like the train line, the HE institutions described here have also adapted themselves to the changing times: expansion of modern specialist education and education for women from around the 1920s; reconfiguration after the war; growing demand by the baby boomers; changing fortunes of female-only education; demographic decline; the demand for internationalization and other added-value benefits, and so on. Takadanobaba station is famous for being the one for Waseda University, which lies a short bus or subway ride towards central Tokyo. As Waseda is mentioned frequently elsewhere in this book, and is famous in its own right, we shall leave it and turn our attention first to the university that is the nearest to the station itself: Tokyo Fuji University, which is located right next to the railway line between Takadanobaba and the next station, Shimo-Ochiai. It is best reached on foot down Sakae-dori, a narrow street lined with small entertainment locales and other businesses. The institution was founded in 1943 as Toa Gakuin by Takada Yudo, a distinguished Waseda graduate. After a few minor changes, in 1946 its name was changed to Taisei Gakuin, where Ikeda Daisaku, later famous as leader of the Soka Gakkai religious sect, studied in the evening division in 1948. In 1951 another name change introduced the expression “Fuji”: the renowned lexicographer Katsumata Senkichiro became the first president of the new Fuji Junior College (Fuji Tanki Daigaku). Since then the Fuji institution has continued under a board run by the Futagami family. As a junior college, for several decades the student body remained mostly female, and the curriculum concentrated on accounting and clerical matters, which offered solid employment after two years of study. The decline in popularity of junior colleges that came with the upheavals of the 1990s affected Fuji, too, and in 2001 “Tanki” (short-term) was deleted from the name, while “Tokyo” was added to create Tokyo Fuji University. As a four-year institution it began to attract male students, too, and expanded with a policy of extra construction on its small but geographically favorable campus. A junior college department was retained for a decade or so, to be abolished finally in 2013. The current curriculum is still business-based, with some departments such as Management Psychology and Event Production following modern trends for eye-catching titles. There is a small master’s program. The undergraduate program’s hensachi varies according to different yobikō between 45 and 35. Seibu trains fully wrapped in the Tokyo Fuji name have been witnessed in recent years. This university, as well as others along the line, converted to co-education in recent years, but it would be unfair to conclude that female-only education is in absolute decline. Chapter 16, recognizing two parallel themes that have provided a consistent rationale and structure that started in the Meiji period and still remain valid, expresses optimism. Chapter 17 looks at the experiences of young female scholars in a society that is rapidly evolving but does retain many elements of older views that create obstacles to reaching ideal standards of equality in academia. Chapter 18 presents a pioneering analysis that combines the topics of race and gender to examine the circumstances of female scholars in positions of a degree of authority in Japan. Such persons are currently few and far between, and this chapter may provide pointers for how progress could be made for the future.

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On a bluff overlooking Nakai, the next station after Shimo-Ochiai, stands Mejiro University. This is the original site of an educational foundation, Mejiro Gakuen, which embraces all stages of education and has recently expanded in both scope and location. It was begun as a school in 1923 (with a predecessor in Kumamoto from 1918) by Sato Juen and his wife Fuyu as Kenshin Gakuen. The foundation received its current name in 1929, relating it to the nearby Mejiro Station on what is now the Yamanote Line, though “Kenshin” (Spirit of Study) continues to this day as part of the title of the associated secondary schools. A major educational purpose was clarified with the name Mejiro Commercial School in 1934 and further in 1944, when it became Mejiro Women’s Commercial School. In the 1950s, significant Jomon and Yayoi period remains were unearthed during building work; the results of continuing excavations are on display at the campus. While a kindergarten was added in 1960, HE-level education began in 1963 with the creation of Mejiro Women’s Junior College with a department of English Language and Literature. Since converting to a four-year, co-educational program in 1994 and opening an additional campus in Saitama Prefecture, the University has successfully adapted itself to contemporary trends, and now operates a wide range of courses in welfare and health sciences, while retaining and expanding its provision of education in languages, culture, and communication. A graduate school was begun in 1999. As its centenary approaches, it can boast of many achievements during the first two decades of the 21st century. The undergraduate programs’ hensachi varies according to different yobikō between 50 and 35. A few stops along the line, near Kami-Shakujii Station, lies not a university per se, but Waseda University’s High School (Kōtō Gakuin), all of whose graduates (all male) are guaranteed entry to the University after three years of study—or six years for boys who enter the junior high school (chūgaku) added in the early 21st century. Suburban Tokyo is rich in such secondary education institutions, many of which have close affiliations with universities to which they offer straightforward university admission for all or some of their pupils. Chapter 9 outlines the variety of policies and mechanisms colleges are developing to deal with recruitment of students from a shrinking population, and how they can assess applicants for their academic suitability. Chapter 15 proposes policies new to Japan for employing faculty and/or staff specialists in advising and selecting prospective students, while Chapter 11 uses the increasingly popular method of self-assessment surveys for an analysis of how high school experience might predict performance at university, and of the correlation between actual performance and how students assess themselves. The next stop for the Seibu Shinjuku Line express trains after Kami-Shakujii is Tanashi, the nearest station for the old main campus of Musashino University, named like many other institutions, companies and other organizations in this area after the old Province of Musashi, with the “-no” referring to the wide agricultural plains that used to feed Edo. Buddhist scholar Takakusu Junjiro established Musashino Girls’ School in Tsukiji in 1924; it moved to the current location in 1929. With areas of specialization in Japanese and English Literature, History, and Home Economics, the school provided a conventional curriculum for the time. When war damage in 1945 forced Chiyoda Girls’ School to relocate to the Tanashi campus, the concentration on female education was strengthened, and after the 1949 educational reforms Musashino Women’s Junior College came into being, with the same curriculum. After a four-year program was introduced in 1965, the curriculum began to expand, first in the direction of childhood education. The change of the name “Department of Home Economics” (kaseika) to “Department of Life and Living” (seikatsugakka) in 1990 reflected advances in society, to which the university adapted itself with increasing rapidity. Faculties began reorganizing in the 1990s, and a graduate school was established in 1999. In 2004 the university became co-educational, the new Faculty of Pharmacy setting the trend for expansion into areas of human and health sciences. The humanities and social sciences were not ignored, however, and the Buddhist studies promoted by the founder continue. With the construction of a new campus at Ariake on Tokyo Bay in 2012, further expansion in nursing and related fields took place, to the extent that much of the main administration moved there.

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The Tanashi campus does remain active, with its attractive buildings surrounded by mature trees. The undergraduate programs’ hensachi varies according to different yobikō between 55 and 45. A short walk from the next station to the west, Hanakoganei, is Kaetsu University. This small institution is a typical representative of specialist schools run by the same family for several generations. Kaetsu Taka established a commercial school for women in 1903, which finally became a co-educational four-year university in 2001. The name “Kaetsu” was not used until 1982, when the institution moved from central Tokyo to its current location as Kaetsu Joshi Tanki Daigaku (Kaetsu Women’s Junior College). There it has continued its concentration on skills related to accounting, culminating in the graduate program in Business Innovation in 2010—a title that reflects recent trends for individual institutions to search for unique and attractive names for their new courses. In 1996 the Kaetsu Building was constructed in the grounds of New Hall (now Murray-Edwards College), Cambridge, and is used for occasional study trips during vacations. Recently, on account of financial irregularities, the Kaetsu family have had to withdraw from active participation in administration. The undergraduate programs’ hensachi varies according to different yobikō between 40 and 35. At the next station, Kodaira, the Seibu Line branches left towards Haijima and a network of smaller Seibu Lines, and right for the main route to Kawagoe in Saitama Prefecture. It is worth noting in passing that that network of smaller lines accommodates several well-known and high-ranking universities, including Hitotsubashi (a national university with a strong faculty of law, relocated from the eponymous area of central Tokyo after the 1923 earthquake), Tsuda-juku (the women’s university founded by the pioneer of women’s education Tsuda Umeko, featured in Chapters 7, 16 and 21 on foreign universities, women’s universities, and liberal arts education respectively), and Musashino Art University. A little further away, on the Chuo and Keio lines, lies Hachioji, the large suburban city that attracted two dozen universities to move there in the 1980s and 90s when central Tokyo’s land prices were impossibly high. After some years of success, many of them are regretting their move now that student numbers have fallen, and there have been frequent cases of returning in whole or in part to high-rise buildings in central Tokyo. Where the main Seibu-Shinjuku route enters Saitama Prefecture at Tokorozawa, that city, like many other cities of a similar size, boasts several specialist colleges of further education, which offer shorter courses for young people who prefer to train for a specific occupation rather than commit themselves to four years of study. Some of those schools, or senmon gakkō, have suffered from recent demographic trends, but others remain successful on account of determined publicity, good local relations, and of course the popularity of their subject. Several offer two- or three-year training in nursing, while other subjects include nursery education, aviation, cooking, fashion and so on. One small college claims to concentrate on “succession”—ways and means of preserving national and personal inheritance. Still inside Tokorozawa’s city limits one stop further down the line at Koku-Koen, the National Defense Medical College offers six-year medical degrees and four-year courses for nurses, as well as its own hospital and research facilities. Competition for places on the six-year course has declined to below 20:1 (30% female); on the nursing courses it varies around 10:1 (10–15% male)—both still very high rates of competition. Another three stops down the line brings the train to Sayama-shi station. There are two four-year universities within Sayama city. Musashino Gakuin University (not connected with Musashino University at Tanashi) has been a four-year institution only since 2004. Its history goes back to a kindergarten founded in central Tokyo in 1912 (the last year of Meiji), followed by a girls’ school of home economics in 1920 and a girls’ high school in 1922. Musashino Junior College, specializing in infant education, was established in Sayama in 1981, changing its status in 2004. Enrollment grew from 71 in 2016 to 151 in 2019; there is a small graduate school. Despite its small size, it advertises profusely in the Seibu trains. The undergraduate programs’ hensachi varies according to different yobikō between 53 and 37.

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One other university, Seibu Bunri University, “bunri” being translated as “arts and sciences,” occupies a rather remote site developed in the 1980s. It is part of an educational foundation, the Bunri Sato Gakuen Educational Institution, which includes a junior and senior high school on the same campus as the university, and an elementary school nearby. In addition, there are several senmon gakkō colleges in the same group in Tokorozawa and other parts of Tokyo. The founder gained a reputation for his energy and determination in setting up this little “empire.” The undergraduate programs’ hensachi varies according to different yobikō between 53 and 37. See Chapter 21 for how the expression “bunri” has been used in the context of Liberal Arts, which have always had some kind of function in Japan’s HE as either mainstream or subsidiary, and in the 21st century have seen their profile raised through Japan’s need for “all-rounders” in a growingly fluid labor market. The Seibu Shinjuku line ends at Hon-Kawagoe station, which has no universities in its immediate vicinity. On different lines, near different stations inside the city of Kawagoe, are Toho College of Music, founded here in 1965; Shobi University, previously a music academy, then a junior college, converting to a four-year university in 2000; and Tokyo International University. TIU, founded in 1965 as Tokyo University of Commerce (until 1986), has developed its own niche for international language and other studies, operating a close exchange partnership with one US university, and a Japanese language school at its satellite campus in Takadanobaba. It advertises profusely on Seibu trains. It is perhaps appropriate to have ended this tour of one suburban train line with a university that has a link with Takadanobaba near the beginning of the line and, more significantly, is striving for success in globalization—the field that held priority with MEXT throughout the first two decades of the 21st century. The institutions reviewed here represent many aspects of how Japanese life, culture and education have resiliently evolved over the last century and a half: it remains to be seen how, and to what extent, they will continue to adapt themselves to whatever comes next, with or without recognition by the outside world. Perhaps Chapter 20 on research and advanced technology shows the way to the future. Perhaps the last chapter in this book, Chapter 25, will provide some pointers for a revolution in Artificial Intelligence that will open up new possibilities, despite Chapter 3 wondering about a continuing story of plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.

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Chapter 1 Universities in Modern Japan: A Historical Outline Mito Takamichi This chapter examines the origin and growth of modern universities from 1868, the first year of the Meiji era, until 1948, when the new postwar University Law came into effect. Its major objective is to analyze the origins, development, challenges and legacies of modern universities in Japan. To this end, the first section traces the development of universities in prewar Japan. The challenges and opportunities that faced modern Japanese universities are then analyzed before a conclusion which summarizes findings against the above objective.

Before Meiji In the 7th century Japan’s first institutes of higher education were established. These were training schools for monks attached to major temples, such as Horyuji Temple in Nara built by Prince Shotoku. Influenced by the Tang Dynasty system of higher education in China, Emperor Tenmu legislated the first written laws to establish higher education in Japan in 701. Just as the first European universities founded in the Middle Ages differed from their modern descendants, Japan’s early institutes of higher education also differed considerably from the modern universities which were developed after the Meiji Restoration. During the feudal era, the Shogunate Government developed a number of institutes of higher education. Included were a school to train elite samurai and four academies, each devoted to the area studies of Japan (kokugaku), China (kangaku), the West (yōgaku), and Western medicine (seiyō igaku). With the surrender of the Shogunate rule to the Emperor in 1868, these institutions were abolished or absorbed into new institutions. The new government prohibited the mixture of Shintoism and Buddhism as the former became the state religion. Many Buddhist temples were separated from Shinto shrines, even though most of them coexisted on the same site. Initially, the fledgling government did not have a clear vision for higher education, though it had a vague anachronistic educational policy. It attempted to set up a Shinto-based Japan study school (kokugaku dokoro) and a Confucianist China study school (kangaku dokoro) in Kyoto, but these failed owing to major changes in administration—primarily because of the transfer of Japan’s capital from Kyoto to Edo, which was re-named Tokyo.

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Japan’s first university As one of its first acts in the new capital, the new government emphasized the importance of education, especially that of knowledge transfer between Japan and the West. In the Five Oaths declared in March 1868, it stated its firm commitment that “knowledge and wisdom shall be sought globally.” Once relocated in Tokyo, it set up higher education headquarters specializing in Japan and China studies at University headquarters in Shoheizaka, Tokyo, with Western studies and medicine offered at Daigaku Nankō (University South School) and Daigaku Tōkō (University East School) campuses respectively. According to the One-Hundred Year History of the Japanese School System (Nippon gakusei hyakunenshi), an official history published by Japan’s Ministry of Education in 1981, a power struggle developed between the Japan and China studies schools at University headquarters, and later between those two on the one hand and the other two Western studies schools at their different campuses. In response, the new government shut down the former two schools at University headquarters in July 1871. The decision to choose Western studies over traditional Japan and China studies demonstrates the government’s intentions in the new era. Such a decision had a profound effect on the Japanese higher education sector. Disciplines and institutions developed in the European and North American higher education systems were transferred just as they were, like a neat package, into Japan. This decision had far-reaching consequences that continue to influence Japan’s higher education development well into the 21st century. In student recruitment, the new government initially introduced an enrollment scheme which allocated the size of intakes based on the relative importance of the old regional domains in the feudal system. In 1872, this system was abolished in order to attract talented youngsters nationally, regardless of their class origins or station of life under the old caste system. Learning institutions became able to recruit from a wider circle of talented students from all parts of society to learn advanced Western knowledge and technology. According to the official history cited above, the decision reflects the strong belief among Meiji leaders that modern Japan needed to develop domestic institutions and a new culture based on the Western model in order to spur modernization, maintain independence, and avoid being colonized. The new system also heralded an era of career advancement and professions based on one’s own interests, training, knowledge and competences rather than on blood and class origins. In order to accelerate learning, the government decided to send outstanding professors and students of the school of Western studies at Daigaku Nankō to Europe and North America. It also requested the Prussian Government to recruit and dispatch able doctors and academics to the school of Western medicine at Daigaku Tōkō. Meiji leaders believed that Prussia had the most advanced medical science research and practices. The first group of students and professors departed from Japan in October 1871 and the first two German medical professors arrived in July 1872. In September 1872, the government introduced a new school system (gakusei). This system did not have any legal criteria for universities but had an unprecedented effect on the educational sector by establishing a modern educational system as developed in Europe and North America, despite the fact that Japan had no Western cultural values or tradition. In the higher education sector, following the Western model, the Ministry of Education reclassified fields of study based on disciplines as developed in the West rather than on area studies such as Japan, China or Western studies. It established the first modern “university” in Japan, the old Tokyo University, in 1877, through the merger of the schools of Western studies and medical sciences at the Tōkō and Nankō campuses. The newly defined fields in the University included liberal arts, law, sciences and medicine, which included a program in pharmacology. In the following year, it was authorized to offer bachelor degrees. In 1879, these degrees were refined into B.A.(Letters), B.Sc., LL.B., B. Medicine and B.

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Pharmaceutical Engineering. However, it was not a “university” strictly speaking. It had to wait almost ten more years before an imperial ordinance finally gave the institution university status. The old Tokyo University was more international than contemporary Japanese universities. Among 31 professors, 21 were highly-paid foreign academics. Almost 70 percent of the faculty was international. As a result, it had the nickname, the “Tokyo University of Western Languages.” Students had to study the European languages spoken by their professors. Most textbooks they used were also in foreign languages. They had to be linguistically talented before they could pursue the study of their specialization. It was a very challenging period, and many students were unable to fulfil the requirements, according to research done by Amano Ikuo. In 1886 the government issued the Imperial University Ordinance, and in 1887 the old Tokyo University was renamed as the Imperial University—the first and only university under the Japanese legal system. It soon included the Faculty of Engineering, which was created through the merger of a department in the Faculty of Sciences and a school of technology established by the Ministry of Industry. In 1888, it was authorized to confer doctorate degrees in addition to B. Engineering. In the 1880s, approximately 50 students were enrolled at the Imperial University, about half of them studying medicine. The regular output of western trained specialists was regarded as great progress. In 1889, the university awarded five doctorate degrees, one each in Law, Medicine, Engineering, Letters, and Natural Sciences, for the first time, according to its official history. The Western languages used varied from one faculty to another. For instance, many students of continental law were taught in French by French legal experts. Soon, however, the foreign faculty left the Imperial University and joined the law school set up by the Ministry of Legal Affairs. This was because the Meiji government adopted the French continental written law system rather than the common-law-based legal system. Following their departure, most courses in the Faculty of Law at the Imperial University dealt with Anglo-American laws and were offered in English by legal experts from Britain and the USA. German was the most widely spoken language at the Imperial University, especially in the Faculty of Medicine. Thus, students in Japan’s first university studied their subjects and disciplines not in Japanese, but in the various foreign languages used by their international faculty. Many items of Japanese medical terminology were borrowed from German, and persist to this day. Such a practice did not last long, however. Once able Japanese scholars were trained, they took over teaching and started to offer their expertise in Japanese. This way it became possible for the new government to reduce staff costs, and, more importantly, to drastically increase the number of students and quicken the dissemination of knowledge as there were no more language barriers. The change of language of instruction to Japanese also shortened the study period and helped to increase the number of desperately needed experts in various fields.

The growth of Imperial Universities The Imperial Constitution, introduced as a gift from the Emperor to his subjects in 1889 and brought into force in 1890, did not have any clause relating to educational matters. Education was regarded as part of the Emperor’s prerogative, concerned with the promotion of his subjects’ happiness and welfare. As a result, all major regulations and directives related to the provision of education were issued as imperial ordinances in the name of the Emperor. The government did not have any ordinances, written standards or laws to regulate university status other than the 1886 ordinance which created the Imperial University. There was no regulation whatsoever which authorized the establishment of institutes of higher education until 1903, when another imperial ordinance came into effect. Before these ordinances were issued, however, many colleges of higher learning were established by national and local authorities and private initiatives. To begin with, a number of ministries in the

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central government established schools of higher education related to their own jurisdiction. The Ministry of Engineering, for instance, founded a school of technology and engineering to train engineers required for industrialization, and the Ministry of Legal Affairs established a law school to produce legal experts. The Ministry of Agriculture set up a school of agriculture. Before long, these schools were transferred into the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Education and formed the various faculties of the Imperial University and other institutions such as the Tokyo Institute of Technology. Many local authorities also established academies of foreign language studies and medical schools. Like the Imperial University, newly established organizations were more diverse and international than many higher education institutions today. To start and promote the higher education sector based on a Western model, many expatriates (oyatoi gaijin) in engineering and other disciplines were invited to Japan with competitive salaries and benefits, not only at the Imperial University but also at many other institutions. Students still studied their specialized fields in the foreign languages spoken by their professors. In 1897 Kyoto Imperial University was established. As a result, the Imperial University in Tokyo was renamed Tokyo Imperial University. The establishment of the Imperial University in Kyoto was followed by the creation of more Imperial Universities in Tohoku (Sendai), Kyushu (Fukuoka), Hokkaido (Sapporo), Osaka and Nagoya between 1907 and 1939. In addition, Keijo (Seoul) Imperial University and Taipei Imperial University were founded in the capital cities of Japanese colonies in 1924 and 1928 respectively. Seoul National University and National Taipei University established after World War II took over some of their assets. Initially, many new imperial universities had difficulty in filling their student quotas. Some programs accepted all applicants. In order to gain more qualified students, they introduced pathway courses for school leavers. These old imperial universities soon became leaders in higher education in Japan. Among around 800 universities in Japan today, they remain the most prestigious institutions, and admission is highly competitive. All of these former imperial universities in Japan and overseas are top comprehensive research-intensive universities and continue to play leadership roles in education and research in the 21st century.

Colleges of higher learning In addition to central government sponsored schools of higher education, a number of colleges of higher learning were established by local authorities and private initiatives, even when the new government did not have any law to regulate them. In particular a number of local governments established schools of foreign language studies, medicine, engineering and technology, and commerce. Many of them are predecessors of current national and public universities. For instance, local authorities in Nagasaki and Osaka set up schools of Western medicine and foreign language studies, which are now part of Nagasaki University and Osaka Prefectural University. Prominent individuals also started schools of higher learning even if these were not entitled to be formally recognized as institutes of higher education. Fukuzawa Yukichi, for instance, founded an Academy of Dutch Studies in 1859, one of the oldest modern educational organizations in Japan. It later became Keio University, a top private Japanese university today. Fukuzawa was a leading scholar of Western Studies. One of his books, Gakumon no susume (An encouragement to learning, 1872), sold over a million copies. The book starts with the famous statement that, “Heaven does not create one man above or beneath another man.” It introduced the revolutionary democratic ideas of equality before the law, personal freedom and liberty, to a modernizing Japan which had just emerged from a feudal era. These political ideas were alien to most Japanese, who were conditioned to Confucian ethics and a hierarchal social order in a feudal society and caste system. It

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heralded a new social order in the modern era where individual interests, training, knowledge and competences determine professions and careers rather than blood and position in the hierarchy. In 1890, Fukuzawa’s academy was advanced to a college of higher learning with faculties of literature, sciences and law. Its school of medicine founded in 1873 was later promoted to a college of higher education in 1917. With a new ordinance of 1918 which enabled local governments and private foundations to establish universities for the first time in Japanese history, the government authorized Keio as one of the first two private universities in Japan. Prior to this, however, Keio was given government permission to call itself a university early in the 20th century. It was authorized as a college of higher education legally when an ordinance of 1902, which regulated the establishment of institutes of higher education, came into effect the following year. Okuma Shigenobu, one of Japan’s state leaders of the modern era, also founded the Tokyo College of Higher Education (Tokyo senmon gakkō), the former body of Waseda University, another top private university in Japan. The College consisted of four faculties; Schools of Political Economy, Law, Sciences and English Studies. Okuma was educated and influenced by Guido Herman Fridolin Verbeck, a Dutch-American missionary, according to the official history of the University. He was from a samurai family in Saga Prefecture on the island of Kyushu and became a political activist for the People’s Rights Movement before establishing a political party, Rikken kaishintō (constitutional reform party). He served several ministerial portfolios before being appointed as Prime Minister in 1898 and again in 1914. He founded his Tokyo College of Higher Education in 1882, which was renamed Waseda University in 1902 with the approval of the Ministry of Education and the Ministry of Legal Affairs, though at that time there was no regulation for university status. To satisfy the conditions of the ordinance of 1902, it was legally recognized as a college of higher education. Thus, Keio and Waseda Universities legally became the first colleges of higher education in the private sector, though they were entitled to call themselves universities prior to this. Other enlightened elites also established schools targeting the education of women or specific professions. Included are the former bodies of leading private medical and other universities such as Tokyo Women’s College of Medicine, and Kitasato University. Some prominent Japanese who returned from study abroad also set up institutes of higher learning. Niijima Jo established Doshisha College of English Studies in 1875, and Tsuda Ume (who changed her name to Umeko in 1902) set up Joshi Eigaku Juku (Women’s College of English Studies) in 1900. Niijima was a Japanese Christian who had studied at Amherst College and Andover Newton Theological School; Tsuda, the first Japanese woman sent to study abroad, had lived in the United States from the age of seven and studied at Bryn Mawr and other colleges. A number of foreign missionaries also founded educational institutions of higher learning. Keen to learn from the West, the new government initially welcomed their initiatives, though was uneasy about awarding them university status, despite the high ratings given to schools where foreign academics with high qualifications and degrees taught specialized courses in English and other European languages. Government enthusiasm coincided with the interests and expertise of Christian missionaries once the ban on their religion was lifted in 1873. Many mission schools were set up all over Japan as they viewed education as an effective tool through which to teach Christianity and help future Japanese leaders and citizens build a new Japan. Their initiatives included what has become Rikkyo (St. Paul’s) University, established by the Anglican Church in Japan, Aoyama Gakuin and Kwansei Gakuin by North American Methodist missions, and Jochi (Sophia) University by the Jesuits. Students studied theology, commerce, accounting, liberal arts and other subjects through English at these institutions as they were taught by foreign missionaries and academics. A major figure in the Anglican Church in Japan, Channing Moore Williams, established St. Paul’s School for boys at his residence in Tsukiji, Tokyo in 1874. In the foundation year his school attracted

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more than fifty students, most of whom lived in a dormitory which he rented. Williams was succeeded by James McDonald Gardiner in 1880 and Gardiner, by Rev. Theodosius Stevens Tyng in 1891, when it was renamed as St. Paul’s College. In 1897, he was succeeded by Rev. Arthur Lloyd as Head of the College. Mission schools played a critical role for the education of Japanese youth. For instance, St. Paul’s College alone educated more Japanese students than the Imperial University in the 1880s. They had many difficulties but managed to operate with no public support. Thanks to the effective management by these founding leaders, St. Paul’s School survived despite the destruction of its buildings by fire in 1876 and an earthquake of 1894. Their contribution was highly appreciated by the government. By the end of the 19th century, the Japanese government granted a license to the College. The license offered its students exemption from military service and also access to all government institutes of higher education. It was a trying period for mission schools, however. Nationalism emerged towards the end of the 19th century in reaction to the Westernization drives of the early Meiji era. This was demonstrated by the assassination of Mori Arinori, the first Minister of Education and founder of modern education in Japan on February 11, 1889, the day when the Imperial Constitution was promulgated. Mori was from a samurai family in the Satsuma Domain (today’s Kagoshima) and was sent to England on a secret study abroad mission by the local lord in 1865. This was still during the era of isolationism when Japanese nationals were prohibited from going overseas. He was so impressed by England’s advancement that he became a strong advocate for the opening of Japan and modernization. He even advocated changing from Japanese to English as the official language of Japan. Influenced by Western political theories, he joined the modernization movement along with other leaders such as Fukuzawa, the founder of Keio University. At the same time, Mori was a Christian and leading advocate of freedom in religion. Because of this, he was regarded as a national enemy by some rightwing political activists, though he was in fact a nationalist who sought advancement of his country through education rather than for individual enlightenment and development. It was this misunderstanding among the Japanese nationalists of the time that led to his assassination. In 1891, Uchimura Kanzo, a Christian teacher at the First Higher School (later the Faculty of Arts at the University of Tokyo), was also criticized for not following the custom of bowing before the Imperial Rescript on Education, with its portrait and signature of the emperor. It caused a nationwide uproar at a time when nationalist forces were gaining power inside and outside the government. Before long the Ministry of Education introduced Directive 12, which prevented licensed schools from teaching religious studies in their educational program. This threatened the foundation of mission schools. As a result, at St. Paul’s College, for instance, Arthur Lloyd, its head, decided to offer bible studies only in the dormitories so as to maintain its license. Thanks to this decision, the college continued and attracted more and more students. By 1903, when he was replaced by Henry St. George Tucker, its male student enrollment had grown to more than 570 pupils. As at the first Imperial University, most classes in Christian mission schools including St. Paul’s College were taught in English well into the 20th century.

The 1902 Imperial Ordinance and colleges of higher education Legally speaking, there were no other colleges of higher education apart from Tokyo and Kyoto Imperial Universities until a 1902 ordinance was introduced to authorize and regulate schools of higher education. The national government established many colleges for rapid industrialization throughout the modern era. More than 30 schools offered engineering and technology courses. This was followed by schools of medicine (22); agriculture, fishery, forestry, and mining (21); commerce (14) and pharmacy

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(5). Once the Imperial Ordinance of 1902 came into being, the local authorities and private bodies were also authorized to establish colleges of higher education. In accordance with the ordinance of 1902, Keio and Waseda Universities were authorized as Japan’s first colleges of higher education, followed by a number of public and private colleges until 1948, when the new postwar University Law came into effect. The most popular specialization was medicine. Sixty medical schools were authorized. Of these, 19 were national, 20 public, and 11 private. Interestingly, seven were attached to the medical schools of imperial universities and were designated to train medical practitioners rather than researchers through the Japanese language. Nine public and three private medical schools were created to train female doctors exclusively. These initiatives were quite progressive at a time when women were not admitted into medical schools even in some industrialized countries in the West. During the modern period, ten medical schools were also authorized in Japan’s colonies overseas such as China, Taiwan, Korea and Karafuto (now Sakhalin in Russia). The government needed to produce a large number of medical doctors and professionals to serve both in Japan and overseas for the war effort. As a result, it authorized a number of medical schools, especially during war years. The next most popular area of study was engineering and technology. Almost 60 institutions were authorized. If the schools of industrial management, aviation and other technology-related schools were added to them, the number may exceed those of the medical schools. This was followed by schools of commerce (more than 40). Interestingly, 34 schools were authorized as colleges of religious studies. Of these, 20 were Buddhist, 13 were Christian and one was a Shinto-based organization. In addition, more than twenty women’s colleges, and also those of forestry and pharmacy were authorized. Other schools offered a wide range of subjects such as maritime studies, fishery, agriculture, mining, home economics and special courses for women, veterinary sciences, dental sciences, foreign language studies, law, textiles, physical education and martial arts, liberal arts, social welfare studies, photography, fine arts, and shipbuilding. What is noteworthy is the large number of institutions established for women’s education. One national, almost 30 private, and 10 public colleges were established for the general education of women. In addition, seven medical schools, four colleges of pharmacy and one school each of natural sciences and fine arts were founded exclusively for female students.Further, a number of teacher training colleges and pass-through schools for higher education were created. Excluding the teacher training institutions, the Imperial Ordinance of 1902 authorized 83 national and 69 local authorities-funded institutes and 200 private colleges of higher education by 1943, after which this law was replaced by a new postwar University Law. According to Amano, not many of them had the high standards of the imperial universities. As a result, a pyramid structure developed in the Japanese higher education sector, in which imperial universities were on the top, then local public institutions, top private universities such as Keio and Waseda and finally a number of other private institutions at the bottom, reflecting a hierarchical structure which continues into the 21st century. Such a hierarchy was also reflected in the employment practices of the time. Amano reports that in some established companies the highest salaries were paid to graduates of Tokyo Imperial University, followed by the graduates of other imperial universities, then those of other national and local government schools, and finally graduates of private institutions.

The Imperial Ordinance of 1918 It was not until 1918 that the government was able to authorize university status for institutes established by various bodies such as local governments and private foundations. There was intense debate in the imperial legislature and government on the question of what should be authorized as universities. Some argued that universities should be comprehensive, and consist of a group of colleges rather than a single college of medicine, law, technology and so forth. Others were concerned with the possible

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gap in financial foundation and program quality between imperial universities and those run by local authorities and private initiatives. The government recognized the increasing need to supply more university graduates for the growth of Japan’s economy and development. Given limited government resources, it finally decided to allow local governments and private foundations with a sound financial base to establish universities whether they were single colleges or more comprehensive institutions. This was introduced as the University Ordinance in 1918. Based on this new regulation, in February 1920 Keio and Waseda were authorized as the first private universities not only in name but also legally in Japan. In April 1920, two months after the advancement of Waseda and Keio to university status, six more private institutes were given university status under the 1918 ordinance. They were Meiji, Hosei, Chuo, Nihon, Kokugakuin and Doshisha Universities. Prior to this, Osaka Prefectural University of Medicine was authorized as the first university created by a local government in 1919. This medical school was soon transferred into Osaka Imperial University as its Faculty of Medicine in 1931. Soon many other institutions were recognized as universities. The other public universities authorized by this ordinance included: Kyoto Prefectural University of Medicine authorized in 1921; Niigata University of Medicine (now Niigata University), Okayama University of Medicine (now part of Okayama University), Lushunkou (Port Arthur) Institute of Technology, Dalian, China which was abolished in 1945, Manchurian Medical University (now China Medical University, Shenyang) in 1922; Kumamoto University of Medicine (Kumamoto University), Kanazawa University of Medicine (Kanazawa University), and Nagasaki University of Medicine (Nagasaki University) in 1923; Osaka University of Commerce (Osaka City University) in 1928; Osaka Institute of Technology, which was integrated as the Faculty of Engineering of Osaka Imperial University, in 1933; Tokyo University of Arts and Sciences, which was the former body of Tokyo University of Education later replaced by the University of Tsukuba, Hiroshima University of Arts and Sciences (Hiroshima University), and Kobe University of Commerce (Kobe University) in 1929; and Jingu Kogakkan University, a national Shintoist institution, in 1940. The last institution was abolished immediately after the war and revived in 1962 as Kogakkan University at Ise, a private institution today. Other private institutions included: Tokyo Jikei University of Medicine in 1921; Ryukoku University, Otani University, Senshu University, Rikkyo (St. Paul’s) University, Ritsumeikan University, Kansai University, and Toyokyokai University (now Takushoku University) authorized in 1922; Rissho University in 1924; Komazawa University and Tokyo University of Agriculture in 1925; Nihon University of Medicine, Koyasan University and Taisho University in 1926; Toyo University and Sophia University in 1928; Kwansei Gakuin University in 1932; Fujiwara Institute of Technology (the former body of the School of Engineering at Keio University) and Toa Dobunshoin University (in Shanghai—the roots of Aichi University) in 1939; Koa Institute of Technology (now Chiba Institute of Technology) in 1942; and Osaka University of Sciences and Technology (Kindai University) in 1943. In short, under the 1918 ordinance, 14 public universities including two in China were established, almost half of them medical schools. The rest included schools of technology, commerce and other fields. This ordinance also authorized the founding of 28 private and 14 public universities before 1945. Altogether, 49 universities were established according to the two ordinances before the end of World War II. In 1944, a breakdown of the number of universities set up by the national government, local public authorities and private bodies stood at seven, 14, and 28 respectively and for colleges of higher education there were 89, 44 and 153 respectively. Seven imperial universities headed by Tokyo Imperial University led the higher education sector, followed by other national and local public universities and finally private universities. A similar pattern developed among the colleges of higher education, with national medical schools followed by other public institutions and finally private institutions.

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Handbook of Higher Education in Japan

Another 32 new universities were established under the 1918 ordinance in the short period between Japan’s surrender in 1945 and April 1948, when it was replaced by the new postwar University Law. Most of these 32 postwar universities were medical schools, of which 18 were either national or public, and nine were private. Three were also private universities of dental sciences. In 1944, almost 16,000 students graduated from universities, and 47,000 from colleges of higher education. The number of annual graduates increased steadily from 683 to 15,968 for universities and 2,939 to 46,928 for colleges between 1906 and 1944. Overall, the combined number increased more than 17 times. This implies that there were more than 50,000 university students and almost 150,000 college students in 1944 as their course of study was generally three to four years. As the Imperial University, Japan’s first and only university at that time, had only 50 students in the founding years of the 1880s, these increases demonstrate that the higher education sector was firmly founded in Japan. It was a remarkable achievement compared with other industrialized countries. In Britain, there were five universities with 3,385 students in 1860. In 1930, the number of British universities had increased to 16 with 37,255 students. In Germany, there were 20 universities with 12,188 students in 1860. The number of German universities increased to 23 with 97,692 students by 1930 according to research done by Konrad H. Jarausch and his colleagues. Long before Japan’s economy overtook that of Britain and Germany in the 1960s, Japan had prepared itself and succeeded in the human resource and technology development required for the rapid reconstruction and fast economic growth of the postwar era.

Challenges and opportunities faced by Christian mission and other universities in prewar Japan After the 1918 Imperial Ordinance was introduced, many Japanese public and private universities were authorized. In the interwar years, however, they faced many challenges. Universities and colleges located in the Tokyo area suffered the great earthquake in 1923. Another major issue was funding. The 1920s witnessed a series of economic crises including a post-World War I recession, a post-Great Kanto Earthquake recession, a monetary crisis and the Great Depression of 1929. One institution, Kwansei Gakuin, Kobe, tried to upgrade its schools of theology, law, commerce and letters to university status even before the Imperial Ordinance of 1918 was introduced. Although it was set up and developed by North American Methodists who sometimes supplied almost 70 percent of its operating expenses, these missions had great difficulty in obtaining enough donations to advance such an institution as a university. As a result, the governing body of Kwansei Gakuin decided to sell its original campus located in the center of Kobe and move to a larger, cheaper campus in what was then a rural village located between Kobe and Osaka in 1929, the year of the Great Depression. With the money raised, it established a spacious, attractive campus and a handsome endowment, and was authorized as a university in 1932. Like Kwansei Gakuin, many other private institutions had to demonstrate a sound financial foundation before authorization. In 1933, Japan withdrew from the League of Nations and in 1938, the government introduced its Total National Mobilization Law for the War Effort. With the rise of the militarists in the 1930s, indeed, many foreign mission schools such as St. Paul’s University and Kwansei Gakuin University came under attack, especially if they were supported by Anglo-American organizations. In 1936, for instance, Kimura Shigeharu, President of St. Paul’s University, had to resign over allegations of not respecting the required public reading of the Imperial Rescript on Education in the University All Saints Chapel. At Kwansei Gakuin University, C. J. L. Bates, its long-serving Chancellor, resigned as some members of the Board of Trustees argued that the institute should be headed by a Japanese national. Soon many Anglo-American missionaries and professors were under pressure to resign.

Chapter 1: Universities in Modern Japan: A Historical Outline

9

In September 1940, Imperial Japan concluded a treaty and allied with Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. Against their will, and with the recommendation of their diplomatic missions in Japan, AngloAmerican missionaries, academics and their families had to evacuate the country shortly before Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor in December. During the War, these Christian mission universities operated under more pressure from military authorities. In 1942, for instance, the trustees of St. Paul’s University were forced to sever all its ties with the Anglican Church, the official religious organization of Japan’s enemy, the United Kingdom. Most Christian faculty members, whether foreigners or Japanese, had to leave. The University Chapel was closed until the end of World War II, when the University resumed its relations with its founding body. This was in stark contrast to its early twentieth-century days when the Anglo-Japanese Alliance was celebrated and almost anything Anglo-American was cherished. In Western Japan, Kwansei Gakuin University had to Japanize its faculty members and also destroy anything English, including the university emblem with its English motto, “Mastery for Service.” In Japan, the military authorities prohibited English language and cultural studies of the enemy nations at schools and universities. By contrast, the United States government funded and promoted Japanese studies in order to increase understanding of the patterns of their enemy’s behavior, values and culture, a critical prerequisite before the Occupation and political reorientation of Japan. As Japan started military advances into the Asia-Pacific region, losing more and more troops in major battles, the government needed to find replacements for their soldiers and factory workers. To meet these desperate needs, the government authorized a series of measures to produce graduates quickly. They commandeered Korean, Chinese and other citizens from occupied territories into military service, ammunition production, mining and other industries in Japan. School children and other citizens, whether female, young or old, were also mobilized for the war effort. Japanese universities, whether national, public or private, could no longer offer regular programs of study. The quality of higher education deteriorated. For instance, Tohoku Gakuin College of Aerospace Engineering, authorized in 1944 as a College of Higher Education, became a “ghost school” existing only in name, according to Amano. It had sparse facilities, and was authorized to borrow the facilities of the Faculty of Engineering at Tohoku Imperial University and Sendai Engineering College of Higher Education. It was planned to train students in the surrounding ammunition factories. The government also softened other quality control measures in the higher education sector as in the school system. It shortened the length of study and ordered higher education providers to let their students graduate early so that they could be recruited as soldiers. Many students were mobilized to become kamikaze pilots or serve on fierce battlefields and never saw their homeland again. Japan was losing battles in the higher education sector long before its defeat in 1945.

Conclusion The new Meiji government initially established schools of higher education in Japan and China studies at University headquarters in Tokyo, the new capital. Yet, they were immediately shut down following a fierce battle between themselves and also with the schools of Western studies and medicine located at nearby campuses. This decision had a great effect on the development of higher education in Japan: it instituted the Western system and traditions into the higher education sector. With this drastic policy change, the government started modernization in the higher education sector. Although at first glance it seemed that Japan had turned its back on its own culture, the ultimate objective of the policy makers was to fortify Japan’s ability to compete in a diverse and modernizing world, become an equal power on a par with advanced industrialized countries, and resist colonization by the West. “Fukoku Kyōhei (Rich Nation, Strong Army),” “Shokusan Kōgyō (Building and Fostering Industries),” and “Wakon Yōsai (Japanese Spirit and Western Technology)” were the slogans of the day.

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Handbook of Higher Education in Japan

To catch up with the West, it required fast learning of knowledge and technology, which was already highly advanced in the West. To do this, students needed to learn Western languages before they could study in various specialized fields. As a result, foreign language studies became very important and flourished. Both public and private sectors established schools of foreign studies and Japanese citizens who were keen to learn from the West, first studied languages at these schools. The Imperial University Ordinance of 1886 created the Imperial University in Tokyo, the only university in Japan until 1889, when Kyoto Imperial University was founded. Apart from this order, the government did not have any regulations to define and regulate institutes of higher education until 1903, when the Higher Education Ordinance introduced a year before came into being. With this 1902 ordinance, criteria for the authorization and the establishment of colleges of higher education were set out for the first time in modern Japan. Still, no other entities except imperial universities were entitled to university status until the 1918 University Ordinance was issued. The 1918 order allowed public authorities and private foundations to establish universities in addition to imperial universities. The revised 1886 ordinance permitted altogether seven imperial universities, including two in Japan’s later colonial capitals of Taipei and Seoul. The 1902 ordinance for higher education providers authorized more than 150 national and public colleges and 200 private institutions, and the 1918 ordinance, 14 public and 28 private universities. Japanese universities faced many challenges caused by funding, natural disasters and economic downturns. Among them, universities established and funded by Anglo-American missionaries in particular had to operate under the growing hostile environment of the military government which allied with Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. In the era of national mobilization for the war effort, however, all universities suffered to meet the rapidly growing shortages of soldiers. They had to comply with new government measures at the expense of quality assurance. Nevertheless, notwithstanding these restrictions, Japanese universities grew fast not only in numbers but also in terms of student enrollment. The nation’s student population increased from 50 students in the 1860s to around 50,000 before the end of the War. Japan’s imperial universities and other institutes of higher education have produced leading scholars and community leaders with global influence and renown. All the first three Japanese Nobel Laureates were educated by imperial universities. The first recipient in 1949 was Yukawa Hideki, a graduate of Kyoto Imperial University with a doctorate degree in Physics from Osaka Imperial University. Tomonaga Shinichiro, the second recipient in 1965, was a graduate from Kyoto Imperial University with a PhD in Physics from Tokyo Imperial University. The third recipient in 1973, Esaki Leona, was educated at Tokyo Imperial University both at the undergraduate and postgraduate level. Later he became Professor at Princeton University and President of the University of Tsukuba. Imperial and other Japanese universities have produced many other Laureates in Chemistry, Literature, Medical Sciences and Peace to date. Other public and private institutions have also produced fine global citizens and leaders. Mission schools in particular have educated a number of community and other global leaders. Setsuko Thurlow, an A-bomb victim and a leader of ICAN, the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, and Nobel Laureate for Peace, is a graduate of Hiroshima Jogakuin, a college for girls established by a Methodist mission. The late Gordon Kadota, once the President of the National Association of Japanese Canadians, was educated at Kwansei Gakuin. He led the redress movement of Japanese Canadians whose properties were confiscated after Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor; many Japanese Canadians were interned in concentration camps during and after the war. His movement not only reinstituted Japanese Canadians as full Canadian citizens but also assisted in the transformation of a European-dominant Canada into a multicultural society, increasing the awareness of equality before the law. Thus, the effect of the prewar Japanese education sector is global and goes beyond its national borders.

Chapter 1: Universities in Modern Japan: A Historical Outline

11

Yet, one of the major negative legacies from the prewar era is that since higher education courses were offered mainly in Japanese, students have become less proficient in foreign languages and crosscultural studies in today’s world when more diversity and inclusion have become critical for further advancement of Japan and the world. With the support of the government and many other stakeholders in the community and industry, Japanese universities are now struggling to develop effective programs to educate future global citizens and leaders with cross-cultural literacy, communication and management competences. At the same time, the use of the Japanese language as the main language of instruction and research limits the availability of academics and researchers as well as the enrollment of students in the Japanese higher education sector. As a result, it is suffering from declines in international attractiveness and competitiveness.

Bibliography Amano, Ikuo. Kyūsei Senmon Gakkō [The prewar colleges of higher education]. Tokyo: Tamagawa University Press, 1993. Dore, Ronald. Education in Tokugawa Japan. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1965. Gakko Hojin Kwansei Gakuin. Kwansei Gakuin hyakunen-shi tsūshi-hen I [One hundred years’ history of Kwansei Gakuin I]. Nishinomiya: Kwansei Gakuin University, 1997. Gakko Hojin Rikkyo Gakuin. Rikkyō Gakuin hyakunen-shi [One hundred years’ history of Rikkyo Gakuin]. Tokyo: Rikkyo Gakuin University, 1974. Jarausch, Konrad H., ed. The Transformation of Higher Learning 1860–1930: Expansion, Diversification, Social Opening, and Professionalization in England, Germany, Russia, and the United States. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983. Monbusho (The Ministry of Education, Japan). Gakusei hyakunenshi [100 years history of the school system]. Tokyo: Teikoku Chiho Gyoseigakkai, 1981. ———. Gakusei hyakunijūnenshi [120 years history of the school system]. Tokyo: Gyosei, 1992. Morikawa, Izumi. “Senzen ni okeru shiritsu daigaku no setchi ninka” [Approving the establishment of private universities by the Imperial Ordinance of 1918]. Hiroshima Shūdai ronshū jinbunhen 47, no. 1 (May 2006): 113–139.

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Handbook of Higher Education in Japan

Chapter 2 From Showa to Heisei: The Formation of Japan’s Contemporary Higher Education System Jeremy Breaden “Showa,” referring to the reign of Emperor Hirohito from December 25, 1926, to January 7, 1989, is a useful metaphor for change and continuity in 20th-century Japanese society, but deeply impractical for the purpose of historical periodization. In the course of the Showa period Japan went from fledgling liberal democracy to authoritarian, militarist state, from the devastation of defeat and occupation to the exhilarating, but equally disillusioning, experience of recovery and rapid growth, and on through to the heady years of the bubble economy. The immense macro-level changes of the Showa period are reflected in the development of Japanese social institutions, making simple, linear narratives difficult to construct in any area.

Early Showa In the case of higher education, if it is possible to characterize the entirety of Showa in any way at all, it would be to say that this was the period in which virtually all the distinguishing features of Japan’s contemporary system took shape. This chapter elaborates on this simple idea that Showa as a whole, and notwithstanding the vast transformations which punctuated it, was the key formative period for Japanese HE. Let us begin the elaboration with a brief review of the features of Japanese education generally at the start of the Showa period: (almost) universal primary schooling; institutional heterogeneity at the post-primary level; significant regional and gender disparities in access to higher educational opportunities; a growing degree of administrative centralization and state control; increasing importance of advanced credentials for access to highly-skilled occupations. In the first year of Showa, 1926, Japan already had 34 fully-fledged universities (35 counting the one established in colonial Korea in 1924), almost 30 higher schools (kōtō gakkō), which provided the main pathway to university entrance, and well over 100 professional and advanced vocational colleges (senmon gakkō and jitsugyō senmon gakkō), some of which already called themselves “universities” (daigaku) and were working, despite onerous requirements, to gain formal recognition under the University Ordinance (daigakurei) of 1918.1 The HE sector was also growing rapidly in size: the number of students in HE increased almost threefold in the 1920s, and by another 40 percent in the 1930s (see Table 2.1). The sector also became more privatized: by 1940 well over 60 percent of all HE students were attending private institutions.

Chapter 2: From Showa to Heisei: The Formation of Japan’s Contemporary Higher Education System

13

Table 2.1 Number of higher education institutions and students, 1920–1940

Universities (daigaku)

Higher Schools (kōtō gakkō)

Higher Normal Schools (kōtō shihan gakkō)

Professional Colleges (senmon gakkō)

Advanced Vocational Colleges (jitsugyō senmon gakkō)

TOTAL

1920

1930

1940

Institutions

16

46

47

Students (degree)

11,487

43,256

52,240

Students (preparatory)*

7,335

22,506

25,149

% private**

53%

62%

65%

Institutions

15

32

32

Students

6,631

18,251

17,719

% private

-

5%

6%

Institutions

4

4

4

Students

1,591

2,403

2,843

% private

-

-

-

Institutions

74

111

121

Students

22,088

60,081

90,182

% private

79%

91%

92%

Institutions

27

52

72

Students

9,575

21,351

41,475

% private

10%

8%

20%

Institutions

136

245

276

Students

58,707

167,848

229,608

% private

48%

58%

62%

* Students attending university preparatory courses (daigaku yoka) as opposed to full degree courses ** Percentage of students enrolled in private institutions as opposed to national or local public ones

Early-Showa Japan already had not only many higher education institutions (HEIs) and a growing number of students in them, but also an emerging system of HE in which a variety of different concerns and interests were beginning to coalesce into some key unifying themes. This chapter focuses particularly on those themes which persisted through the entire Showa period and indeed well into Heisei and beyond. The most pertinent for ordinary Japanese people is that of access to HE. By the 1920s the stage was set, albeit tentatively, for the growth of HE into something more than an elite niche. The subsequent decades saw virtually continuous growth up to the point at which, in the late 20th century, HE could be considered a genuinely mass enterprise. Within this growth trajectory were a number of fluctuations in the balance of supply and demand and a range of socio-cultural and -economic constraints which meant that access was, and still is, distributed far from evenly across society. This leads us to another major theme: institutional diversity. Early-Showa HE was distinguished by a high degree of institutional heterogeneity which, as we shall see, was reduced dramatically by reforms in the late 1940s to create an ostensibly “single-track” education system. This simplified structure, however, worked in concert with the ongoing expansion to produce a steeply hierarchical arrangement of institutions and a diversity of institutional identities and orientations which belies the relatively simple architecture of the system itself. A number of institutional types which initially stood outside this postwar architecture also became well-entrenched features of Japanese HE and today contribute to a system which may be less convoluted than the one which existed in the 1920s, but is significantly more heterogeneous.

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Handbook of Higher Education in Japan

This inquiry invites us to consider the means by which the system developed. To what extent is it a product of centralized guidance and control? What degree of agency was enjoyed by HEIs and the people who worked and studied within them? These are questions of autonomy in both the institutional and academic senses. The answers to them are far from straightforward, even when correlated with the historical currents of expansion and diversification. Academic freedom was guaranteed in the postwar constitution, yet the specter of state intervention into academic endeavor was never exorcised completely; HEIs became more heavily regulated, but the state’s overall vision remained difficult to identify, and the comparatively low commitment of public funds to HE persisted. In the following pages I eschew a simple chronological account—which, given the sheer span of time and depth of transformation would test both the reader’s patience and the author’s narrative gifts—and instead consider the Showa period through the three lenses identified above: diversity, access and autonomy. I acknowledge that these are categories of convenience rather than scientific precision: there are many other ways of grouping the events of the Showa period, many other events deserving mention and patterns begging to be drawn. I hope however that this review serves to bring into focus some of the main recurring concerns in critical discussions of HE in Japan, such as equality of opportunity, public and private responsibilities, education and research culture, and the tensions between autonomy and centralized control.

Institutional diversity and hierarchy Japanese HE at the start of the Showa period was nothing if not diverse. Figure 2.1 summarizes the considerable variety of institutional categories which populated the educational landscape for the first two decades of Showa. At first glance the system appears complex—but perhaps only if we assume that a HE system provides a menu of options from which students can select. This certainly was not the case in Japan of the 1920s and 30s. Fewer than one in 20 students progressed to HE of any form, and most of those who did would have had their pathways mapped out by parental decisions at a much earlier stage of their schooling. The vast majority would and could not even have contemplated advancing to such a level.2 Nonetheless, the system was functioning effectively, in the sense that it was supplying the highlyskilled administrators, engineers, scientists and other professionals crucial to the technocracy which had developed in the process of modernization and empire-building since the Meiji Restoration. University campuses were sites of research activity which was becoming more and more self-sustaining as Japanese academia moved beyond the simple reliance on importation and translation of foreign knowledge which had been so important in the early decades of modernization and began to develop its own disciplinary logics and communities of practice. Higher education had become part of Japan’s colonial project as well. As the empire expanded, Japanese-style educational structures and academic practices took root in Korea, Taiwan and parts of mainland China.3 Imperial universities were established in Seoul and Taipei, and numerous professional schools were also launched. These ceased to be part of Japanese HE after the dismantling of the empire in 1945, but many formed the basis of new institutions in the postcolonial states of Taiwan and Korea, while others were transplanted back to Japan. Aichi University, for example, was established by the repatriated staff and students of Tōa Dōbunshoin University in Shanghai. In these ways the imprint of colonial Japanese HE is still visible today.

Chapter 2: From Showa to Heisei: The Formation of Japan’s Contemporary Higher Education System

15

Figure 2.1 Types of educational institutions in Japan, 19354 Vocational Schools

(specialized courses) (research courses)

Youth Schools (higher courses)

Normal Schools

(research courses)

(prep. courses)

National Schools (compulsory primary education)

(higher courses)

Girls’ High Schools

Prep. Courses Higher Schools

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

(research courses)

Professional / Adv. Vocational Colleges

Middle Schools

1

(specialized courses)

Higher Normal Schools

10

11

12

Universities 13

14

15

(research courses)

16

17

18

Year of Schooling

Postwar rationalization: change and continuity Very soon after Japan’s surrender in 1945, the Allies identified the reform of education as a key to the re-creation of Japan as a peaceful, democratic nation. A complete renovation of both the structure and content of the education system was pursued during the Occupation of Japan from 1945–52. Occupation-era reformists envisioned a school system to which all Japanese children would have equal access and through which they could progress in accordance with their own abilities rather than the circumstances of their birth. The system needed to be simple in its design and universal in its application. HE was brought in line with this vision by the rationalization of the multi-track prewar system into a radically simplified system of universities (daigaku), which continues to provide the backbone of Japanese HE in the 21st century (see Figure 2.2). This system was enshrined in the School Education Act of 1947, which stated (Article 52) that universities were to be centers of academic inquiry, sharing knowledge broadly, conducting in-depth, specialized research and education in the arts and sciences, and developing students’ intellectual, moral, and applied capabilities. The Act also set out the bodies which would be able to establish universities: the national government, local governments and private educational corporations. Figure 2.2 Types of educational institutions in Japan, 1950 Miscellaneous Schools Primary Schools (Compulsory)

1

2

3

4

Lower Secondary Schools (Compulsory)

5

6

7

8

9

Upper Secondary Schools 10

11

12

Junior Colleges Universities 13

14

15

Graduate Schools

16

17

18+

Year of Schooling

What was created by these postwar reforms was not a completely new system of HE, but rather a streamlined version of what already existed. The universities established in the years shortly after 1949 had almost all operated prior thereto, as either imperial universities, other universities already qualified under the 1918 daigakurei, professional colleges which aspired to such qualification, higher schools (kōtō gakkō), or various polytechnic institutions. The existing infrastructure simply needed to be retrofitted to a new formal institutional schema. Higher schools, for example, were generally transformed

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Handbook of Higher Education in Japan

into the general education or liberal arts arms of undergraduate programs in the new national university system, facilitating the development of a network of national universities across the country in a very short space of time. Private operators of HEIs were required to adopt the new legal status of private educational corporations (shiritsu gakkō hōjin) but could continue to pursue the diverse purposes—religious, political, commercial and so on—for which they were originally established prewar. Nonetheless, the speed at which the postwar HE system was (re-)constructed is remarkable—especially considering that the country was still facing much more basic challenges of rebuilding basic infrastructure and services after the devastation of war. By the end of the Occupation in 1952, the new system was largely in place, with 71 national universities in operation, alongside 116 private and 33 local public ones. All but one of the universities which existed previously in Japan proper (so-called kyūsei daigaku or old-system universities) had made the transition to the new system, and virtually all those which had been newly established (shinsei daigaku—new-system universities) by 1952 also had their origins in other non-university institutions which had existed prior to 1945. For many institutions and individual academics previously outside the university system, the single-track system was an opportunity to “upgrade” to a formal status equal with the prewar universities. Viewed in reverse, the classification of university had been “downgraded” to encompass a much greater variety of institutional profiles. The term ekiben daigaku (station lunchbox universities) was coined for the new universities which seemed to be popping up in every town across the country, just like the ekiben train station lunchboxes filled with local specialties. Initially the standards which new universities needed to meet were formulated by an independent body representing the (pre-existing) university community itself, but were replaced in 1956 by a more bureaucratic system of establishment standards administered by the national education ministry and focusing on formal requirements concerning campus land and facilities, staffing levels, and curricular structures. Even after establishment, universities were obliged to consult with the ministry before making substantive changes such as instituting new educational programs and altering their enrollment capacity. These requirements, together with the framework of the School Education Act, ensured uniformity in a formal sense while allowing for great diversity in origins, missions, and educational outlooks. On paper, therefore, an undergraduate degree program in economics at a small, newly-founded university in a rural prefecture often looked very similar to the one offered by a large, metropolitan, comprehensive university which had been operating since the Meiji period. The difference lay in the students enrolling in the program and (often, but not always) the professors teaching it, both of which were functions of the position of the two institutions in the university hierarchy.

Institutional hierarchy The entrenchment of hierarchy is undoubtedly one of the most infamous achievements of the postwar reforms. Institutions which were previously considered formally and qualitatively dissimilar were organized into a unified university structure which rendered them readily comparable. Inevitably, a pecking order emerged, indexed to the various institutional strata which had existed prior to 1947. At the top were the University of Tokyo and the other former imperial universities, followed by new national universities which now had the same formal status as the imperials, and a small group of older private universities, many of which had existed since Meiji and had extensive resources and powerful support bases. Other new universities followed, with better positions generally being obtained by those which were of a reasonable size, located in urban rather than rural areas, and which could trace their origins to prewar times. This order became more engrained as participation in HE grew. As we shall see in more detail in the next section of this chapter, and as shown statistically in Table 2.2, much of the growth in the postwar decades (and indeed up to the present day) was in the private sector. Fifteen years after the

Chapter 2: From Showa to Heisei: The Formation of Japan’s Contemporary Higher Education System

17

Table 2.2 Private, national, and local public universities: number of institutions and students, 1950–1990

Private National Local Public

Institutions Students Institutions Students Institutions Students Institutions % private

TOTAL

1955

1960

1965

1970

1975

1980

1985

1990

122

140

209

274

305

319

331

372

312,364

403,625

660,899

1,046,823

1,325,430

1,376,586

1,344,381

1,550,613

72

72

73

75

81

93

95

96

186,055

194,227

238,380

309,587

357,772

406,644

449,373

518,609

34

33

35

33

34

34

34

39

24,936

28,569

38,277

50,111

50,880

52,082

54,944

64,140

228

245

317

382

420

446

460

507

53.5%

57.1%

65.9%

71.7%

72.6%

71.5%

72.0%

73.4%

523,355

626,421

937,556

1,406,521

1,734,082

1,835,312

1,848,698

2,133,362

% private

59.7%

64.4%

70.5%

74.4%

76.4%

75.0%

72.7%

72.7%

% female

12.4%

13.7%

16.2%

18.0%

21.2%

22.1%

23.5%

27.4%

Students

end of the Occupation, in 1967, there were only three more national universities than there had been in 1952, but 140 more private ones; the student population in national universities had grown by a substantial 75 percent, but the increase in private universities was a significantly more striking 313 percent. Newer private institutions, by virtue of both their late arrival and the increasingly diverse origins and motivations of their founders, could not hope to match the prestige of the old institutions or even the newest national ones, so they filled out the lower tiers of the pyramidal hierarchy, which grew larger both horizontally and vertically. The hierarchy was not simply a figment of the popular imagination. It was both the basis and the product of specific choices made by employers and educational consumers. White-collar employers, keen to recruit intelligent and diligent workers and train them up in-house, looked to the wellestablished, prestigious HEIs which selected their students rigorously; students vied for entry to these HEIs, seeking the job-market value of the degrees they conferred. More and more applicants competed to enter those universities which had been most selective in previous years, thus increasing their popularity in what can only be described as a “vicious circle.”5 The hierarchy was further entrenched by the rise in the 1960s of the hensachi system of standardized rank scores. These were designed to enable prospective students to assess their prospects of gaining admission to any given course, but inevitably used also to systematize the ranking of courses and institutions by degree of admissions selectivity. Hensachi is just one aspect of a much larger story concerning the rise of HE admissions as an industry in its own right. Private HEIs themselves benefited as competition bred more competition, and the fees they charged to take the entrance exams—which many candidates did multiple times as a hedging strategy—brought significant revenue even before candidates enrolled. A huge industry grew around the process of HE admissions, catering for those keen to purchase advantage in access to competitive HEIs.6 This industry included gakushūjuku academies offering private tutoring to schoolchildren, yobikō “cram schools” with the sole function of preparing candidates for entrance exams, and publishers of study materials and guides to institutions and their various exams. The rise of the admission-based hierarchy therefore also led to the vesting of some major economic interests in the hierarchy’s maintenance—interests which, although not part of HE in a formal sense, have had immeasurable influence on the shape of the HE sector today. As well as being shaped by employers’ preferences and the behaviors of educational consumers, the hierarchy was reflected in the organization of the academic profession. The majority of candidates for academic positions in the immediate postwar period were naturally alumni of the research-intensive

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former imperial universities. As they took up senior posts in new universities postwar, they were able to recruit colleagues and successors from within their own academic networks, typically alumni of the same institution, creating “colonies” of their alma mater. Their employers usually did not discourage this colonization, as association with a former imperial university promised a boost in prestige for a fledgling institution, while a uniform lineage was assumed to foster organizational stability and loyalty. Once the colonies were established and the new universities gained the capacity to train researchers autonomously, a closed circle of recruitment became entrenched, resulting in the high rate of academic inbreeding which is often noted as a feature of Japanese academic organizations even today.7 Consciousness of academic pedigree naturally remained strong, and the preeminence of former imperial universities remained just as palpable in the academic community as in the hensachi-based student hierarchy.

Structural and qualitative variation The postwar reforms had not disrupted the development of Japanese HE; nor, importantly, had they erased the institutional diversity of the prewar period—they had just collapsed it into a single system. The notable omission, however, was higher technical education. The single-track system had many advantages in terms of comprehensibility and administrative efficiency, but had little inbuilt capacity to function as a mechanism for selecting and sorting young talent into different vocational pathways. During the 1950s business leaders grew increasingly vociferous in their calls for “functional differentiation” of the system to enable it to produce the skilled human resources which they saw as crucial to Japan’s economic growth, especially in scientific and technical fields. These calls gained greater momentum in the early 1960s when, in line with the “income-doubling plan” instigated by the Ikeda cabinet, virtually all spheres of policymaking came to be governed by the logic of economic efficiency and growth. In 1961, therefore, an amendment to the School Education Act formalized a new category of higher technical schools (kōtō senmon gakkō, or kōsen for short) offering five-year curricula beginning at the upper secondary school level. The first 19 of these (12 national, five private and two local public) were opened in 1962, attracting almost 12 applicants for every place available. By the end of the 1960s supply had largely caught up with demand, and there were 60 kōsen operating across Japan. Meanwhile, universities were encouraged to expand their science and engineering courses, which grew in both number and student population considerably faster than other disciplines in the 1960s and early 70s. The government did not, however, move to create a unified technical education pathway, and the higher technical schools remained separated both formally and qualitatively from the university-centered mainstream HE system. Even further removed from universities, but also playing a very significant role in post-secondary education, was a large non-formal sector of private vocational colleges which offered highly diverse curricula to cater for a huge variety of occupational niches and interests. Some of these had their origins in the senmon gakkō which had existed in the prewar period, but under the 1947 School Education Act had been relegated to the category of kakushu gakkō or “miscellaneous schools,” largely unregulated and unsupported by the state. The category of miscellaneous schools was extremely broad, ranging from driver training academies to foreign language institutes, as well as colleges offering more organized, long-term, vocationally-oriented curricula. It was only in 1975 that an amendment of the School Education Act formalized this latter type as senshū gakkō or specialized training colleges. Those offering postsecondary curricula (senmon katei) became known as senmon gakkō, a revival of the prewar term for non-university HE colleges. The education ministry today refers to senmon gakkō in English as “professional training colleges,” and counts them officially as part of the Japanese HE system.

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A further variation in the ostensibly single-track HE system was the junior college (tanki daigaku) offering associate degree programs of two to three years’ duration. The idea of American-style junior colleges had been canvassed during the initial design of the postwar system, but not followed through into the creation of a distinct statutory category. Seeing, however, that it would be difficult for many prewar institutions to gain full university status, and wishing to make use of the capacity for advanced training which they offered, the government resolved to institute junior colleges as a “temporary” institutional type which would eventually become obsolete as its members progressed to full university status. This category proved remarkably popular, however, and was already populated by more than 200 institutions and 50,000 students by the end of the Occupation in 1952. The most notable success of junior colleges in the postwar period was to cater for the burgeoning demand for HE among women, who continued to face a variety of barriers to accessing full bachelor’s degree education. (See Chapter 16 for more about the establishment of junior colleges in the postwar period.) The ratio of women to men in junior colleges was virtually one to one in the first half of the 1950s, but was closer to five to one in favor of women by the mid-1960s. Junior colleges became a permanent part of Japanese HE with a revision of the School Education Act in 1964. With the formalization of junior colleges, higher technical colleges and professional training colleges, the construction of the Japanese HE system was in a sense complete. The prototypical category of university (daigaku) created in 1947 has remained the dominant one right up to the present day, consistently enrolling at least three-quarters of all students in HE. The three-way distinction between national, local public and private institutions has also persisted and the exceptions which have been introduced—such as the system enabling some NGOs and for-profit private companies to establish universities—remain small anomalies. The diversification of curricular offerings within the category of university, which one might assume to be a natural product of its quantitative expansion, was limited for many decades by the abovementioned imposition of a uniform set of standards for establishment of new institutions and curricular programs, together with a lack of reform pressure on individual institutions, which continued to operate in a sellers’ market (see next section). There was of course much discussion of the need for universities to differentiate their offerings to cater for the increasing diverse needs of both individual students and employers. Diversification (tayōka) was a common refrain in reports on HE by both the government’s peak policy advisory organ, the Central Council for Education, industry bodies and indeed educationalists. Just as rote learning was stifling the creativity of schoolchildren, the dynamism of the HE sector was seen to be repressed by the rigid hierarchy and unthinking conformity to organizational norms and practices which had grown, almost unnoticed as it were, in the course of postwar development. It was in the 1980s that these criticisms converged with what is often called the “neoliberal” embrace of free market logic and its imperatives of deregulation and diversification—which dovetailed with contemporary trends such as internationalization and the rise of the information society.8 The reformist activity of the 1980s, guided by a Special Advisory Council on Education established in 1984, did not produce the kind of revolutionary changes some had anticipated, but it did lead to what in retrospect is one of the most significant milestones in the development of Japanese HE since 1947. This was the relaxation of university establishment standards, implemented just after the end of the Showa period, in 1991. The revision collapsed the previously strict distinctions between different components of the undergraduate curriculum and requirements to conform to conventional disciplinary frameworks. Universities gained unprecedented freedom to design their own distinctive offerings and moreover to have them approved through a significantly streamlined administrative process. The trade-off was a new emphasis on self-assessment and evaluation, which would ultimately form the basis of a full-scale accreditation regime in the 2000s.

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Student access: massification and equality The institutional history of Japanese HE is thus an up-and-down one: from structural diversity to uniformity, then again toward diversity firstly through the addition of supplementary categories and then through qualitative differentiation within the same structural parameters. It is possible to construct a far more linear narrative, however, in relation to quantitative expansion. The number of institutions, the number of students, and most importantly the proportion of students entering HE, all increased throughout the Showa period, albeit with some fluctuations. In the latter half of the period, advancement to HE became a major milestone in the life course of ordinary people as entrance rates exceeded 50 percent (Figure 2.3). (In accordance with the education ministry’s definition, “18-year-old population” in Figure 2.3 refers to the number of students graduating from lower secondary school three years prior, which (theoretically) denotes the number of potential candidates for admission to HE in the year in question.) The story is a familiar one in other societies across the world where, like Japan, the shift from an elite to a mass HE system was fueled by rising participation in upper secondary education, facilitated by the standardization of institutions and credential types, and driven by the demand for skilled labor and applied research in the contexts of economic growth and industrialization. Figure 2.3 18-year-old population and higher education entrance rates, 1960–1990

From elite to mass As noted earlier, the trajectory of expansion was already set by the start of the Showa period, but was accelerated dramatically by the postwar reforms. A key guiding principle for these reforms was that democratization hinged on universal access to education. The right to equal education for all children was enshrined in the new Constitution; compulsory (and free) school education was extended to nine years; and significant efforts were made to address interregional disparities in availability and quality of primary and lower secondary compulsory schooling. Resources were also poured into the development of upper secondary schools, which were better articulated with HE thanks to the aforementioned

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collapsing of the diversified prewar system into a single-track structure. A pipeline was thereby created for large numbers of students to flow directly into HEIs. As the postwar recovery progressed in the 1950s, it became clear that a number of other developments were contributing to a very pronounced swelling of this pipeline. Firstly, there had been a “baby boom” which would push the population of secondary school-leavers above two million in the late 1960s (Figure 2.3). Technological advancements and the shift from primary to secondary/tertiary industries were creating new demand for highly-skilled labor. Trends such as urbanization and nuclearization of the family, combined with rapidly-growing economic affluence, were fueling aspirations for upward social mobility. Within a few short years, hundreds of thousands of school-leavers would be seeking admission to HE institutions. The question of how, and to what extent, the HE sector should expand in order to absorb this demand was not answered with any certainty. The national government, despite spending heavily on the lower levels of the education system, was reluctant to bankroll a large-scale expansion of HE when it had so many pressing, and more popular, investments to make in other areas of society. Those universities which were already supported heavily by the government—former imperial universities and the other national universities established postwar—meanwhile were understandably concerned that an opening-up of their classrooms to a larger number of school-leavers would dilute their academic rigor and jeopardize their mission of producing elite talent and excellent research. The private sector was therefore allowed to expand to meet the growing demand, and it did so with great alacrity, as we have seen by the rapid rate of increase in private universities and colleges from the 1950s to 70s (Table 2.2). There was little need to incentivize private institutions; the combination of burgeoning demand, readily available private sector finance, and tax-free status were sufficient incentives on their own. The aforementioned expansion of science and engineering education in the 1960s, for example, was enabled primarily not by any major governmental intervention but simply by loosening the administrative approval requirements, allowing private universities and colleges to set up new programs more quickly and easily. Over-enrollment became widespread, as private universities sought rationally to maximize revenue in preparation for further investments in expansion. The private sector response provided some kind of solution to the problem of growing demand, but with a number of key problems in terms of access to HE. The first was that HE became a huge private, user-pays market, which not only affected affordability but also conditioned the public to conceive of HE as an essentially private good, with benefits accruing to individual holders of HE credentials rather than society as a whole. Another was that as market forces did their work, access was unevenly distributed—greater in larger urban centers, focused on popular, accessible courses with low setup and delivery costs. Moreover, the private sector, despite showing remarkable flexibility, was unable to respond entirely apace with fluctuations in demand, and a major bottleneck developed when the population bulge reached school-leaving age in the 1960s. This related to another problem, which was that prospective students did not spread themselves evenly across the expanding HE sector but rather gravitated naturally toward the more prestigious universities, resulting in intense competition and the entrenchment of a steep institutional hierarchy. These problems are closely intertwined and it is worth looking at them together and in some detail.

Selection of candidates No mechanism for selection of HE entrants had been built in to Japan’s postwar school system, which instead emphasized equality of both access to and outcomes of compulsory education. Japan in this sense provides an interesting contrast to West Germany, another state which was occupied and subjected to sweeping social and political reforms following its defeat, but where a multi-track school system continued (for better or worse) to channel students into different post-compulsory educational options

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from a very early age. In the uniform egalitarianist system created in postwar Japan, selection for HE opportunities had instead to take place outside formal schooling. Like other features of the postwar system, the natural starting point was to adapt what had existed prior to the reform: in this case, the custom of HEIs conducting formal tests of scholastic ability. This had to be done, however, in a way which was “democratic” in the sense of being both universally accessible and formally objective. The Occupation policymakers encouraged the comprehensive assessment of “past, present and future” performance through reference to academic performance in senior high school, scholastic ability tests conducted by individual institutions, and a common test of general aptitude for HE. The question of what balance to strike between these elements was answered differently at different times during the first two decades after the war, but HEIs themselves were in general unenthusiastic about aptitude testing. The first nationwide general aptitude test (shingaku tekisei kensa) was introduced in 1947 but abandoned in 1954. A more diversified format was developed in 1963, incorporating not only scholastic achievement testing across a wide range of subjects but also assessments of general intelligence and vocational aptitude. This nōken test, as it became known after the research institute which devised it, proved spectacularly unpopular among universities and was decommissioned just five years after its launch. Universities continued of their own accord to select candidates on the basis of formal entrance examinations which, as applicant numbers ballooned in the 1960s, came to demand of candidates not only a mastery of the secondary school curriculum but also a range of extracurricular knowledge, some of it bordering on the esoteric, which could only be acquired through intensive after-hours study. Criticisms of course abounded: the examinations were not a true reflection of aptitude as candidates could improve their scores through practice; they imposed an excessive and unhealthy physical and psychological burden on candidates; they undermined the regular functions of upper secondary schooling and, at worst, turned schools into exam preparation centers; they were expensive and cumbersome to operate; and, ultimately, neither universities nor graduate employers really wanted students who were simply adept at test-taking. These same concerns were in fact the ones which had prompted the abolition of the original national aptitude test in 1954, and indeed continued to be voiced throughout the Showa period. In 1979 the first common exam for national universities was instituted, providing a centralized first-stage screening while universities continued to administer second-stage selection processes themselves. This common “Center Test,” as it became known after its operation was taken over by a National Center for University Entrance Examinations in 1988, also came to be used widely by private and local public institutions in combination with their own selection methods. Adjustments to the format and content of both the Center Test and university-run exams continued almost unabated through the 1980s and beyond, finally reaching critical mass with a sweeping re-design of the Center Test in the late 2010s. Yet the practice of entrance exams persisted: not only because there was no obvious alternative method for sorting through such a large number of school-leavers vying for access to HE, but also because, as discussed above, the institutional hierarchy was already calibrated by the degree of selectivity, and significant interests had been vested in the business of preparing students for the exams. See Chapter 9 for more on the Center Test and its role in the admissions process.

Affordability and equal opportunity Households wishing to maximize their child’s chances of success in the admissions race invested heavily in supplementary schooling, and further costs awaited those who succeeded. National and local public universities were able to keep their fees very low at least until the 1970s but private institutions, which enrolled far more students and remained unsubsidized, had no choice but to operate on a user-pays basis. They increased their fees steadily throughout the 1950s and 60s, both in order to keep up with

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inflation across the Japanese economy (which was running at more than 5 percent through the 1960s) and to recoup their immense spending on land and infrastructure in the course of rapid expansion. It seems difficult to rationalize the preparedness of the Japanese households to shoulder such a burden, at least without resorting to generalizations regarding a “Confucian” cultural heritage in which high individual investment in educational competition was accepted as the natural order of things. However, it must be remembered that a very specific set of conditions prevailed in Japan’s postwar growth period, which may well have produced the same results in other societies with no such cultural preconditioning. Firstly, as we have already seen, the HE sector was already heavily privatized: paying one’s way in HE was the norm rather than the exception. Moreover, the so-called “college premium” was significant: higher credentials generally led to better job prospects, so the user-pays system did actually make sense in return-on-investment terms. The intense competition for access reinforced the conception of HE as a positional good which naturally came at a private cost. Moreover, Japan was experiencing sustained economic growth and household income was on the rise, meaning that, up to a point, ordinary parents did have the capacity to pay, and pay more, for their children’s education. Also, crucially, the system was not inconsistent with egalitarian values as on the surface, the selection mechanism of entrance exams was impartial, and those who performed best naturally gained the most. When in 1971 an OECD commission9 wrote of the “social birth” of Japanese at the age of 18 through entrance exams, that was perhaps preferable at least to such a birth taking place earlier in one’s childhood. There were other factors, however, which undermined the ostensibly meritocratic nature of access to HE. One was place of residence. Market forces worked to produce a concentration of HEIs, and supplementary providers, in the major cities. By 1975, 74% of university and junior college students were concentrated in Japan’s three major metropolitan corridors of Kanto, Tokai and Kinki, centered on Tokyo, Nagoya and Osaka respectively; the university entrance rate among secondary school graduates in Tokyo was already over 40%, while in some rural prefectures it was only 15%. Urban-rural disparity in access to HE had of course existed in the prewar period as well, but became more significant now that children even in the most isolated parts of the country were completing secondary school. Local public universities played an important role in enabling such students to study locally, but municipalities where access was most limited also tended to be those with the least resources and experience in operating HEIs. Apart from living in a major metropolitan area, another means of gaining advantage in access to HE was to be male. The postwar education system was ostensibly gender-neutral, but traditional thinking about gender roles could not be legislated out of existence. The employment market was highly gendered, and parents continued to hold low educational aspirations for their daughters.10 University admissions processes did not discriminate openly, but it was clear that many did so behind the scenes, a reality confirmed by occasional public avowals by distinguished professors to the effect that university was not the place for women.11 Junior colleges provided an important alternative pathway for female school leavers, but one which was arguably also part of the problem, forestalling a more exhaustive discussion of gender inequality in the university sector, and reinforcing gender roles by offering mainly curricula already considered “feminine.”12 At the end of the Showa period men still outnumbered women in universities by more than three to one (Table 2.2), and far more in the “masculine” disciplines such as engineering. Women accounted for only 10 percent of full-time university academics and less than five percent of full professors. Tolerance to increasingly visible inequalities was not unlimited. Many of the large private universities, beginning with Keio in 1965, experienced mass student strikes in protest against fee increases. These soon converged with other student dissatisfactions—ranging from the entrance exam system, to university management practices, to the growing nexus between HE and Japan’s industrial complex—and broader social and political issues such as Japan’s complicity in the US military campaign in Vietnam. The product was the explosive student unrest for which late-1960s Japan is well known.

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Students had played a major role in the 1960 “Ampo” protests over the renewal of the Japan-US Security Treaty, which similarly brought together a wide array of dissatisfactions, but which were played out largely off-campus. The difference this time was that university campuses themselves were the hotspots. As many as half of all universities were disrupted by the protests, but perhaps the most symbolically significant was the 1968–9 takeover of the University of Tokyo campus by student radicals, which saw the deployment of riot police on campus and forced the university to close for several months.13 The student movement ultimately lost momentum as a result of internal ideological conflicts and the threat of a more forceful crackdown by the government (discussed later), but not before it had added a new sense of urgency to long-standing calls for greater state funding for HE to alleviate the burden on students and their families. Private HEIs themselves had long demanded this support, pointing out that they, after all, had borne most of the burden of expansion and by the end of the 1960s enrolled two-thirds of all HE students (the figure in 2020 is closer to three-quarters). In 1970 the government finally instituted an ad hoc subsidy scheme for private universities and colleges, which was enshrined in legislation in 1975. Through the late 1970s and early 80s, subsidies covered close to one-quarter of expenditure in private universities, decreasing thereafter to around 16% on average at the end of the Showa period (and under 10% at the end of Heisei). This new support, however, was accompanied by tighter controls on the establishment of new institutions which kept the supply of HE limited while demand continued to grow. The result, therefore, was not lower fees but higher ones, as private providers had little fear of pricing themselves out of the market.14 Fee inflation at national universities was even more remarkable: a tenfold increase between 1975 and 1990, which reduced the difference in fees between private and national universities from 5:1 to under 2:1.

Autonomy: State regulation, governance, and academic freedom Questions of autonomy are perennial features in popular and scholarly discussions of HE across the world, and Showa Japan was no exception. If anything, the changes in political climate during the Showa period fostered an especial sensitivity to such questions. At an individual level, the issue at stake is usually “academic freedom”: the liberty of individual staff and students of HEIs to research, teach and learn what they see fit, rather than what the authorities deem appropriate. At the institutional level, there may be concern over the degree of central administrative controls placed on the organization and operation of individual HEIs. Stepping back further invites the macro-level question of the degree to which a HE system’s development is coordinated by the state, rather than being a product of the spontaneous and/or undirected growth of HEIs themselves. Once again, different aspects of Showa history yield different assessments of these issues.

The state and the market The discussion in this chapter thus far shows that the Japanese HE system developed rapidly throughout the Showa period. What is far less clear, however, is exactly who developed it. Clearly the state had a role to play: basic statutory frameworks for HE existed, albeit in different forms, both before and after the postwar reform period; and the government performed a variety of basic regulatory functions. In the case of national universities, bureaucratic control was considerable, maintained through both budgeting cycles and circulation of personnel between university administrative organs and the ministry proper. Yet it would be inaccurate to say that the development of HE was driven by the state. As we have seen, the key strategy for development, both before and after 1947, was simply to let the private sector expand—an expansion which was highly successful quantitatively but also led to many of the problems identified in the previous section. While the Central Council for Education, Economic Deliberation Council and other national government advisory bodies made various recommendations in regard to

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reform of the HE system, and there was much administrative tinkering, it is difficult to identify any coherent, long-term vision for the system’s future through Japan’s period of postwar economic and demographic growth.15 Something of a shift took place in the early 1970s. A new emphasis on the “planning” of HE emerged in the national policymaking sphere, with the establishment of an Advisory Committee on Higher Education and a ministerial HE planning division in 1972. The aforementioned subsidy scheme for private universities and colleges was inaugurated around the same time, and the professional training college (senmon gakkō) system was also formalized, bringing the entire HE system within the ambit of national planning. As the decade progressed the government became more proactive in limiting the expansion of the university and college sector, imposing stricter restrictions on establishment of new programs and increases in enrollment quota which slowed the growth of the sector significantly and (according to the government’s rationale) ensured that minimum quality standards could be maintained. For private universities and colleges, greater ministerial control was the stick which accompanied the fresh carrot of subsidies; but more importantly it was a stick which dictated how and to what extent universities could enjoy the pre-existing, and much larger, carrot of access to the still-expanding pool of fee-paying students.16 Administration of quotas and manipulation of establishment standards were thus normalized in the 1970s as the primary means of control over the entire sector. In the mid-1980s, as the population of school leavers entered another sharp upswing, the government once again loosened the reins and introduced a new mechanism of temporarily raised enrollment quotas (rinjiteki teiin), allowing universities and colleges to over-enroll to cater for the population bubble. The seven years from 1986 to 1992 became known as the “golden seven” for private universities, when they enjoyed a seemingly endless supply of candidates and huge entrance examination fee revenue just before Japan entered a major and protracted demographic change which would see the population of school-leavers drop by 40 percent in just two decades and the supply-demand balance reversed completely. Further freedom was granted with the aforementioned relaxation of curricular standards in 1991. Regulation of enrollment quotas was also generous, with universities able to convert some of their temporary quotas to permanent ones, and moreover enroll up to 130% of quota without penalty. Unlike the previous regulatory adjustments, these relaxations were not designed to cater for fluctuating demand: indeed, the timing, at precisely the start of the largest decline in youth population for many decades, seems counter-intuitive—not to mention unfortunate, given the economic disaster which unfolded later in the 1990s. But the relaxation was one of the products of the first wave of so-called neoliberal policymaking in Japan. HE was earmarked as one area which would benefit most from market-driven reform. A consistent refrain in HE policy in the 1980s and beyond was that to survive in the coming decades, HEIs would need to operate more efficiently and find ways to make their offerings distinctive and therefore competitive. These imperatives would in turn align HEIs more effectively with the changing needs of wider society—and particularly the calls from industry for universities to produce graduates with more real-world skills and assume a greater role in applied research and development. The “planning” model perfected in the 1970s was to be supplanted in the Heisei period by a “market” model.17 It is also worth noting the parts of the education system which lay outside these models. Professional training colleges (senmon gakkō), while regulated since 1975, enjoyed lax establishment requirements and minimal ex-post monitoring, allowing them to grow rapidly to a point that, in the 1990s, they enrolled 750,000 students—more than double the number of a decade earlier. This growth was far from irrelevant to HEIs, as these colleges presented a more practical alternative to undergraduate education—or increasingly often, a complement to it, as many students chose to “double-school” themselves in vocational programs at the same time as completing a university or college degree.

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Even less regulated than vocational colleges were institutions falling into the category of “miscellaneous schools” (kakushu gakkō). Many of these institutions were also closely connected with HE, most notably the supplementary education providers which, as we have seen, powered the entrance examination industry and were therefore highly influential in shaping the landscape of HE beyond the government’s reach. Non-regulation of miscellaneous schools produced some unexpected results. One was when international demand for Japanese HE first emerged in the 1970s and 80s. While universities remained ill-prepared for and largely disinterested in recruiting international students, private Japanese language institutes (Nihongo gakkō) provided the major point of entry. Numbers ballooned in the early 1980s and serious concerns emerged over back-door entry to Japan’s labor market.18 In the absence of action by educational policymakers, the Immigration Bureau stepped in to tighten visa issuance standards—a move which, in turn, caused a major backlash in neighboring countries which provided most of the students. Eventually minimum standards for the Japanese language education industry were formulated with the collaboration of the education ministry, but immigration control, not HE planning, remained the primary mechanism for regulating international student numbers throughout the 1980s and 90s. Would the Showa history of HE have been different if the state had been more proactive in developing HE rather than allowing it to develop? The answer is almost certainly yes, but the trade-off may have been stronger tethering of the system to state needs and a level of bureaucratization which would have made academic life more difficult and denied HE opportunities to even more young Japanese. As it is, the product of this history is the curious alternation of hands-on micro-regulation and hands-off macro-planning, and of intense governmental interest in HE but only light investment therein.

Institutional autonomy and academic freedom At the start of the Showa period HEIs enjoyed considerable autonomy in their day-to-day operations. Imperial universities had gradually developed their own systems of collegial academic governance, to a point that presidents and other key officials were elected rather than being ministerially appointed in some institutions. Private universities had even greater scope to organize and conduct their own affairs. In general, individual academics enjoyed high job security and were free to research what they wished. In the 1930s, however, these freedoms were circumscribed considerably as Japan descended into authoritarianism and militarism and the HE system came to be seen as a useful adjunct to the war effort. HEIs themselves began cooperating more actively with authorities and in some cases adopted overtly nationalistic positions which deviated from the more liberal positions which had characterized their institutions prewar. Political and bureaucratic elites understood the importance of building persuasive intellectual justifications for militarist imperialism abroad and authoritarian rule at home, so some academics were co-opted into a kind of service intelligentsia. Students were also drawn increasingly into the war effort, both as soldiers and as workers in military factories and the like. Especially decisive in this mobilization was the lowering of the age of conscription to 19 and the ending of the moratorium on the drafting of students (with a few exceptions, which themselves were removed in the final months of the war) in 1943. In the postwar period this student mobilization (gakuto shutsujin) became emblematic of universities’ complicity in Japan’s disastrous imperial project and the focus of intense reflection (hansei) which underpins the pacifist, liberal missions espoused by so many of Japan’s universities today. From the state’s perspective, the usefulness of HEIs in wartime needed to be weighed against their potential to undermine the political order. The scope of acceptable political ideas narrowed as the war progressed and broad-ranging intellectual enquiry, especially any form of ideological questioning of the state authority, began to be viewed with suspicion. Liberal academics were attacked with vitriol; various forms of intellectual surveillance were implemented, with some academics even falling foul of

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the increasingly oppressive press laws. It was those working in the imperial universities, originally set up expressly as organs of the state, which were viewed as the most problematic if they happened to hold ideologically divergent views.19 The most infamous affront on academic freedom in this period was the “Takigawa Incident” of 1932–33, in which Kyoto Imperial University criminal law professor Takigawa Yukitoki was suspended, and ultimately dismissed, on the orders of the education minister for supposedly anti-state ideas. This unprecedentedly direct interference into the intellectual life of the university was protested fervidly by students in Takigawa’s Faculty of Law, reported and debated widely, and ultimately led to the resignation of a large proportion of the faculty’s remaining professors in protest. Like the student mobilization, in the postwar period the Takigawa Incident became a touchstone in recurring assertions of the value of academic freedom and institutional autonomy.20 Limiting the scope for state intervention in the conduct of education and research was a major priority in postwar education reform. The new Constitution contained an express guarantee of academic freedom (Article 23); the School Education Act also enshrined the principle of academic autonomy by giving faculty councils (kyōjukai) a major role in decision-making on matters such as curriculum and academic personnel. The Private Schools Act provided the basis for private HEIs to operate largely free from governmental intervention once they had been established, although the importance accorded to the autonomy of the professoriate, as distinct from the managerial autonomy of the owning corporation’s directors, varied considerably from institution to institution. National universities and local public universities were subject to more controls, but at an individual level, their academics also benefited from highly secure and privileged status as public servants. This combination of statutory protections and employment practices, combined with the collective memory of prewar experiences such as Takigawa, fostered a strong norm of non-intervention into practical teaching and research. Academic freedom provided an argument against virtually any exercise of managerial authority, and was sometimes mistakenly extrapolated into a general right “to be left alone,” fostering a mutual disinterest between academia and the general public.21 Academic freedom has also been invoked on various occasions to protest the direct imposition of state power on university campuses. An early test case was the “Poporo Incident” at the University of Tokyo in 1952, in which undercover police officers were discovered attending, and taking notes on, a leftist student theater performance on campus and were attacked by incensed students. In the legal battle that followed, the courts accepted that the constitutional guarantee of academic freedom restricted the scope for police presence on campus, but ultimately upheld the convictions of the students who assaulted the officers, on the grounds that the guarantee did not extend to extracurricular activities. The student unrest of the late 1960s was another watershed. Growing campus violence was countered by the introduction of an Act on Emergency Measures in University Administration, which although never actually invoked, was notable in that it empowered national university authorities to override faculty autonomy at times of crisis. This was a move which according to at least one distinguished observer “fundamentally altered” the relationship between government and universities.22 The initiation of a neoliberal reform trajectory in the 1980s could be seen as yet another decisive moment, with the powers of autonomous faculty councils being whittled away in the name of managerial efficiency, and the rise of limited-term and casual appointments eroding collegiality and making academics more beholden to their employers. Whether or not these changes threaten the fundamental right to academic freedom is largely a matter of perspective, but they undoubtedly inform a continued concern in the academic community with institutional and personal autonomy.

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Conclusion In the changes of the Showa period outlined in this chapter we can locate most of the major features of the contemporary Japanese HE system, including a clearly-defined and stable institutional hierarchy, a dominant role for the private sector both in facilitating wider access to HE and in financing it, an intense concern with the processes of admission to HE, formal equality compromised by substantive disparities, a strong norm of non-intervention in practicalities of teaching and research in the name of academic freedom, and a combination of structural rigidity and operational elasticity in government policy. Importantly, these and other features examined at length elsewhere in this volume are not the product of a clearly coordinated long-term vision for Japanese HE but rather an absence thereof, an absence which is proving, in retrospect, to be crucial to the shape which Japanese HE takes in the 21st century.

Notes 1

Statistics on HEIs and student enrollments in this chapter are taken mainly from MEXT’s Gakkō kihon chōsa [School Basic Survey] accessed December 20, 2019, https://www.mext.go.jp/b_menu/toukei/chousa01/kihon /1267995.htm. Some older statistics are from Ministry of Education, Science and Culture, Japan’s Modern Educational System: A History of the First Hundred Years (Tokyo: Ministry of Education, Science and Culture, 1980); and Ito Akihiro, Senkanki nihon no kōtō kyōiku [Japanese higher education in the interwar period] (Tokyo: Tamagawa University Press). 2 For a concise overview of prewar Japanese education, see Part 1 of Edward R. Beauchamp and Richard Rubinger, Education in Japan: A Source Book (New York: Garland, 1989). 3 Philip Altbach and Viswanathan Selvaratnam, From Dependence to Autonomy: The Development of Asian Universities (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1989). 4 Figures 2.1 and 2.2 are adapted and simplified from Ministry of Education, Science and Culture, Japan’s Modern Educational System. They are designed to represent the overall structure of the mainstream education system: simplicity and comprehensibility have been favored over comprehensiveness and technical precision. 5 Ikuo Amano, “Postwar Japanese Education: A History of Reform and Counterreform,” in Education and Schooling in Japan since 1945, ed. Edward R. Beauchamp (New York: Garland Publishing, 1998), 152–167; see also (i) Ikuo Amano, The Origins of Japanese Credentialism (Melbourne: Trans Pacific Press, 2011); (ii) Ronald P. Dore, The Diploma Disease: Education, Qualification and Development (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976). 6 Steve R. Entrich, Shadow Education and Social Inequalities in Japan: Evolving Patterns and Conceptual Implications (Dordrecht: Springer, 2018). 7 (i) Hugo Horta, Machi Sato and Akiyoshi Yonezawa, “Academic Inbreeding: Exploring Its Characteristics and Rationale,” Asia Pacific Education Review 12 (2011), 35–44; (ii) Akiyoshi Yonezawa, “Japan: Opening Up the Academic Labour Market,” in Professorial Pathways: Academic Careers in a Global Perspective, ed. Martin J. Finkelstein and Glen A. Jones (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019), 200–219. 8 Christopher P. Hood, Japanese Education Reform: Nakasone’s Legacy (London: Routledge, 2001). 9 OECD, Reviews of National Policies for Education: Japan (Paris: OECD, 1971). 10 Edward R. Beauchamp, “The Development of Japanese Educational Policy, 1945–85,” History of Education Quarterly 27, 3 (1987): 309. 11 An example is the joshi gakusei bōkoku-ron [discourse of national ruin at the hands of female students] which rose briefly to popularity in the early 1960s. Julia Bullock, “‘Female Students Ruining the Nation’: The Debate over Coeducation in Postwar Japan,” U.S.-Japan Women’s Journal 46 (2014): 3–23. 12 (i) Kumiko Fujimura-Fanselow, “College Women Today: Opinions and Dilemmas,” in Japanese Women: New Feminist Perspectives on the Past, Present and Future, ed. Kumiko Fujimura-Fanselow and Atsuko Kameda (New York: The Feminist Press, 1995), 125–154; (ii) Brian McVeigh, Life in a Japanese Women’s College: Learning to be Ladylike (London: Routledge, 1997) 13 These events can be situated in the wider landscape of student radicalism from 1945 to the present day: see William Andrews, A History of Japanese Radicalism and Counterculture from 1945 to Fukushima (London: Hurst, 2016). For a more in-depth account of student radicalism in the early postwar period, see: Kenji Hasegawa, Student Radicalism and the Formation of Postwar Japan (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019). 14 The period of greatest sustained real increase in private university fees, 1973 to 1988, was also that of slowest growth in student numbers in the postwar era: Yonezawa Akiyoshi, Kōtō kyōiku no taishūka to shiritsu daigaku keiei [Massification of higher education and the administration of private universities] (Sendai: Tohoku University Press, 2011), 246.

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15

For critical analysis of HE policymaking in middle and late Showa, see: (i) T.J. Pempel, Patterns of Japanese Policy Making: Experiences From Higher Education (Boulder, CO.: Westview, 1978); (ii) Leonard Schoppa, Education Reform in Japan: A Case of Immobilist Politics (London: Routledge, 1991). 16 Motohisa Kaneko writes incisively about the relationship between private HEIs and the state in “Japanese Private Universities in Transition: Characteristics, Crisis and Future Directions,” in Frontier of Private Higher Education Research in East Asia, ed. Akiyoshi Yonezawa (Tokyo: Research Institute for Independent Higher Education), 47–62. 17 Ikuo Amano, “Structural Changes in Japan’s Higher Education System: From a Planning to a Market Model,” Higher Education 34 (1997): 125–139. 18 Wolfgang Herbert, Foreign Workers and Law Enforcement in Japan (London: Kegan Paul International, 1997). 19 For an in-depth study on this topic, see: Andrew E. Barshay, State and Intellectual in Imperial Japan: The Public Man in Crisis (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991). 20 For a general reference on academic freedom in imperial Japan, see: Byron Marshall, Academic Freedom and the Japanese Imperial University, 1868–1939 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992). 21 Masao Miyoshi, “The University and the ‘Global’ Economy: The Cases of the United States and Japan,” The South Atlantic Quarterly 99, 4 (2000): 680. 22 Beauchamp, “The Development of Japanese Educational Policy, 1945–85”.

Bibliography Altbach, Philip, and Viswanathan Selvaratnam. From Dependence to Autonomy: The Development of Asian Universities. Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1989. Amano, Ikuo. “Postwar Japanese Education: A History of Reform and Counterreform.” In Education and Schooling in Japan since 1945, edited by Edward R. Beauchamp, 152–167. New York: Garland Publishing, 1998. ———. “Structural Changes in Japan’s Higher Education System: From a Planning to a Market Model.” Higher Education 34 (1997): 125–139. ———. The Origins of Japanese Credentialism. Melbourne: Trans Pacific Press, 2011. Andrews, William. A History of Japanese Radicalism and Counterculture from 1945 to Fukushima. London: Hurst, 2016. Barshay, Andrew E. State and Intellectual in Imperial Japan: The Public Man in Crisis. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991. Beauchamp, Edward R. “The Development of Japanese Educational Policy, 1945–85.” History of Education Quarterly 27, 3 (1987): 299–324. Beauchamp, Edward R., and Richard Rubinger. Education in Japan: A Source Book. New York: Garland, 1989. Bullock, Julia. “‘Female Students Ruining the Nation’: The Debate over Coeducation in Postwar Japan.” U.S.-Japan Women’s Journal 46 (2014): 3–23. Dore, Ronald. The Diploma Disease: Education, Qualification and Development. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976. Entrich, Steve R. Shadow Education and Social Inequalities in Japan: Evolving Patterns and Conceptual Implications. Dordrecht: Springer, 2018. Fujimura-Fanselow, Kumiko. “College Women Today: Opinions and Dilemmas.” In Japanese Women: New Feminist Perspectives on the Past, Present and Future, edited by Kumiko Fujimura-Faneslow and Atsuko Kameda. New York: The Feminist Press, 1995. Hasegawa, Kenji. Student Radicalism and the Formation of Postwar Japan. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019. Herbert, Wolfgang. Foreign Workers and Law Enforcement in Japan. London: Kegan Paul International, 1997. Hood, Christopher P. Japanese Education Reform: Nakasone’s Legacy. London: Routledge, 2001. Horta, Hugo, Machi Sato, and Akiyoshi Yonezawa. “Academic Inbreeding: Exploring Its Characteristics and Rationale.” Asia Pacific Education Review 12 (2011): 35–44. Ito, Akihiro. Senkanki nihon no kōtō kyōiku [Japanese higher education in the interwar period]. Tokyo: Tamagawa University Press, 1999. Kaneko, Motohisa. “Japanese Private Universities in Transition: Characteristics, Crisis and Future Directions.” In Frontier of Private Higher Education Research in East Asia, edited by Akiyoshi Yonezawa. Tokyo: Research Institute for Independent Higher Education, 2007. Marshall, Byron. Academic Freedom and the Japanese Imperial University, 1868–1939. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992. McVeigh, Brian. Life in a Japanese Women’s College: Learning to be Ladylike. London: Routledge, 1997. MEXT, Gakkō kihon chōsa [School Basic Survey]. Accessed December 20, 2019. https://www.mext.go.jp/b_menu /toukei/chousa01/kihon/1267995.htm. Ministry of Education, Science and Culture. Japan’s Modern Educational System: A History of the First Hundred Years. Tokyo: Ministry of Education, Science and Culture, 1980.

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Miyoshi, Masao. “The University and the ‘Global’ Economy: The Cases of the United States and Japan.” The South Atlantic Quarterly 99,4 (2000): 669–696. Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development. Reviews of National Policies for Education: Japan. Paris: Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, 1971. Pempel, T.J. Patterns of Japanese Policy Making: Experiences From Higher Education. Boulder, CO: Westview, 1978. Schoppa, Leonard. Education Reform in Japan: A Case of Immobilist Politics. London: Routledge, 1991. Yonezawa, Akiyoshi. “Japan: Opening Up the Academic Labour Market.” In Professorial Pathways: Academic Careers in a Global Perspective, edited by Martin J. Finkelstein and Glen A. Jones. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019. ———. Kōtō kyōiku no taishūka to shiritsu daigaku keiei [Massification of higher education and private university management]. Sendai: Tohoku University Press, 2010.

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Chapter 3 The Heisei Period: Plus Ça Change? Jeremy Breaden The Heisei period was one-third shorter than the formative Meiji period, and only half the length of the immediately preceding Showa period. Covering three decades without Japanese involvement in international armed conflict, and in political and economic terms witnessing few major internal upheavals, it may be seen as an easier period to categorize. Natural disasters may be what characterize Japan in the early 21st century: volcanic eruptions, floods and landslides recurred, while in particular the earthquake and tsunami of March 11, 2011 (Heisei 23) led to the loss of around 20,000 lives and one nuclear power plant undergoing a meltdown whose after-effects will remain for decades to come. At the time of writing, virtually all university students were born in the Heisei period—indeed in the early years of the 21st century. Thus, this chapter describes what is current experience for the current population of Japan.

Dramatic demographic changes A comparison of some of the vital statistics of Japanese HE in the first year and last full year of Heisei gives a sense of the dramatic demographic changes which color this period. In 1989 the population of 18-year-olds (the standard age of entrance to HE in Japan) was around 2 million; in 2018 it was less than 1.2 million. In 1989 fewer than 50% of secondary school graduates went on to HE; in 2018 more than 80% did. In 1989 there were 500 universities and 590 junior colleges in Japan; in 2018 these figures had risen and fallen respectively to 780 and 330. One does not need to look far beyond these statistics to identify a number of major structural reforms which were also implemented during Heisei, such as the incorporation of national and municipal HE institutions, the creation of new categories such as professional graduate schools and corporate universities, and the establishment of a mandatory third-party evaluation regime. These changes provide the entry point for this chapter’s analysis of HE in the Heisei period. Ultimately, the chapter advances the idea of Heisei as a period of frustrated reform, in which the changes that did eventuate fell far short of, or deviated considerably from, the kinds of fundamental transformations anticipated in late Showa. Concerns such as articulation with secondary schooling, gender equality, affordability, and internationalization were as present in 2018 as they had been back in 1989—if not more so. The new Reiwa period, which began in April 2019 with the abdication of the Heisei emperor, will face similar concerns in different circumstances.

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Reforming higher education: the Heisei “big bang” Education reform was an immensely important theme in Japanese society throughout the Heisei period. In a 2018 survey that asked a broad sample of the Japanese public what changes had affected their lives the most in Heisei, three of the five most popular responses were related to the education system: the introduction of the five-day school week ranked second, the yutori kyōiku “relaxed education” reforms to school curricula came third, and the introduction of a national unified university entrance exam, fifth. (First by a wide margin was the introduction in 1989 of the consumption tax, which rose steadily over the next 30 years from 3% to 10%.) The centrality of education to the Heisei zeitgeist, at least retrospectively, is the product of the intense reform activity of this period. The far-reaching changes to primary and secondary education are a topic for another work, but in relation to HE, a snapshot of the volume of output and variety of themes addressed by the national government’s peak policy advisory bodies (Table 3.1) suggests a clear case of reform fever. Most of the items on the Heisei reform agenda had actually been discussed in the days of the Special Advisory Council on Education in the 1980s and even since the 1960s, when many of the contradictions of the postwar HE system came to a head. What HE policymakers in early Heisei had in mind, however, was something akin to the “big bang” that was meant to remodel Japan’s financial sector following the bursting of the economic bubble in the early 1990s. The momentum necessary for such reform was finally attained in the post-bubble climate, when calls for the remodeling of established institutional structures and practices resonated deeply with a disillusioned public. The centerpiece of Heisei HE reform was the incorporation of public HE institutions (HEIs), which began in 2004 with all national universities and continued over the next decade, as many municipal institutions also took up corporate status and several of the new national university corporations amalgamated to achieve economies of scale. Incorporation essentially entailed making public HEIs autonomous entities rather than direct offshoots of national or municipal governments. This in theory would allow them to manage themselves more efficiently, pursue distinctive and innovative academic and social missions, and—eventually—fend for themselves financially. Incorporation, which echoed the new public management (NPM) approach adopted in the UK in the 1980s, was part of a long and wide-ranging deregulatory trend in Japanese HE policy that had its symbolic beginning in the major relaxation of HEI establishment standards in 1991. By the early 2000s deregulation (kisei kanwa) and structural reform (kōzō kaikaku) had become central themes of policymaking, and a national Council for Regulatory Reform was making sweeping proposals for change across many areas of society. In the area of HE, the Council’s first report in 2001 stated a need to “further relax regulations on the establishment of universities, to create more competitive environments to enable the provision of a higher level of education and research activities on their own decisions and responsibility, and at the same time, improve the monitoring system, such as by introducing a regular accreditation system by third-parties” —in short, less ex ante regulation and more autonomy and ex post accountability. This proposal was put into action remarkably swiftly. In 2002 the School Education Law was amended to oblige all HEIs—national, local public, and private alike—to submit to evaluation by thirdparty entities certified by the education minister at least once every seven years. The establishment of this system of “certified evaluation” (ninshō hyōka) was often portrayed as a revolutionary development, but the move to third-party, ex post quality assurance had actually begun in the 1990s, when the Japan University Accreditation Association (JUAA), which had always applied a peer assessment process to prospective members, began requiring its existing members to submit to re-assessment. By the late 1990s most universities were already engaged in some form of standard evaluation process. Wider deregulatory processes also provided the context for other changes around the same time. The year 2003, for example, saw the introduction of both a new category of professional graduate schools

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Table 3.1 Titles of Reports on Higher Education by the University Council (1989–2000) and the Central Council for Education (2002–2018). 1996

Fixed-term employment of university faculty members

2003 Developing a new policy on international students

1997

The future of higher education beyond 2000

2004

1997 Distance education in graduate schools 2004

Preferential university establishment standards in special zones for structural reform Improving and enhancing pharmaceutical education

1997

Further improvements to higher education

2005 The future of higher education in Japan

1998

A vision for universities in the 21st century and reform measures

2005

Graduate education for a new era: developing graduate schools that are internationally attractive

1999

Improving the selection of candidates for admission to graduate schools

2008

Basic plan for revitalizing education: toward an education-oriented country

Improving articulation of higher 1999 education and primary/secondary education 2000

Improving university entrance examinations

2008 Enhancing education in higher technical colleges 2008 Developing bachelor's degree education Graduate education in a globalized society: enabling graduate degree holders to play active roles in diverse fields across the world

2000 Higher education in a global era

2011

2002 Liberal arts education in a new era

Toward a qualitative transformation of university education for building a new future: universities 2012 fostering lifelong learning and the ability to think independently and proactively Integrated reform of senior high school education, university education, university student admissions and to achieve high school-university articulation for a new era

2002

Measures for promoting the admission of working adults to university

2014

2002

Standards for the establishment of graduate law schools

Diversification of education and quality assurance to 2016 realize a full-participation, problem-solving society that unleashes individual talents and potentials

2002

Advanced professional training in graduate schools

2018 A grand design for higher education toward 2040

2002

Building a new system for quality assurance in universities

* Does not include reports for routine amendment of university/graduate school establishment standards or certification of evaluation agencies.

(senmonshoku daigakuin)—spearheaded by the new law schools (hōka daigakuin) designed as part of a major shakeup of the legal profession planned in the 1990s—and a system allowing regular joint-stock companies and non-profit organizations to establish private universities in “special zones for structural reform” (kōzō kaikaku tokubetsu kuiki) established to stimulate economic activity by providing private enterprise with various regulatory exceptions. Clearly the “big bang” was not to occur in a selfcontained HE universe, but rather in conjunction with other structural and administrative reforms. It is difficult to proclaim the Heisei deregulation of HE either an unmitigated success or an abject failure. Looking at incorporation specifically, for example, we see that the number of public servants

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and volume of public funds directly tied up in university operations decreased, although national universities remained highly dependent on government funding and by international comparison are still extremely well supported. Decision-making within universities became more centralized, and decision-makers enjoyed greater flexibility in areas such as budgets, curriculum and staffing, which allowed them to delineate and differentiate their institutional missions and functions more clearly. These changes, however, were driven less by managerial initiative and more by government funding imperatives and differentiations, such as the 2015 division of national universities into three peer groups for evaluation purposes, and the designation of global flagship institutions from 2017. The administration of public HEIs remains closely tethered to bureaucracy through budget approval processes and circulation of personnel; competitively-awarded funding demands close attention to policy trends and buzzwords; ministerially administered planning and evaluation cycles have produced standardized, uniform management approaches and a considerable degree of audit fatigue. Similarly ambivalent judgments may be applied to the other reforms mentioned above. The certified evaluation system certainly forced HEIs to articulate their missions more clearly and demonstrate the quality of their teaching and learning practices more concretely. The uniformity of standards and comparability of results remained questionable, however: universities were allowed to choose from among a number of different evaluation agencies each with different methodologies, the process was expected to pay considerable respect to the “individual characteristics” of each university, and the seven-year cycle made acute problems arising from sudden changes in operating conditions difficult to detect. Reforms that allowed new players into the private university market may have prompted existing ones to re-think their competitive strategies, but the profile of the private sector did not change substantially: only eight universities were ever established by joint-stock companies, the last in 2007; only four of these remained by the end of the Heisei period. Professional graduate schools proved relatively popular in areas such as business administration (MBA), but the flagship law school reforms turned into one of the most unhappy tales of Heisei higher education. By the final year of Heisei, 35 of the 74 law schools established had already closed or announced their imminent closure owing to under-enrollment; the overall numbers of law school applicants and admissions was the lowest since the system’s launch in 2004. The reasons for this outcome are complex, but two key mistakes in retrospect were the over-estimation of universities’ capacity to design and manage professional education successfully alongside more conventional research-based graduate programs, and an under-estimation of the difficulties involved in implementing the other legal system reforms on which the law schools’ success depended.

Massification and its discontents At the same time as the “big bang” reforms were being planned and implemented, there was a marked acceleration in the progression from elite to mass participation in HE which had been in train since the early postwar decades. The proportion of school-leavers going on to HE increased dramatically between 1990 and 2010, and continued to rise at a slower pace through the 2010s (See Figure 3.1). The increase was not distributed evenly across the sector, however. Enrollments in professional training colleges (senmon gakkō), having doubled between 1980 and 1992, remained relatively steady through the 1990s and 2000s, before entering a gradual decline in the 2010s. A more dramatic hollowing-out took place in the junior college (tanki daigaku) sector, as more women opted to pursue full bachelor degrees (in 1995 the number of women entering four-year universities exceeded those entering junior colleges for the first time since the junior college system was formalized), and many junior colleges themselves took the deregulated environment as an opportunity to “upgrade” and become four-year universities. This migration from junior college to university provided an extra boost for a university sector which was already growing at an impressive rate.

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Figure 3.1 18-year-old population and higher education entrance rates, 1989–2018 Overall HE entrance rate 80.0%

2000

18-y-o population (’000s)

70.0%

60.0%

1500

University entrance rate 50.0%

40.0%

1000

30.0%

500

20.0%

Professional training college entrance rate

10.0%

Junior College

2017

2018

2015

2016

2013

Professional Training College

2014

2011

2012

2010

2009

2007

2008

2005

Higher Tech. College

2006

2003

2004

2001

2002

1999

2000

1997

1998

1995

1996

1993

University

1994

1991

0

1992

Junior college entrance rate

0.0%

Not entering HE

It is important to remember, therefore, that massification was a product not simply of higher levels of secondary educational attainment—senior high school participation rates had already exceeded 90% by the early 1970s—but also of government reforms, including formalization of the professional training school system and relaxation of restrictions on establishment and classification of university and junior college programs. The 1991 relaxation of establishment standards (taikōka) was particularly effective—if that is the apposite word—in introducing greater diversity into undergraduate education. Universities had new freedom to design programs attractive to students who previously may not have considered pursuing an undergraduate degree, and became more creative in designing admission pathways for such cohorts. For example, the number of different undergraduate degrees, previously confined to a strict list of 29 titles, had grown to encompass 250 different disciplinary appellations in 1994, 556 in 2004, and 723 in 2015. More than half of these were offered at only one university, and they included such creative nomenclature as “International Professional Development,” “Synthetic Business Administration,” and “Fashion Sociology.” (Similar tendencies have been observed in countries like the UK that greatly expanded university numbers at about the same time.) Meanwhile, the proportion of students taking regular university entrance examinations declined from three-quarters in the early 1990s to two-thirds at the turn of the millennium, and just over half in the 2010s. The shift to nontraditional admissions was most pronounced among private universities, which by 2015 were on average admitting more than 40 percent of their students by “recommendation” and a further 10 percent using “Admissions Office” methods, some of which involved no academic testing at all. The remarkable thing about the accelerated massification of the Heisei period is its timing. Firstly, it coincided with a protracted economic recession after the bursting of the “bubble” economy at the start of the 1990s. Household incomes declined in real terms and job security also diminished, while the costs of HE continued to rise. The average tuition fee at private universities, for example, doubled

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between 1990 and 2010, while the average wage dropped almost 20%. One might have expected HE to be both less attractive and less accessible to the average family in such circumstances. Yet the opposite was the case: the surge in HE participation mirrors almost precisely the downturn in the Japanese economy. The second remarkable coincidence is that HE expanded in a period of demographic contraction. Japanese households’ preparedness to invest in higher qualifications for their children would seem more rational if those qualifications still had high scarcity value: in other words, if demand significantly outweighed supply, as had been the case in the 1960s and 70s. But in fact almost the opposite was true by the 2000s. At the start of Heisei, one student was successful in enrolling in university out of every two who applied; by 2008, this application-to-enrollment ratio was one to just 1.18. New terms such as zennyū jidai, the era of university entrance for all, were coined as the public discarded the longstanding notion of university as a place for the chosen few. Rather than concluding that the expansion occurred in spite of these conditions of economic uncertainty and decline in scarcity value, we may hypothesize some kind of causal relationship. It seems that in post-bubble, depopulating Japan, more and more parents saw university qualifications as a hedge against uncertainty. A university degree was no longer a ticket to upward social mobility, perhaps, but it was certainly a “defensive necessity” in an increasingly insecure society. Put simply: a university degree was no longer sufficient to earn one a secure future, but it remained necessary therefor. The reversal of the supply-demand dynamic which had prevailed in pre-Heisei Japanese HE was the result primarily of a dramatic decline in the population of 18-year-olds. This cohort, which accounted for more than 95 percent of entrants to HE, shrank from over 2 million in the early 1990s to little more than 1.2 million in 2010 (See Figure 3.1). This decline was expected to lead to mass bankruptcies as fee-reliant private institutions struggled to fill their classrooms. The fact that this doomsday scenario largely failed to materialize is testament to the success of universities in capitalizing on the confluence of apparently contradictory factors outlined above: growing demand for higher qualifications in the context of population decline, economic downturn and deregulation. The product of this success was a university sector which by the end of the Heisei period was not only huge (almost 800 universities enrolling more than 2.5 million students, or around 80% of all students in HE) but also a highly diverse mixture of institutions, ranging from those with century-long histories, to those which started life in postwar Japan as other forms of HEI and only upgraded to university status in the post-1991 rush, to brand-new entrepreneurial creations. In size, they ranged from large metropolitan conglomerates to small owner-operated colleges in rural locales. As institutional profiles diversified, they caught a larger proportion of the school-leaver cohort, including those who, by conventional measures, were ill-prepared for university education. The inevitable concern over declining academic standards at university conjoined, again with Heisei-esque serendipity (or design, depending on one’s perspective), with a panic over the watering-down of school curriculum under the banner of “relaxed education” (yutori kyōiku). The academic shortcomings of new university entrants became the subject of a small publishing boom in the early 2000s, with some authors presenting alarming data under provocative titles such as Have University of Tokyo Students Dumbed Down? and others proffering advice on classroom management to professors forced to modify their academic expectations drastically. Diversification was accompanied, predictably, by a stronger demarcation of institutions within the university sector. A clear-cut hierarchy had long been a feature of Japanese HE (see Chapter 2), but massification caused the gap between top and bottom to expand dramatically. Rather than being ordered in a well-proportioned pyramid, the hierarchy became polarized to the point that, at the end of Heisei, the top 30 private universities were receiving more than 50% of all applications, and the top 100 more than 80%. The remaining 450-odd private universities had no choice but to relax their admission standards even further in order to pull in enough students to remain viable. They managed this not through any great re-invention, but rather, simply, by digging deeper and deeper into the dwindling

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pool of school-leavers. The success story of the Heisei period, if there is one, is that universities survived through sticking to their conventional mode of operation, not by rushing into any “big bang” scenario. Throughout this period the government maintained the stance—developed in the deregulatory climate of the 1990s and early 2000s—that its role is simply to “steer” rather than “control” the HE sector, rewarding good practice and ensuring adherence to basic quality standards. Rare cases of overt departure from this hands-off approach led to outrage. For example, in 2012, then-education minister Tanaka Makiko refused to sign a ministerial approval for the establishment of three new universities, on the grounds that any further increase in the number of universities would exacerbate an “alarming decline” in the quality of education. The refusal was shortly withdrawn, however, following intense criticism from the university sector. The objection was not with Tanaka’s fundamental concerns about the effects of unbridled expansion on university quality, but rather with the fact that her action violated the expectation, cultivated by the government itself, that universities should be responsible for their own destinies, and that the size of the sector should be determined primarily by market forces, not ministerial interventions. Nevertheless, by 2019 MEXT was applying strict limits to enrollments at big-city institutions, especially in the 23 wards of Tokyo. This was to prevent inordinate flight from the regions, which were experiencing rapid depopulation. While much of the popular discourse highlights the negative effects of massification, universities at least have emerged from Heisei with a much stronger and more coordinated focus on educational quality. The development of a buyer’s market for undergraduate education has fostered stronger awareness of student needs, while third-party evaluation and growing differentiation of roles and functions has helped individual institutions to clarify their educational missions. By the end of the Heisei period, almost all universities were operating “faculty development” programs to improve the teaching skills of their staff, soliciting feedback from their students, and publishing lengthy, detailed course-specific syllabus documentation—all things which would have been considered highly unusual just two decades earlier. It was “the first time in the history of the university in Japan,” prominent Japanese HE scholar Amano Ikuo proclaimed, “that true reform in university teaching and learning had begun.”

The (unchanging) agenda of change As suggested at the start of this chapter, while Heisei was a period of massive social and economic change and intensive reform, the changes experienced in the HE sphere were not as dramatic or far-reaching as expected. Japanese HE at the end of Heisei actually bore a striking resemblance to Japanese HE at the end of Showa: it remained dominated by universities, arranged in a clear institutional hierarchy and typology, overwhelmingly private, and populated largely by students fresh from secondary education. There have been many changes of degree, but few of essential substance. Some of the major reform experiments, such as third-party evaluation and incorporation of public HEIs, have become well-entrenched features, but they are ones which add to the existing HE landscape rather than constituting a new one. Other reforms which were meant to transform this landscape, such as the entry of corporate, for-profit players and the popularization of professional graduate school programs, have made a negligible impression on the sector as a whole. The result is an extraordinary degree of constancy in popular awareness of problems in Japanese HE. The three discussions of late-Heisei issues that follow, while non-exhaustive and inevitably colored by the author’s own interests, highlight the longevity of the key features of Japan’s HE system and the debates which surround it and—in a sense—the outstanding durability of the system as a whole.

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Access to university The problem of how to ensure fair and equal access to HE opportunities is one which preoccupies educators and policymakers across the world. An especial point of attention in Japan has been the engineering of the university entrance examination system. The final years of Heisei saw the formulation of a new common exam format to replace the national “Center Test” which had been in operation in various forms since late Showa. While not all candidates take the national exam—as explained above, close to half gain admission without taking a conventional written exam at all, while many private university applicants take exams set by universities themselves instead—the Center Test remains central to understandings of university admission. To cut a long story short, the new version, called the Common Test for University Admissions, seeks to test a broader range of “competences” while relying less on the traditional multiple-choice format and more on written responses. The idea, not necessarily a new one, is to concentrate less on rote knowledge and more on candidates’ abilities in applying such knowledge: a sort of forerunner to “critical thinking.” At the time of writing, plans to roll out this new test in 2020 had been postponed amid criticism of various aspects of the format and content. Among the most controversial was the plan to outsource provision of the English language component of the test to private, commercial providers—a plan which raised concerns about affordability and access to testing opportunities outside major urban areas. The assertion that success in entrance exams is tied to socioeconomic and geographical factors is far from novel, however, and will not be refuted simply by further modifications to the exam format. If this author were to venture one prediction about the future of Japanese HE, it would be that university admission will still be the subject of heated debate at the end of the Reiwa period, whenever that may be. Public belief in the essential fairness of university entrance exams is crucial in order to sustain them in the face of concerns such as those raised above. This belief was sorely tested at the end of the Heisei period, with revelations that one private institution, Tokyo Medical University (TMU), had been manipulating the results of its entrance examination. While there were a number of facets to this manipulation, including the favorable treatment of candidates whose families had made donations to the university, the prime issue was the systematic discrimination against female candidates. Allegations, and later official investigations, suggested that the TMU case may be the tip of the iceberg, as medical school acceptance rates are significantly lower for female candidates than for males more or less across the board. This scandal too could be seen as just the latest and most visible variation on a long-standing theme. In this case, the theme is gender bias in university education. A growing proportion of women now pursue bachelor degree programs in favor of the junior colleges which were once the default destination for female school-leavers seeking further education, but at the end of Heisei the gender ratio was still around 55:45 in favor of men in bachelor degree programs and close to 2:1 in graduate degrees. A strong disciplinary bias persists: the OECD’s annual reports unfailingly chide Japan for having the lowest proportion of women in science, technology, engineering and mathematics of all its member countries. Nonetheless, the huge public outcry which accompanied the TMU revelations suggests a broader shift in thinking about the place of women in HE. The findings of one major survey of parental aspirations for their children’s education show that until the early 1990s more parents nominated junior college than university as the preferred level of education for their female children, but in 2018, 61 percent nominated university. The fact that the corresponding percentage for male children was 72 percent suggests that there is still some way to go before the gender gap closes fully, but the government is clearly expecting it to do so. Its late-Heisei projections of HE participation rates relied on a continued increase in female participation to keep overall numbers steady as the population continues to decline, up to the point when in 2040, 56.3 percent of women would be entering university. This would amount

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to a difference of just two percentage points from the projected figure for men in the same year, compared with a gap of thirteen points in 2007 and just under seven in 2017. Debates over access to university during the Heisei period thus continued along trajectories well established during Showa. There was one area, however, of significant divergence which may have surprised early-Heisei prognosticators. This was the dramatic increase in the use of government-funded student financial aid. The system of income-contingent HE loans currently operated by the MEXTaffiliated JASSO was used by around 15 percent of university and junior college students in the 1990s; by 2015 this figure had grown to nearly 40 percent, or over 1.3 million students. The greater availability of loans was in part a product of factors beyond the HE system itself, notably the transformation of the JASSO organization, which in the same wave of structural and administrative reform which led to national university incorporation had been made into an independent administrative agency and required to operate the loan system more like a conventional financial services business. Nonetheless the outcome—more students taking loans—is an important part of the picture of expanding participation in HE. A watershed in public opinion of the loan system was reached in 2017, when JASSO revealed that more than two-thirds of students at some universities were taking out loans, and some 190,000 graduates were defaulting on their loans to the value of around 88 billion yen. With the vast majority of defaulters in the lower income brackets and disproportionately graduates of lower-ranking institutions, the JASSO system began to be compared to the schemes of predatory consumer credit providers. Paradoxically (given that the Liberal Democratic Party was the main architect of the original structural and administrative reform package) the timing of this JASSO crisis proved politically convenient for the incumbent Liberal Democratic Party, which began formulating a package of “free higher education” (kōtō kyōiku no mushōka) and promising to liberate future low-income students from concerns over potential debt. There is much room, however, to question the capacity of this package to break the long-standing connection between household means and access to HE, especially as its scale is adjusted in response to budgetary pressures.

Research Japan’s universities need to generate more innovative, internationally-connected research and contribute more proactively to the creation of a vibrant knowledge economy. This kind of assertion is just as likely to be heard in the 2020s as it was in 1990. Japanese professors have long viewed themselves primarily as researchers rather than educators, but this identity has traditionally produced inwardlooking, input-oriented research behavior rather than a focus on real-world outcomes; self-sustaining domestic academic communities including a robust Japanese-language publishing industry have obviated the need, in some disciplines at least, to engage with the international academic community. In post-bubble Japan, it was easy to point to these features as evidence that academic research was in crisis, with “ivory towers” draining resources and failing to contribute to the revitalization Japan sorely needed. From the late 1990s, as the notion of a SciTech-led, globally-oriented economic recovery emerged, policymakers adopted a greater emphasis on encouraging, and indeed mandating, research productivity. Note, for example, the enactment of a Science and Technology Basic Law in 1995 and the formulation of Science and Technology Basic Plans at five-year intervals thereafter. The budget for Grants-in-Aid for Scientific Research, the major public funding scheme for individual research projects, grew from 92.4 billion yen in 1995 to 188.8 billion in 2005; with the addition of the aforementioned competitive institutional research funding schemes, a total of more than 350 billion yen in public research funding was available by the mid-2000s. As was the case in many countries, the policy emphasis on research productivity was met with a vigorous critique of the utilitarian focus on output—most notably a simplistic acceptance of the

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expectations of the international, Anglophone academic marketplace. But the expansion of funding also fostered a hearty enthusiasm for assessing both institutional and individual performance by reference to those same problematic expectations. The result was something of a self-fulling prophecy, whereby Japanese research came increasingly to be judged by “global” academic standards and was inevitably found wanting—and increasingly so, as the rest of the world surged ahead and the upward trend in government research funding flattened. The parameters may have shifted from the local to the global, but Japanese research was still in crisis. Late-Heisei debates over research highlighted the fine line between government leadership and government control of research agendas. In 2015, an imprudently-worded ministerial call for a review of the organization and activities of national universities prompted a storm of speculation that the government may be intent on destroying the humanities and social sciences; a dramatic increase in funding for “dual-use” (civilian and potential military) research in 2016 prompted the scientific community to unite in a public commitment to boycott military projects and defend Japan’s constitutionally-backed pacifist norms. Academic freedom remained an important source of solidarity among researchers. The policy emphasis on research productivity had more divisive outcomes, too. Research misconduct was one of the hottest topics of late-Heisei HE, with a number of sensational discoveries of serious data fabrication and manipulation, followed up by government revelations that several thousand cases of questionable research practices had been detected in the medical and life sciences since 2000. Moralistic attacks on the individual researchers implicated in these cases, and calls for a stronger emphasis on research ethics education, were paralleled by a more structural critique which highlighted the pressure on researchers to turn out results quickly and with a view to “high-impact” publication and grant success, which was robbing them of control over their own research agendas and processes. The neoliberal reforms of the Heisei period thus added new elements to the picture of Japanese research in crisis.

International student mobility Another enduring axiom of Japanese HE is that progress on internationalization is painfully slow. Following the trajectory set by the government’s “100,000 International Students Plan” launched in the 1980s, inbound student mobility was the centerpiece of internationalization efforts throughout the Heisei period. The target of 100,000 international student enrollments was achieved in 2003—three years later than planned, and thanks in no small part to extensive government support in the form of student scholarships, tuition reductions and support for infrastructure such as student housing. Major questions remained concerning the capacity of Japanese HEIs to attract large international student enrollments on their own merits, and to cater for them within mainstream programs as opposed to isolated, bespoke offerings. The next plan was to have 300,000 students by 2020, a plan which was backed by a stream of government funding schemes supporting high-profile but relatively small-scale initiatives in a limited number of universities generally situated in the upper echelons of the institutional hierarchy. Once again this left serious questions about the depth of capacity and commitment to opening up Japanese HE to the world. International student numbers certainly continued to grow through the 2000s and 2010s, and at a much faster rate—to 298,980 in the final full year of Heisei (2018), just short of the target set for 2020, which was actually met and slightly exceeded. This growth appears impressive, but it is far from exceptional in light of the scale of global growth in student mobility over the same period. Moreover, it would be naïve to view the growth merely, or even mostly, as a success in HE internationalization policy: larger Heisei-period forces were also at work. For one, the increasingly global aspirations of Japanese business had brought new demand for internationally-minded, interculturally-capable graduate employees. The recruitment of international students became a way for HEIs to establish their international credentials and offer local students intercultural experience, while Japan-literate international students themselves

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became highly sought-after in the graduate job market. Changes in Japanese business and employment were also a key driving force for outbound student mobility. HEIs became more interested in building study abroad into their curricula rather than leaving students to seek extra-curricular opportunities. There was major growth in institutionally-coordinated, short-term study abroad especially within the Asian region, which pushed overall outbound mobility numbers up despite some decline in long-term study abroad to “traditional” (Western) destinations. This shift in turn contributed to increased networking by Japanese HEIs within Asia which, once again, paralleled the larger trajectory of Asian regionalization in the early 21st century. Returning to the topic of inbound mobility, at the other end of the spectrum, numbers were boosted by the vigorous recruitment of international students into lower-ranked private universities and Japanese language institutes. It is in the Japanese language institute sector that much of the growth actually occurred in the 2010s: a 251 percent increase between 2011 and 2018 alone, compared with just 24 percent in universities. In the context of growing demand for semi-skilled workers in depopulating Japan, Japanese language institutes have succeeded in attracting students on the promise of paid work: by 2018, around 20 percent of foreign nationals in the Japanese workforce were students. The profile of inbound student-led internationalization thus became curiously polarized between elite universities selected for flagship government funding and those which sought to attract international students because they were bereft of other ways of differentiating themselves in a shrinking student market. This polarization too is hardly a novel development: when international students first started coming to Japan in large numbers in the early 80s, they were divided into two main groups: government-sponsored research students entering national universities, and those enrolling in Japanese language institutes as a stepping-stone to employment opportunities in Japan.

Conclusion Growth in inbound student mobility without either across-the-board internationalization or the kind of market-driven reorientation seen in many other countries; the extension of a government student loan scheme rather than any dramatic adjustment of the balance between public and private expenditure on HE; a stricter stance on academic misconduct which misses the opportunity to tackle underlying dysfunctions in the research system; fresh debates over university admission which rearticulate perennial inequalities. This chapter’s overview of the Heisei period in Japanese HE may be best summed up as a story of plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. It is important, however, to add two remarks to mitigate the rather simplistic tenor of this conclusion. Firstly, for those who lived through the Heisei period working or studying at Japanese HEIs, the conclusion that Heisei was at least as much a period of stasis as it was transformation may appear ignorant of the major disturbances they experienced as their institutions moved to respond to changes in their operating environment. The point, however, is not that these changes were insignificant, but that the fundamental framework of Japanese HE survived intact in spite of them. This leads to a second caveat, which is that resistance to change does not necessarily constitute failure. The fact that so many features of HE proved so durable in Heisei bodes well for the resilience of Japanese HE in the future. This is not an argument for greater conservatism in HE policy and practice, but it is a reminder—perhaps a timely one given the extreme uncertainty experienced by HE across the world in the early 2020s—that some of the entrenched and intractable features of HE systems may actually be stabilizing forces in times of immense upheaval.

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Notes 1

Daiwa Next Bank, “Heisei jidai no omoide to posuto heisei ni kansuru chōsa” [Memories of Heisei and a survey about post-Heisei], accessed December 20, 2019, https://www.bank-daiwa.co.jp/column/articles/2018/heisei_report _2018.html. 2 Jeremy Eades, Roger Goodman, and Yumiko Hada, eds., The “Big Bang” in Japanese Higher Education: The 2004 Reforms and the Dynamics of Change (Melbourne: Trans Pacific Press, 2005). 3 Hideyuki Konyuba, “Incorporation of National Universities in Japan under New Public Management,” in Higher Education Governance in East Asia: Transformations under Neoliberalism, ed. Jung Cheol Shin (Singapore: Springer, 2018). 4 Council for Regulatory Reform, First Report Regarding Promotion of Regulatory Reform, accessed November 12, 2018, https://www8.cao.go.jp/kisei/en/011211report/index.html. 5 Kazuhiko Shimizu, Masateru Baba, and Koji Shimada, “The New Role of the JUAA in Japanese University Evaluation,” Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education 25, no. 1 (2000): 51–60. 6 The OECD’s international comparative figures show that public expenditure per student in Japanese national HEIs is double that of the EU average and lower overall only than Sweden and Norway. OECD, “Japan,” in Education at a Glance 2018: OECD Indicators (Paris: OECD Publishing, 2018). 7 (i) Akira Arimoto, “Declining Academic Autonomy under Neoliberal Reforms: Lessons from Japanese Higher Education after Incorporation,” in Higher Education Governance in East Asia: Transformations under Neoliberalism, ed. Jung Cheol Shin (Singapore: Springer, 2018); (ii) Akiyoshi Yonezawa, “National University Reforms Introduced by the Japanese Government: University Autonomy under Fire?” in The Governance and Management of Universities in Asia: Global Influences and Local Responses, eds. Chang Da Wan, Molly N. N. Lee, and Hoe Yeong Loke (Abingdon: Routledge, 2019). 8 For in-depth analysis of the law school reforms, see: (i) Daniel H. Foote, “The Trials and Tribulations of Japan’s Legal Education Reforms,” Hastings International and Comparative Law Review 36, no. 2 (2016): 369–442; (ii) Stacey Steele and Anesti Petridis, “Japanese Legal Education Reform: A Lost Opportunity to End the Cult(ure) of the National Bar Examination and Internationalise Curricula?” in The Internationalisation of Legal Education: The Future of Practice of Law, eds. William van Caenegem and Mary Hiscock (Cheltenham UK: Edward Elgar, 2014), 92–121. 9 (i) MEXT, Gakui ni fuki suru senkō bunya no meishō ni tsuite [Specialization titles appended to academic degrees], 2016, accessed December 20, 2019, https://www.mext.go.jp/b_menu/shingi/chukyo/chukyo4/siryo/__icsFiles /afieldfile/2016/12/01/1379805_06.pdf; (ii) National Institution for Academic Degrees and Quality Enhancement of Higher Education, Gakui ni fuki suru senkō bunya no meishō [Titles of specializations appended to academic degrees], 2018, https://www.niad.ac.jp/publication/gakui/1176146_872.html, accessed December 20, 2019. 10 MEXT, Nyūgakusha senbatsu jisshi jōkyō [Status of student admissions selection processes], accessed November 18, 2019 https://www.mext.go.jp/a_menu/koutou/senbatsu/1346790.htm. 11 JASSO, Shōgakukin jigyō kanren shiryō [Materials on the scholarship program] (2017), accessed November 29, 2019, http://www.mext.go.jp/b_menu/shingi/chousa/koutou/069/gijiroku/_ _icsFiles/afieldfile/2016/02/23/1367261_7 .pdf. 12 MEXT, Daigaku nyūgakusha senbatsu, daigaku kyōiku no genjō [Current status of university admissions and university education], 2013, accessed November 1, 2019, http://www.kantei.go.jp/jp/singi/kyouikusaisei/dai11/sankou2 .pdf. 13 For a detailed discussion of the dynamics of demand for HE in high-participation societies such as Japan, see Simon Marginson, “The Worldwide Trend to High Participation Higher Education: Dynamics of Social Stratification in Inclusive Systems,” Higher Education 72, no. 4 (2016): 413–434. 14 See, for example, (i) Tachibana Takashi, Tōdaisei wa baka ni natta ka [Have University of Tokyo students dumbed down?] (Tokyo: Bungei Shunju, 2004); (ii) Tose Nobuyuki and Nishimura Kazuo, Daigakusei no gakuryoku o shindan suru [Diagnosing university students’ academic abilities] (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 2001). For a discussion of the changing perceptions of university academics in the 2000s, see Naoyuki Ogata, “Changes to Japanese Teachers’ View towards Students: Impact of Universalization,” in The Changing Academic Profession in Japan (88–102), eds. Akira Arimoto, William K. Cummings, Futao Huang, and Jung Cheol Shin (New York, Dordrecht, London: Springer, 2015). 15 Obunsha Educational Information Center, Shiganshasū jōi 30 daigaku de 53% shimeru [The top 30 universities attract 53% of all applicants], accessed December. 17, 2019, http://eic.obunsha.co.jp/pdf/exam_info/2019/0913_1.pdf. 16 For detailed analysis of this outcome, see: (i) Chapter 5 of Jeremy Breaden and Roger Goodman, Family-run Universities in Japan: Sources of Inbuilt Resilience in the Face of Demographic Pressure, 1992–2030, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020; (ii) Yushi Inaba, “Higher Education in a Depopulating Society: Survival Strategies of Japanese Universities,” Research in Comparative & International Education (2020), https://doi.org/10.1177/1745499920910581. 17 “Tanaka Denies 3 Proposed New Universities,” Daily Yomiuri, November 3, 2012, http://archive.is/v0wYZ; see also Aoki Mizuho, “Mismatch: Universities on Rise but Students in Decline,” The Japan Times Online, December 4,

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2012, accessed November 8, 2019, https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2012/12/04/reference/mismatch-universities -on-rise-but-students-in-decline/. 18 MEXT, Nihon no daigaku dewa, kyōiku naiyō/hōhōtō no kaizen ga dorekurai susunde iru no deshō ka [How advanced are improvements to educational content and methods in Japanese universities?] (n.d.). http://www.mext .go.jp/a_menu/koutou/daigaku/04052801/005.htm. 19 Ikuo Amano and Gregory Poole, “The Japanese University in Crisis,” Higher Education 50, 4 (2005): 685–711, 697. 20 Greg Wheeler, “The Tokyo Medical University Entrance Exam Scandal: Lessons Learned,” International Journal of Educational Integrity 14 (2018), https://doi.org/10.1007/s40979-018-0039-4. 21 OECD, “Japan,” in Education at a Glance 2018. 22 Central Research Services, Heisei de donna ishiki ga kawatta ka—“nihonjin no ishiki” chōsa no kekka kara [What kinds of attitudes have changed during Heisei: From the results of the “Japanese attitudes” survey], accessed October 14, 2019, https://www.crs.or.jp/backno/No739/7391.htm. 23 MEXT, Daigaku he no shingakushasū no shōrai suikei ni tsuite [Future projection of university entrant numbers], 2018, accessed November 7, 2019, https://www.mext.go.jp/b_menu/shingi/chukyo/chukyo4/042/siryo/_ _icsFiles /afieldfile/2018/03/08/1401754_03.pdf, accessed November 7, 2019. 24 JASSO, Shōgakukin jigyō kanren shiryō. 25 See, for example: (i) Iwashige Yoshiharu, “Shōgakukin” jigoku [“Scholarship” Hell] (Tokyo: Shogakukan, 2017); (ii) Sekita Shinya, “Shōgakukin ga ‘hinkon bijinesu’ to iwareru konpon gen’in” [The basic reason for scholarships being known as a “poverty business”], Toyo Keizai Online, January 26, 2016, https://toyokeizai.net/articles/-/102020. 26 (i) Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, Kakenhi no yosangaku no suii [Change in the Grants-in-Aid budget over time], accessed December 20, 2019, https://www.jsps.go.jp/j-grantsinaid/27_kdata/data/1-1/1-1_r1.pdf; (ii) Fumihiro Maruyama, “Public Expenditure on Higher Education in Japan,” Higher Education Forum 7 (2010), 53–68. 27 Mayumi Ishikawa, “University Rankings, Global Models, and Emerging Hegemony: Critical Analysis from Japan,” Journal of Studies in International Education 13, no. 2 (2009): 159–173. 28 See, for example, Akira Arimoto, “Declining Academic Autonomy under Neoliberal Reforms: Lessons from Japanese Higher Education after Incorporation,” in Higher Education Governance in East Asia: Transformations under Neoliberalism, edited by Jung Cheol Shin (Singapore: Springer, 2018). 29 Gregory Poole, Hiroshi Ota and Mako Kawano, “Tracing the Developments of the ‘Global Education Effect’ in Japanese Higher Education: Discourses, Policy, and Practice,” in The Global Education Effect and Japan: Constructing New Borders and Identification Practices, ed. Neriko Musha Doerr, (Abingdon: Routledge, 2020). 30 Jeremy Breaden, Articulating Asia in Japanese Higher Education: Policy, Partnership and Mobility (Abingdon: Routledge, 2018). 31 Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare, Gaikokujin koyō jōkyō no todokede jōkyō matome [Summary of reporting on employment of foreign nationals], 2018, accessed December 18, 2019, https://www.mhlw.go.jp/content /11655000/000472892.pdf .

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Eades, Jeremy, Roger Goodman, and Yumiko Hada, eds. The “Big Bang” in Japanese Higher Education: The 2004 Reforms and the Dynamics of Change. Melbourne: Trans Pacific Press, 2005. Foote, Daniel H. “The Trials and Tribulations of Japan’s Legal Education Reforms.” Hastings International and Comparative Law Review 36, no. 2 (2016): 369–442. Inaba, Yushi. “Higher Education in a Depopulating Society: Survival Strategies of Japanese Universities.” Research in Comparative & International Education (2020). https://doi.org/10.1177/1745499920910581. Ishikawa, Mayumi. “University Rankings, Global Models, and Emerging Hegemony: Critical Analysis from Japan.” Journal of Studies in International Education 13, no. 2 (2009): 159–173. Iwashige, Yoshiharu. “Shōgakukin” jigoku [“Scholarship” hell]. Tokyo: Shogakukan, 2017. Japan Society for the Promotion of Science. Kakenhi no yosangaku no suii [Change in the Grants-in-Aid budget over time]. Accessed December 20, 2019. https://www.jsps.go.jp/j-grantsinaid/27_kdata/data/1-1/1-1_r1.pdf. Japan Student Services Organisation (JASSO). Shōgakukin jigyō kanren shiryō [Materials on the scholarship program], 2017. Accessed November 29, 2019. http://www.mext.go.jp/b_menu/shingi/chousa/koutou/069/gijiroku /__icsFiles/afieldfile/2016/02/23/1367261_7.pdf. Konyuba, Hideyuki. “Incorporation of National Universities in Japan under New Public Management.” In Higher Education Governance in East Asia: Transformations under Neoliberalism, edited by Jung Cheol Shin. Singapore: Springer, 2018. Marginson, Simon. “The Worldwide Trend to High Participation Higher Education: Dynamics of Social Stratification in Inclusive Systems.” Higher Education 72, 4 (2016): 413–434. Maruyama, Fumihiro. “Public Expenditure on Higher Education in Japan.” Higher Education Forum 7 (2010): 53–68. MEXT. Daigaku he no shingakushasū no shōrai suikei ni tsuite [Future projection of university entrant numbers], 2018. Accessed November 7, 2019. https://www.mext.go.jp/b_menu/shingi/chukyo/chukyo4/042/siryo/_ _icsFiles/afieldfile/2018/03/08/1401754_03.pdf. ———. Daigaku nyūgakusha senbatsu, daigaku kyōiku no genjō [Current status of university admissions and university education], (2013). Accessed November 1, 2019. http://www.kantei.go.jp/jp/singi/kyouikusaisei/dai11 /sankou2.pdf. ———. Gakui ni fuki suru senkō bunya no meishō ni tsuite [Specialization titles appended to academic degrees], 2016. Accessed December 20, 2019. https://www.mext.go.jp/b_menu/shingi/chukyo/chukyo4/siryo/_ _icsFiles/ afieldfile/2016/12/01/1379805_06.pdf. ———. Nihon no daigaku dewa, kyōiku naiyō/hōhōtō no kaizen ga dorekurai susunde iru no deshō ka [How advanced are improvements to educational content and methods in Japanese universities?] (n.d.). Accessed November 18, 2019. http://www.mext.go.jp/a_menu/koutou/daigaku/04052801/005.htm. ———. Nyūgakusha senbatsu jisshi jōkyō [Status of student admissions selection processes], (n.d.). Accessed November 18, 2018, https://www.mext.go.jp/a_menu/koutou/senbatsu/1346790.htm. Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare. Gaikokujin koyō jōkyō no todokede jōkyō matome [Summary of reporting on employment of foreign nationals], (2018). Accessed December 18, 2019, https://www.mhlw.go.jp/content /11655000/000472892.pdf. National Institution for Academic Degrees and Quality Enhancement of Higher Education. Gakui ni fuki suru senkō bunya no meishō [Titles of specializations appended to academic degrees], 2018. Accessed December 20, 2019. https://www.niad.ac.jp/publication/gakui/1176146_872.html. Obunsha Educational Information Center. Shiganshasū jōi 30 daigaku de 53% shimeru [The top 30 universities attract 53% of all applicants]. Accessed December 17, 2019. http://eic.obunsha.co.jp/pdf/exam_info/2019/0913_1 .pdf. Ogata, Naoyuki. “Changes to Japanese Teachers’ View towards Students: Impact of Universalization,” in The Changing Academic Profession in Japan (88–102), edited by Akira Arimoto, William K. Cummings, Futao Huang, and Jung Cheol Shin. New York, Dordrecht, London: Springer, 2015. Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development. “Japan,” in Education at a Glance 2018: OECD Indicators. Paris: OECD Publishing, 2018. Poole, Gregory, Hiroshi Ota, and Mako Kawano. “Tracing the Developments of the ‘Global Education Effect’ in Japanese Higher Education: Discourses, Policy, and Practice,” in The Global Education Effect and Japan: Constructing New Borders and Identification Practices, edited by Neriko Musha Doerr. Abingdon: Routledge, 2020. Sekita, Shinya. “Shōgakukin ga ‘hinkon bijinesu’ to iwareru konpon gen’in” [The fundamental reasons why JASSO scholarships are known as a “poverty business”]. Toyo Keizai Online, January 26, 2016. https://toyokeizai.net /articles/-/102020. Shimizu, Kazuhiko, Masateru Baba, and Koji Shimada, “The New Role of the JUAA in Japanese University Evaluation.” Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education 25 (2000): 51–60. Steele, Stacey and Anesti Petridis. “Japanese Legal Education Reform: A Lost Opportunity to End the Cult(ure) of the National Bar Examination and Internationalise Curricula?” in The Internationalisation of Legal Education:

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The Future of Practice of Law edited by William van Caenegem and Mary Hiscock, (92–121). Cheltenham UK: Edward Elgar, 2014. Tachibana, Takashi. Tōdaisei wa baka ni natta ka [Have University of Tokyo students dumbed down?]. Tokyo: Bungei Shunju, 2004. “Tanaka Denies 3 Proposed New Universities.” Daily Yomiuri, November 3, 2012. http://archive.is/v0wYZ. Tose, Nobuyuki and Kazuo Nishimura. Daigakusei no gakuryoku o shindan suru [Diagnosing university students’ academic abilities]. Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 2001. Wheeler, Greg. “The Tokyo Medical University Entrance Exam Scandal: Lessons Learned.” International Journal of Educational Integrity 14 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40979-018-0039-4. Yonezawa, Akiyoshi. “National University Reforms Introduced by the Japanese Government: University Autonomy under Fire?” in The Governance and Management of Universities in Asia: Global Influences and Local Responses, edited by Chang Da Wan, Molly N. N. Lee, and Hoe Yeong Loke. Abingdon: Routledge, 2019.

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Chapter 4 National Universities: Autonomy in Their Governance; Ideology and Practice Kawano Mako and Gregory Poole Within the limited scope of this chapter, we explore national university (NU) governance generally, looking at not only how government policy has affected NUs, but also presenting the organizational structure, management schemes, and system of financing at these institutions. Our aim is to be as descriptive as possible so as to capture a snapshot of NU governance for those who are not involved directly in the management of a national university, but for whom NU governance might be important to understand. In particular, we have in mind as an audience academic staff working at NUs who might wish to better understand the organization of the institution in which they are members.

Introduction National universities are diverse in institutional mission and respective roles within the Japanese higher education (HE) system, unsurprising given both their sheer number (86 institutions) and considerable scale in terms of enrolled students and academic, research, and administrative staff employed. In spite of this diversity, every national institution of HE has been affected by the (neoliberal) approach toward governance implemented by the state over the past decade or more—the 2004 “big bang” in Japanese HE. This “corporatization” of national universities (CNU), “hōjinka,” was an attempt to infuse autonomy, independence, and entrepreneurialism into the governance of NUs, a considerable challenge given that these institutions are financed mostly by state tax monies. The scope of this chapter will be first to discuss the background of NUs in Japan, reflecting on the roles played by these institutions; then to explore how governance and finance are operated at NUs; and finally, we will attempt to unpack the change that the state corporatization policy (CNU) has had in terms of autonomy. (It should be noted that as of April 2004 what are still commonly known as NUs—National University Corporations, to be exact—are in fact officially designated as independent legal entities.) The basis for our discussion here refers to past scholarship both in Japanese and English, government and institutional documents, as well as qualitative, empirical evidence from various NU actors. We conclude that for the most part the ideology of autonomy has not been achieved in practice at most national institutions and that the government still demands strict oversight on most critical matters of governance. Not only MEXT, but increasingly more powerful actors at the Ministry of Finance (MOF) and the Cabinet Office are increasing their involvement in discussions around the

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governance and finance of NUs. General autonomy in governance is limited by not only external oversight but also internal challenges that arise from various institutional factors that include intractable campus politics and embedded employment practices.

What is a Japanese National University? Currently there are 86 NUs in Japan. Though this number is much less than that of private universities (607), NUs continue to have a dominant presence in the Japanese higher education sector, especially in terms of policy discussions. Since NUs are subsidized by public funds to a much greater degree than private universities, they are expected to answer to the demands of society and the state. As the times change, so do the societal demands placed on NUs. “The sudden changes that affect society today—an aging and shrinking population, globalization, intensified international competition—demand that NUs be institutions making a maximum contribution to finding solutions and generating innovation when facing these issues in Japan and the world.” This is against the backdrop of not only an emerging knowledge economy and a shrinking influence of Japan as an economic superpower on the global stage, but also the increasing realization that globally tertiary education should be regarded as “a major driver of economic competitiveness in an increasingly knowledge-driven global economy.” However, not all NUs are necessarily expected to play the same roles equally. Universities cover a diverse set of needs with very different institutional missions for education, research, and social relations, a diversity both in size and academic focus, including needs that may neither be in high demand nor profitable but are deemed important to the nation. For example, Tsukuba University of Technology, contrary to what the English name implies, is a NU that focuses on HE for individuals with special needs (including hearing and visual disabilities). Another example of this breadth of focus and societal need represented by specialist NUs is the Tokyo University of Marine Science and Technology, an institution that aims to “implement basic and applied education and research related to marine studies and science technologies to facilitate sustainable development of human society.” MEXT in 2014 summarizes the role of national universities as follows: 1. to conduct research and teaching to the highest global standard 2. to conduct basic research on a grand scale while also engaging in cutting edge and experimental research and educational initiatives 3. to sustain and develop academic disciplines not necessarily in high demand 4. to secure equal opportunities to access higher education nationwide 5. to contribute to local revitalization in all regions of the country 6. to respond to human resource training deemed necessary by the government and society. These roles as defined by MEXT indicate the public significance of NUs, which is clearly stronger than that of private universities. Since NUs are regarded by the public to be at the core of Japan’s research activities, recently there is inherently more pressure from the government and industry for them to contribute directly to national “innovation.” This innovation translates to a research intensity that means, for example, compared with local public universities and private universities, more NU researchers apply for Grants-in-Aid for Scientific Research (kakenhi) (Figure 4.1).

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Figure 4.1 Grants-in-Aid (kakenhi) acceptance ratio by institutional type (newly accepted each year) 70.0 60.0

57.5

58.0

56.9

56.6

55.8

55.4

54.8

53.6

53.8

51.8

50.0 National

40.0 30.0

25.9

26.4

27.2

Local public

28.8

27.3

23.6

24.1

24.6

24.8

25.5

11.8

10.7

11.0

11.5

11.2

11.5

11.5

11.6

11.6

11.5

7.0

7.2

7.6

7.1

7.4

7.2

7.3

7.5

7.3

7.9

2010

2011

2012

2013

2014

2015

2016

2017

2018

2019

Private Others

20.0 10.0 0.0

The data on graduate education in Japan also bears out this NU research intensity. While NUs only account for 10.9% of the total number of institutions, they provide research education to 58.8% of all master students and 67.7% of PhD students (Table 4.1). Table 4.1 Number of universities/students/academic staff 9 National

Local Public

Private

Universities

86 (10.9%)

93

607

Undergraduate students

437,401 (16.8%)

138,654

2,033,376

Postgraduate students

152,774 (60.0%)

16,428

Full-time academics

64,092 (34.1%)

14,083

National

Local Public

Private

Master

95,353 (58.8%)

10,653

56,279

85,441

PhD

50,571 (67.7%)

5,052

19,086

109,701

Professional degrees

6,850 (38.8%)

723

10,076

Total

152,774

16,428

85,441

One result of such a research intensity amongst NUs is that most of the research centers of the World Premier International Research Center Initiative (WPI) have been established at national universities. Additionally, NUs make up nine of the eleven member universities in the “RU11,” a consortium of the top research universities in Japan. In addition to this focus on innovative research, the geographic distribution of NUs also reflects their mission to serve the public. While private universities tend to be concentrated in the urban centers where HE is most marketable, every prefecture throughout the country has at least one national university. National university hospitals are consequently distributed among 42 NUs across the nation, which helps to sustain a high level of regional medical service throughout Japan. In this way, medical

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care is also an additional, crucial mission for NUs with hospitals, along with other forms of research, education, and social engagement. There has been a hierarchical structure among NUs from their origin. When HEIs were formally established during Meiji Japan starting in the 1870s, they largely followed Humboldtian models of elite, state-run research universities. The first HEI named “Tokyo University” was established in 1877 by the Meiji government as the first NU in modern Japan, and its successor is still commonly recognized as the most prestigious Japanese HEI. The name was changed to “Imperial University” with the Imperial University Ordinance (teikoku daigaku rei) of 1886, its purpose defined as “to provide instruction in the arts and sciences and to inquire into the mysteries of learning in accordance with the needs of the state.” The name “Tokyo” was restored in 1897 when Kyoto Imperial University became the first of six other imperial universities subsequently founded between 1897 and 1939. Kyoto, Tohoku, Kyushu, Hokkaido, Osaka, and Nagoya are together with the University of Tokyo still referred to informally as the “former imperial universities” (kyū teikoku daigaku or “kyū teidai”) even more than seven decades since the new university system was introduced in 1949. All these institutions were expected to, and did, contribute to the modernization process (kindaika) so important to Japan’s “mission” at the time. Even today the former imperials have a clear reputation as the top research universities in Japan: all of them appear in the above-mentioned RU11 consortium members and in the list of WPI initiatives. The former imperials have places for a larger number of students and researchers, and a larger operating budget, than other NUs. Thus, they have a higher research capability and have been able to consistently attract the top students nationally. Since the ratio of competitive funding has greatly increased after the CNU (as we will discuss below), there is a growing disparity between these top research NUs and other NUs in smaller cities or NUs with only one or two faculties or graduate schools. This disparity seems not only to be one of finances. Kuroki reveals that more information from the government is available to the former imperial universities, thereby creating an information gap that results in more success in achieving competitive funding and thus a growing cycle of disparity generally. This disparity was made more explicit when in 2015 MEXT required all NUs to classify themselves into one of the following three categories: 1. NUs that contribute to the local economy: 55 universities 2. NUs with unique research or teaching program: 15 universities 3. Research NUs that compete globally: 16 universities The stated purpose for the government to ask for such a self-classification was only “for reasons of budget allocation” based on a “prioritization of support” at that time, as will be explained later. Whatever the stated purpose, however, the ramifications of such labeling are certainly significant as it arguably further speeds a growing disparity in the NU sector. With this increasing competition between and stratification of NUs, “contribution to local revitalization” is becoming an increasingly important role for those “category one” institutions located in relatively small cities. One of the ways to contribute locally is through collaborative projects with local companies. NUs are the main actors in industry-academia collaboration in Japan (Table 4.2). Especially in regions outside the large urban centers, NUs are taking a leading role in working with industry. To summarize, since NUs are a diverse group of institutions, even though they have basically the same governance structures regulated by the same national law (as will be seen in the next section), the conditions under which each NU operates are unique and must be considered when seeking to understand their governance.

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Table 4.2 Number of joint research projects with projects commissioned from private corporations Institution

National/ Private

Number of projects

Amount received (unit 1,000 yen)

1 University of Tokyo

NU

1,979

7,496,635

2

NU

1,398

7,254,498

Osaka University

3

Kyoto University

NU

1,134

5,306,850

4

Tohoku University

NU

1,079

3,490,106

5 Kyushu University

NU

812

2,539,227

6

Keio University

PU

793

3,014,328

7

Nagoya University

NU

725

3,218,812

8

Tokyo Institute of Technology

NU

707

2,119,381

9 10

Hokkaido University

NU

666

1,443,884

Kobe University

NU

577

1,325,589

11

Waseda University

PU

529

1,239,163

12

Yamagata University

NU

489

1,060,012

13

Tsukuba University

NU

483

1,112,403

14

Hiroshima University

NU

457

787,180

15

Chiba University

NU

454

968,507

16

Shinshu University

NU

418

586,861 N/A (below top 30)

17

Kindai University

PU

403

18

Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology

NU

377

661,073

19

Ritsumeikan University

PU

369

440,759

20

Tokyo University of Science

PU

331

628,196

Corporatization policy and governance structures Background The policy to incorporate NUs (CNU or hōjinka) began as a movement of new public management (NPM), the impetus for which was partly the increasing demand from society for accountability of public institutions, which was part of a global trend not necessarily limited to Japan. Another reason for the CNU was the general deteriorating fiscal condition of the Japanese government in the postbubble period of the late 1990s. Administrative and financial reforms were undertaken, starting with the Hashimoto administration of 1996–7 and continuing later with Koizumi, 2001–2. For example, one of the key tasks was to reduce the number of national civil servants in an attempt to reduce the government payroll. All academic and administrative staff at NUs were categorized as national civil servants, of course, so changing their status greatly affected this overall number and went far in achieving a reduction in government employees overall. (In 2003 there were over 55,000 full-time non-academic administrative staff and over 60,000 full-time academic research staff employed at NUs nationwide.) Finally, since the national university is the main research actor in Japan, another motivation for the CNU was pressure to fill a growing need for collaboration with industry in order to commodify NU research in commercial applications. Despite these motivations, however, the ultimate purpose of the CNU was to allow NUs more autonomy (see Morozumi for the basic design of the CNU), in both governance and management, while giving them the same status as legal entities enjoyed by the great public universities in western countries.

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The move toward implementing the CNU accelerated with the so-called “Toyama Plan,” which was released in 2001 and indicated for the first time that MEXT had officially changed their original stance and were willing to accept a decision for the corporatization of NUs. Toyama Atsuko, the MEXT Minister at the time, explains that this Plan was inevitable in order to protect national universities from being completely privatized which, given the public mission of NUs, was viewed as undesirable by both MEXT and the NUs. At the Economic and Financial Advisory Council (keizai zaisei shimon kaigi) of the Cabinet Office on 11 June 2001, MEXT submitted this Toyama Plan. In actuality the Plan was a draft of national university reform as a part of a larger effort to create globally competitive national, local public, and private universities in Japan. Incidentally, the president of Gifu University first saw this draft only at the general assembly of the Japan Association of National Universities (JANU) on June 14, 2001, even though MEXT had given a report of the contents to the presidents of former imperial universities and Hitotsubashi University beforehand. The Toyama Plan proposed the following three items: 1. the drastic restructuring and amalgamation of national universities 2. a rapid transition to corporatization by introducing private sector management approaches to national universities 3. the introduction of competition by allocating funds based on third-party assessment results in order to establish 30 top universities in Japan Since the implementation of this Plan, management teams at some national universities, especially ones located outside major urban centers, seriously considered the possibility of institutional partnering and integration for survival. As a result, between 2002 and 2007 the number of national universities shrank from 101 to 86. Over half of these partnerships involved a medical school and a comprehensive university located in the same prefecture (8 out of 14 cases). On March 26, 2002, a final report titled “Atarashii kokuritsu daigaku hōjinzō ni tsuite (The new image of national university corporations)” was released by a MEXT committee (kokuritsu daigaku tō no dokuritsu gyōsei hōjinka ni kansuru chōsa kentō kaigi) tasked with transforming NUs into independent administrative corporations. This report outlined the underlying assumptions of corporatization, including the directive that “the autonomy of the university should be respected as an academic institution and university discretion should be expanded,” and introduced the principle of competition, implemented through third-party assessment and motivated by funding allocation based on these assessment results.

Governance and the structure of decision making The CNU substantially changed the governance structure of NUs. Before, national universities were extra-governmental bodies organizationally located under and therefore part of MEXT. After the CNU, each national university became a single independent legal entity separate from MEXT and the government. The National University Corporation Act (NUCA), which was enacted in July 2003 and effected the CNU on April 2004, regulates the basic governance structure of NUs. The main feature of the NUCA is that it implemented a president-centered management scheme, weakening the bottomup power of the Faculty Council (kyōjukai). Another change implemented by the NUCA is that the president is the single person responsible for all NU activities, both in terms of administrative management as well as academics and research affairs. The NU president is the head of both the university corporation (hōjin) and the university itself (daigaku), which are not separate entities as with private universities in Japan or public universities in many other countries. At all NUs, in addition to auditors (kanji), there are three governing bodies that are mandatory: the Executive Board (yakuinkai), the Management (or Administration) Council (keiei kyōgikai) and the Education and Research Council (kyōiku kenkyū hyōgikai). The NU president is the head of all three

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of these committees. The Executive Board is the top decision-making committee at the NU and is also responsible for the execution of these decisions. The maximum number of Executive Board members (riji) besides the president is set by Article 10 of the NUCA (a set number between two and eight, differing for each NU). Executive Board members often serve as vice-presidents as well (at larger NUs, Executive Board members are given the title of “executive vice-presidents” to distinguish them from vice-presidents not on the Executive Board). The Management (or Administration) Council consists of the president (chair), the Executive Board members, university staff (academic or administrative) appointed by the president, and members from outside the university who must represent more than half of the total membership. These non-university members tend to be people from the private sector who have strong connections in the region where the university is located. This Management Council is positioned to deliberate (shingi) critical matters related to NU management, including mid-term goals (see below), financial matters, and self-assessment. The Education and Research Council consists of the president (chair), university academic and non-academic staff appointed by the president, and deans or department heads set by this council. This council is responsible for deliberating important matters directly related to education and research. The creation of these three governing bodies was meant to diminish the power of the Faculty Council. However, in reality, the NU “culture” has changed more slowly. In an attempt to further emphasize the executive power of the NU president, Article 93-1 of the School Education Act was revised slightly in 2015 from “universities must have Faculty Councils to deliberate important matters” to the simpler phrase “universities have Faculty Councils” in the hope that this would weaken the power of the Faculty Council.

Selecting a president In the new scheme of governing bodies, the president is elected by the Presidential Selection Committee (gakuchō senkō kaigi) at each NU and then officially appointed by the Minister of MEXT (regulated by Article 12-2 of the NUCA). The members of the Presidential Selection Committee consist of selected Education and Research Council members as well as Management Council members who are from outside the institution. Also, members of the Executive Board, including the president, may be appointed to the selection committee, though their number cannot exceed more than one-third of the total members. The result is that it is now possible for a person from outside of the institution to be selected as a NU president. This was not the case before the CNU went into effect. Furthermore, Japanese citizenship is not mandatory. Before the CNU, all NU employees were national public employees as mentioned before, which limited the positions to Japanese citizens. Non-Japanese could be formal faculty members even before the CNU under a special law enacted in 1982 (Kokuritsu mata wa kōritsu no daigaku ni okeru gaikokujin kyōin no ninyō tō ni kansuru tokubetsu sochi hō) that allowed foreigners to be official, but exceptional, members of the Faculty Council. However, because of the NUCA there are no longer any legal constraints to hiring international staff or to inviting a non-Japanese to become president of a NU. Before the CNU, NU presidents were elected by members of the Faculty Council. In reality, there are a number of NUs which still conduct an election (referred to as a “vote of intention” or ikō tōhyō), extending the vote to non-academic staff at some institutions. These election results have a strong influence on the selection by the committee. The University of Tokyo is one such NU. The UTokyo student newspaper explains how after careful consideration the University decided to keep such a vote in the post-CNU era: “Since the University has such a large number of members—including researchers, students, and administrative staff—their voices should be reflected broadly in order for the president to be enabled with proper legitimacy and leadership.”

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Controversy has surrounded this “vote of intention,” however, and according to Kuroki, for at least six NUs (Okayama, Shiga Medical, Niigata, Yamagata, Kochi, and Toyama) the Selection Committee ignored the result of the vote of intention and appointed a different candidate as president. The appointment of presidents by the Selection Committees at UTokyo and the University of Tsukuba in October, 2020 ignored the vote of intention by the faculty and staff, resulting in a review of the process by independent committees and continuing protest by academic and administrative staff.

Mid-term goals and plans (MGP) The management of every NU is now based operationally on a six-year cycle of set goals and plans referred to as the “Mid-term Goals and Plans” (chūki mokuhyō chūki keikaku, “MGP”). The MGP works as a contract between the government as the principal and each national university corporation as an agent. At the time of writing, NUs are in the 4th year of the third six-year cycle of MGP, the first cycle being from FY 2004–2009, the second from FY 2010–2015, and the third from FY 2016–2021. At the beginning of each MGP cycle, MEXT first announces the basic items to be included in the upcoming MGP period. Then each university creates its own goals and detailed plans based on this “guidance” from MEXT. The MGP for a particular NU will then be fixed once the university and MEXT mutually agree with the contents before the beginning of the cycle. Once the cycle begins, every year of the cycle NUs submit progress reports for each of the detailed annual plans in addition to the final achievement report due every six years. The yearly progress reports are extremely involved in their preparation. There is an extensive list of goals and plans that must be accounted for in the report. For instance, Kyoto University devised a detailed set of 55 goals and 79 plans for the current cycle in order to achieve their set goals during the six-year period. The annual progress report must include a section for each plan (in the case of Kyoto University, this means the document will be at least 79 pages in length). Also, for the final reports, there are supporting documents that must be included, such as the “current status reports” (genkyō chōsa hyō) which need to be created by each academic unit of the university. These annual reports and the current status reports are made public on the NU websites. Based on the detailed reports and documents submitted, NUs are assessed by the Council for the Evaluation of National University Corporations (kokuritsu daigaku hōjin hyōka iinkai) once every year and once every six years. This is in addition to an assessment for outside accreditation that all NUs and private universities must undergo every seven years. The results of the six-year assessments are reflected in the amount of operating grants (un’eihi kōfukin) awarded to each institution in a rewardpunishment system. However, irrespective of the massive costs of these assessments both in time and human resources for the universities and the evaluators, there is serious doubt about their effectiveness.

Financing As previously mentioned, before the CNU NUs were directly part of MEXT and therefore all institutional costs were borne by the government. At the same time, all income including tuition fees and medical treatment fees from the NU hospitals went directly into the national treasury. The budgets for national universities were secured as a form of “special accounting” (tokubetsu kaikei) within the national budget. After the CNU, budgets for national universities have been removed from the government’s special accounting and embedded in the general accounting (ippan kaikei). This means that MEXT must compete to secure the NU budgets, jostling with other ministries and government agencies in the yearly process of requesting budgets to the Ministry of Finance, which then draws up the draft of the national budget and submits it to the cabinet council every year, a process that is referred to as gaisan yōkyū, or demand for budgetary appropriations.

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Once the budget has been appropriated, the basic operating fees are then provided by MEXT to each NU in the form of a government grant for operating expenses. The amount of these operating grants for each NU set at the time of the CNU was decided based on that university’s budget size (minus possible incomes from tuition fees and other revenues) from the previous year, 2003, a calculation based mainly on the number of students and staff. Government operating grants account for about half of the total revenue at each NU. Although NUs with university hospitals may appear to be receiving less in terms of grants, if the hospital costs and revenues are excluded, the monies from the government are still about fifty percent of revenue.

Change in the level of autonomy? As mentioned before, the primary objective of the CNU was to facilitate NU reforms by giving each university more discretion. The hope was that with more independence and in a more competitive domestic environment, Japanese NUs would then be able to better compete globally with the world’s top-class universities, both in education and research. “[Before the CNU, Japanese NUs had] … certainly embodied the government’s tertiary education policies more directly, while the government, in turn, … guaranteed the sustainability of high-cost disciplines through utilizing the national universities. This was essentially the rationale for the close control of the national universities by MEXT. The reforms of 2004 altered this nexus.” Approaching two decades after the implementation of the CNU, however, we ask if this nexus was really altered. Although stated as the ideology behind the 2004 reforms, in practice have NUs actually achieved more independence?

More budgetary discretion What autonomy did the NUs obtain after the CNU in 2004? We can point to at least the following four ways in which increased budgetary discretion has influenced NU governance since 2004. First, the CNU has made it possible for NUs to roll forward their budget monies into the next fiscal year. Before 2004 such budget carryover was not an option, since the government operates on a single-year budget system. Since NUs were part of MEXT, they were bound to use the entire budget allocated for any given fiscal year. Budget carryover of course allows for more efficient and strategic money management with less waste, in principle at least. Secondly, in the past NUs were forced to spend annual budgets within the line items specified by MEXT with little or no flexibility in allocation. Since the CNU, NUs are now able to allocate their budgets according to a strategy decided by each institution, specific to their operational circumstances. For instance, the former president of Gifu University points out that one of the merits of the CNU was that even when the university was faced with an overall budget cut, unlike in the past they were able to make a strategic decision to continue hiring part-time lecturers as needed for the curriculum. Even with more discretion in budgetary decisions, however, the reality is that some NUs with very limited income face austerity budgets that do not allow for a strategic approach to institutional finances; all monies are used for critical operational expenses alone, a large portion of which goes to personnel expenses. The number of such institutions is increasing with the yearly shrinking of operational grants, especially true for those NUs with small STEM programs, focused on the arts, humanities, and social sciences. Even some of the larger NUs have been known to struggle to pay for utility expenses, forcing the implementation of draconian consumption rules including turning off all administrative office lights during lunch time, even when staff continue working. In addition, even though there is more flexibility in hiring academic staff than before the CNU when there was a stricter implementation of HR quotas (teiin), most of these additional academics must be hired on limited-term, non-renewable,

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non-tenure-track contracts. This policy is necessitated by the standard labor practice in Japan, and enforced by MEXT, of offering generous retirement packages (taishokukin) to regular employees not on limited-term contracts. The number of these retirement packages is set by the pre-CNU HR quota and included as part of the yearly operating grant, calculated based on the number of regular employees retiring each year. The net result is that young researchers and academics have a more difficult time securing regular posts at NUs than in the past (especially pre-CNU). Thirdly, though the admissions application and examination fee (jukenryō) and one-time enrollment fee (nyūgakukin) are standardized by MEXT nationally, after the CNU each NU now has more control over setting tuition fees (jugyōryō). Base tuition fees are regulated by law (article 2, kokuritsu daigaku tō no jugyōryō sonota hiyō ni kansuru shōrei) and the current standard tuition is set at ¥535,800. However, whereas previously these monies went directly into the national treasury, since FY 2004 all tuition fees are income for NUs, and the law stipulates that each NU is permitted to top-up its own tuition fees above this minimum standard rate. Initially limited to 110%, in FY 2017 this tuition top-up rate was relaxed slightly to 120%. Nevertheless, unlike in England, where a majority of institutions charge the full amount allowed by law, 15 years after the legislation was enacted in Japan the prerogative to top-up fees had not been utilized by any NUs, at least for undergraduate programs. Even today, in practice, most NUs have left the fees at 100% of standard tuition. In April 2019, the Tokyo Institute of Technology and Tokyo University of Arts were the first NUs to decide to increase their tuition up to the limit of ¥642,960. Chiba University and Hitotsubashi University followed suit by increasing their tuition to this same amount from April 2020. Lastly, NUs are now motivated to expand their income streams, since these monies do not go directly into MEXT government coffers. As a result, many NUs are actively seeking to create university endowments, soliciting donations of money and financial assets, as well as research monies from public and private institutions and industry benefactors and collaborators. Related to this has been the introduction of a system of charging an overhead fee to administer the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science Grants-in-Aid for Scientific Research (kakenhi) in which universities can now receive a 30% fee from applicable research monies. Acquisition of such external funds has become a crucial task for the management strategy at NUs. For example, NU development offices have begun the work of cultivating donations through university alumni networks and NU research offices have begun to facilitate a rapidly increasing number of industry-university collaborations (sangaku renkei). These activities greatly increase the total income of NUs and, though a relatively recent development in Japan, especially for NUs, of course parallel similar activities at many other HEIs worldwide. However, this diversification of income streams has arguably increased disparity amongst NUs since the more research-intensive institutions focused predominantly on STEM research earn substantially more in external funding than those NUs that are less research-focused generally or with less of an emphasis on the STEM fields. NU governing boards are less enamored of these external income sources since they are less predictable and often earmarked for specific activities. The desire is for a stable income with unspecified expenditures.

But less discretion in governance? Some scholars argue that MEXT policies still have inordinate influence on institutional governance and thus NUs are not able to exercise true autonomy, quite opposite to the initial vision presented as a reason for the CNU reform. For example, through the proposal, acceptance, and evaluation of the MGPs, NUs are still deeply under the thumb of MEXT, since the results of the MGP evaluation and assessment are reflected in the distribution of budgets in the form of the operating grants. In addition to the cycle of MGP “accountability,” there are other assessment schemes which also have an effect on the distribution of operating grants, working to enforce MEXT policies on NU governance

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and management. First is the so-called “Project to further the intensification of NU reforms” (kokuritsu daigaku kaikaku kyōka suishin jigyō). Introduced in 2012, an annual nationwide competition selects several NU projects and monies are allocated as a part of an additional operating grant. MEXT clearly sets the purpose and goals of this subsidy every year and NUs submit their project proposals based on these specifications. Without a doubt, the NU proposals must match MEXT policies and expectations closely in order to be selected for these grants. Another example of MEXT control is the evaluatory scheme labeled “Prioritized Funding of Operating Grants” (un’eihi kōfukin no jūten shien). This competition was introduced from the third period of MGPs in 2016 and uses the three NU categorizations established in 2015. Every NU submits an annual plan with Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for each specified item, carefully aligned with the key mission of the corresponding category into which each university has been allocated. The purpose of this MEXT scheme is not to select specific universities but rather to evaluate all NUs based on their submitted KPIs for each item, re-allocating their budget through a reapportionment depending on the perceived success of institutional performance in that year. The operating grants are adjusted based on this norm-referenced assessment (i.e., NUs are “graded on a curve” relative to other institutions in their same category) and deductions are made from the operating grants of all universities (1.0 to 1.4% depending on the size of the institution). For instance, the results for FY 2019 are represented in Table 4.3. Table 4.3 2019 FY prioritized funding of operating grants for national university corporations (evaluation results) Distribution ratio

Prioritized Support Category 1

Prioritized Support Category 2

Prioritized Support Category 3

105%

5 universities

1 university

1 university

102.5%

11 universities

3 universities

3 universities

100%

12 universities

4 universities

5 universities

97.5%

11 universities

3 universities

3 universities

95%

16 universities

4 universities

4 universities

We argue that, year after year, MEXT has actually become more influential and gained more control over NU governance and management through the “audit culture” of these evaluation/subsidies schemes. There are other competitive grant projects, such as the Top Global University Project, which are neither connected to the operating grants nor limited to NUs. All these MEXT competitive initiatives and schemes serve to coerce NUs into implementing government “suggestions.” NU academic and administrative staff are beleaguered with the construction of proposals and reports for these MEXT schemes, often facing the pressure of short deadlines and the need to respond to very detailed “guidance” from MEXT on the specifics of these schemes. Even (or especially) after the CNU, there is little room for creativity in the reporting and application process. Since MEXT-set goals have to be achieved in a limited time period, usually less than six years, the NUs response and approach is often necessarily ad-hoc and lacking the resources to consider long-term, strategic institutional planning. One path towards more financial independence from government grants would be for NUs to solicit more money from the private sector (industry-academia collaboration). However, though such collaboration might bring more autonomy from MEXT, the control over governance would merely be shifted to private corporations seeking to influence how universities use the funding they provide. The

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ability for NUs to obtain funding over which they have full discretion is one of the keys to becoming truly autonomous institutions.

Increased MEXT dependency The influence in the name of “accountability” that has been exerted on NUs from the Cabinet Office, Ministry of Finance, Ministry of Economy, Trade, and Industry (METI), and the private sector, including the Japan Business Federation (Keidanren) has probably never been stronger. In the face of pressure from these other government agencies, not surprisingly MEXT stands on the side of NUs. For example, in the process of securing funding for NUs from the central government (gaisan yōkyū as mentioned above), MEXT actually works on behalf of the NUs to secure budget year to year. Also, the original idea for the CNU, the Toyama Plan, was actually submitted by MEXT as a way to deflect discussion of complete privatization of NUs, which was suggested by then Prime Minister Koizumi at the time and supported by private industry. Given this relationship, the dependency on MEXT in which NUs continue to be mired, we wonder how much has really changed in terms of institutional mindset since the CNU. In some ways the various actors at NUs, including the leadership teams, seem perfectly content depending on MEXT, enabling government control as it were. The administrative structure bears this out as one important example.

Autonomy of administrative practices? With the CNU, the management of all administrative departments was also tasked to the university president and their executive board. Before, these administrative offices were managed by the administrative directors (jimukyokuchō) who were sent to the campus directly from MEXT. In the pre-CNU era, not only administrative directors, but also all major management positions (such as general managers, buchō, and managers, kachō) were served by MEXT officials, not by employees hired locally. These NU administrative staff sent by MEXT are generally referred to as “transferred civil servants” (idō kanshoku). As mentioned before, prior to the CNU all NU staff members were “national civil servants” (kokka kōmuin) since the NUs were fully part of MEXT. Thus, MEXT had complete authority over personnel issues for NU administrative (jimu) staff members, while each university had full control over academic staff, a power that supported full academic freedom and autonomy of faculty members as promised in the constitution. In short, before the CNU there were two different governance streams within each NU—academic staff headed by the university president and administrative staff headed by MEXT. Now that the management of administrative offices has been officially tasked to NU presidents, we might consider how this could be an important new opportunity and challenge for the governance of NUs. However, the long-held practice of assigning MEXT officers in management positions at administrative offices has not completely changed, although the number of such MEXT transferred civil servants is decreasing. This practice ensures that MEXT still holds undue influence over administrative offices at NUs even though the president is nominally in charge. The position of the Administrative Director at NUs has largely been replaced by an executive board member position in charge of HR or finance—in 2018 at 76 out of 86 NUs a MEXT official takes this executive board position. The MEXT minister recently announced a decremental reduction in the number of MEXT officials on executive boards and in administrative positions of authority generally (e.g., as buchō or kachō).36 Even so, there are as many as 241 MEXT officials working at NUs across Japan in administrative positions, and of course their loyalties lie with the agendas of their bosses back at MEXT rather than with the local mission of the university to which they have been assigned.

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In addition to the continued practice of MEXT placing administrators at NUs, there are “training programs” that support NU administrative staff working at MEXT for a year or more. There are at least three such programs: 1. Practical Administration Traineeship Program (gyōsei jitsumu kenshūsei) In this program NU administrative staff work at MEXT as trainees for a couple of years while maintaining their affiliation to the home institution, which pays their salary. 2. Long-term Educational Administrators Program for International Exchange (kokusai gyōmu kenshūsei)—LEAP NU administrative staff work at MEXT for a year and then spend another year in a university abroad. Again, they maintain their affiliation to the home institution, which pays their salary. 3. Personnel Exchange Program (kōryū jinji) This program is applicable not only for NUs but also for private universities. University administrative staff temporarily leave their home institution and are affiliated with MEXT. During their time working at MEXT they receive remuneration from the Ministry. These reverse instances of training programs at MEXT for university administrators along with the flow of MEXT officials to NU administrative management offices ensures that the government remains very influential in the day-to-day administration of NUs even after the CNU. This influence is even manifested in the everyday language of NU administrators who commonly refer to MEXT as “the head office” (honshō), indicating a close attachment and loyalty to the government. NU administrators have a practical and psychological dependence on MEXT even 16 years after the CNU. Of course the end result is that such structures of personnel affairs between MEXT and the NUs fosters a continuing reliance and dependence that in some ways prevents NU administrators from breaking away from the pre-CNU mindset and allowing them to take key roles in supporting a more autonomous governance of NUs—“under such a structure … administrative staff cannot break away from a mindset in which they absolutize MEXT policies and guidance rather than prioritizing each university’s self-initiatives and autonomy.”

Conclusion NUs are expected to play a leading, innovative role in Japan, serving the diverse higher educational and research needs of society. The elite nature of the NU as an institution remains a distinguishing characteristic of the select few, starting with the former imperials, while the remaining NUs have been categorized into separate roles that serve the state in varying ways. The effect has been an increasing disparity in access to funding and the continued disparity in access to information. The CNU reforms implemented in 2004 have indeed increased income streams and possibly even facilitated more collaboration with industry as was part of the intent. However, has the main goal of creating more autonomous, competitive institutions been realized? Indeed, by following the worldwide trend of new public management, with corporatization the Japanese state has to a degree infused a market mechanism into the NU sector, and in doing so created more institutional discretion in terms of financial and managerial governance. But this new status of NUs also means that university administrators and management must work ever more closely with MEXT bureaucrats to secure state budget funding for the sector, through the gaisan yōkyū system, which was not always the case in the pre-CNU days. The pressure to maintain such a close relationship with MEXT, in addition to the continued direct presence of state bureaucrats in administrative positions of influence and the indirect effect of former MEXT-trainee minions throughout the NU administrative system, has in some ways created more rather than less dependency on the honshō. Has

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this continued dependency led to an environment that allows for the freedom to develop more creative, unique, and innovative institutions? In some ways, with a decrease in the proportion of NU operating costs being automatically funded directly through MEXT accounting, NUs have less financial stability year-to-year, in the new system of operating grants (un’eihi kōfukin), which may mean less freedom rather than more. In other words, the financial discretion, or “freedom,” awarded to NUs by the CNU seems to have come at a rather high cost—increased “accountability.” Funding is now earmarked by industry and by KPIs; competitive funding comes with strings attached, either to corporations or to the state. Income from the private sector is attached through the earmarking of these monies to certain agendas; budget grants from the state are attached to MEXT and, increasingly, Cabinet Office directives through the MGP cycle of accountability and competition. Responding to the “audit culture” embedded in the financing of NUs post-CNU is in and of itself a huge cost to the administrative and academic staff at every institution—for example, the work hours devoted to documenting KPIs is not insignificant. Putting aside financial dependency (if this is possible), can we not say that the delegation of leadership responsibility to the president and their management teams at individual NUs has been a large step forward toward autonomy of governance? The ideology of the CNU has of course for the first time given full control and responsibility to the university presidents, and at the same time allowed for, and forced, more collaboration between administrators and academics in the governance of the university. In practice, however, strong university leaders managing the NU in an autonomous, top-down model have yet to emerge. There are probably two issues here that largely account for this gap between the ideology and practice of leadership and governance. The first is the tradition of “Humboldt’s ideal,” the cultural-historical background to Japanese HE in which academic freedom is ensured by the bottom-up, collegiate management of the university through the Faculty Council, or kyōjukai. This was especially embraced by the professoriate in postwar Japan, wary as they were of preserving freedoms not allowed during the rise of militarism in the post-Depression period that culminated in the fifteen-year war. This academic culture of an inward-looking (uchimuki) professoriate is averse to a top-down model of university governance. Presidents elected from within such an egalitarian academic community have neither the leadership nor management training necessary to implement a different style of governance. Consequently, embedded modes of practice become the default leadership approach. The second issue that serves to prevent NUs from developing a strong leadership model autonomous from MEXT is the crucial, and somewhat overlooked, role of administrators in the practice of governance. In the neoliberal setting of post-CNU universities, actualization of change is not possible without the full support of the jimu administrators possessing intimate familiarity with the regulations necessary to navigate the terrain of government and industry accountability. These individuals must be advocates for change and innovation in autonomous, top-down governance practices and programs if there is to be success in changing NU management significantly. The power that administrators hold is underestimated—their loyalty is cultivated by MEXT and does not normally lie with the NU president and leadership team. In practice, leadership is exercised not by university presidents but by MEXT bureaucrats through the loyal administrators at the universities. Developing a collaborative working environment where the “real” leadership team is embraced fully and equally by both administrators and academics, fully supported by MEXT laissez-faire, and based on the mission of the NU is arguably key to significant change. Without such a practice, the ideology of the CNU will continue to be slow to effect change in local NU practice.

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Notes 1

R. Goodman, “W(h)ither the Japanese University: An Introduction to the 2004 Higher Education Reforms in Japan,” in The “Big Bang” in Japanese Higher Education: The 2004 Reforms and the Dynamics of Change, eds. J.S. Eades., R. Goodman, and Y. Hada, (Melbourne: Trans Pacific Press, 2005). 2 MEXT, Gakkō kihon chōsa kekka—reiwa gannendo kekka no gaiyō [Outline of results of the 2019 School Basic Survey], accessed February 1, 2020, https://www.mext.go.jp/b_menu/toukei/chousa01/kihon/kekka/k_detail/1419591 .htm. 3 MEXT, Daisanki chūki mokuhyō kikan ni okeru kokuritsu daigaku hōjin uneihi kōfukin no arikata ni tsuite (shingi matome) [The modality of operating grants during the third cycle of the mid-term goals (final report)], 2015, accessed February 1, 2020, https://www.mext.go.jp/component/b_menu/shingi/toushin/_ _icsFiles /afieldfile/2015/06/23/1358943_1.pdf. 4 H. Newby, et al., OECD Reviews of Tertiary Education: JAPAN (2009). 5 TUMSAT (Tokyo University of Marine Science and Technology), “Philosophy and Objectives of the University,” accessed February 1, 2020, https://www.kaiyodai.ac.jp/english/overview/vision/vision.html. 6 MEXT, Kokuritsu hōjin no soshiki oyobi un’ei ni kansuru gaiyō ni tsuite [An overview of organizations and the operation of National University Corporations], 2014, accessed February 1, 2019, https://www.mext.go.jp/b_menu /shingi/chousa/koutou/059/gijiroku/__icsFiles/afieldfile/2015/01/13/1354177_01.pdf. 7 See overview of these roles at Japan Association of National Universities (JANU), “Current Situation of National Universities in Japan,” accessed February 1, 2020, https://www.janu.jp/eng/national_universities. 8 MEXT, Reiwa gannendo kagaku kenkyūhi josei jigyō no haibun ni tsuite [Distribution of Grants-in-Aid for Scientific Research in FY 2019], accessed April 3, 2020, https://www.mext.go.jp/content/20200327-mxt_gakjokik-1422129_1 .pdf. 2019. 9 MEXT, Gakkō kihon chōsa kekka—reiwa gannendo kekka no gaiyō. 10 (i) Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, World Premier International Research Center Initiative (WPI), accessed February 1, 2020. https://www.jsps.go.jp/english/e-toplevel/04_centers.html. 2020; (ii) RU11, Research University 11 website, accessed February 1, 2020, http://www.ru11.jp/eng/. 11 G. Poole, The Japanese Professor: An Ethnography of a Japanese Faculty (Rotterdam: Sense Publishers, 2010). 12 Kuroki T., Rakkasan gakuchō funtōki: daigaku hōjinka no genba kara [A diary of the struggles of a “parachuted president”: from a site of university corporatization] (Tokyo: Chuokoron-shinsha, Inc., 2009). 13 MEXT, Kōtōkyōiku kyoku shuyō jikō—heisei 28 nendo gaisan yōkyū [Key items for the higher education bureau—demand for budgetary appropriations in FY 2016], accessed February 1, 2020, https://www.mext.go.jp /component/b_menu/other/__icsFiles/afieldfile/2015/08/27/1361291_1.pdf. 14 MEXT, Heisei 29 nendo daigaku tō ni okeru sangakurenkei tō jisshi jōkyō ni tsuite [Presence of industry-university collaborations at universities and inter-university research institutes in FY 2017], accessed February 1, 2020, https:// www.mext.go.jp/component/a_menu/science/detail/__icsFiles/afieldfile/2019/03/12/1413730_02.pdf, 46–47. 15 Motohisa Kaneko, “Incorporation of National Universities in Japan: An Evaluation Six Years On,” in University Governance and Reform: Policy, Fads, and Experience in International Perspective, eds H.G. Schuetze, W Bruneau, G. Grosjean (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 179–195. 16 Akiko Morozumi, “Higher Education Reform: Focusing on National University Reform,” in Education in Japan: A Comprehensive Analysis of Education Reforms and Practices, eds. Yuto Kitamura, Toshiyuki Omomo, and Masaaki Katsuno (Singapore: Springer, 2019). 17 MEXT, School Basic Survey (2003), https://www.e-stat.go.jp/en. 18 MEXT, Kokuritsu daigaku no hōjinka wo meguru jū no gimon ni okotae shimasu! [Answering ten questions about national university corporatization], accessed February 1, 2020, https://www.mext.go.jp/a_menu/koutou /houjin/03052702/001.htm. 19 Toyama A., “Kokuritsudaigaku hō no seitei” [Enactment of the National University Corporation Act] in IDE Vol. 600. (Tokyo: Institute for Development of Education, 2018). 20 (i) Kuroki; (ii) Nakai K., Tettei kenshō daigaku hōjinka [An exhaustive investigation of the corporatization of national universities] (Tokyo: Chuokoron-shinsha, Inc, 2004). 21 Kazunori Shima, “Changes in Governance and Finance at Japanese National Universities After Incorporation,” in Higher Education Governance in East Asia: Transformations under Neoliberalism, ed. Jung Cheol Shin (Singapore: Springer, 2018). 22 Osaki H., Kokuritsudaigaku hōjin no keisei [The formation of National University Corporations] (Tokyo: Toshindo Publishing Co, 2011). 23 UTokyo, Tōdai shinbun online: Tōdai sōcho ha kōyatte erabareru [UTokyo online newspaper: How the university president is elected], 2014, accessed February 1, 2020, http://www.todaishimbun.org/sochosen1127/. 24 Kuroki. 25 Tsuchiya Ryo, “Konran suru kokuritsu dai no gakuchō senkō—kyōin no ikō ka toppu daun ka” [Confusion in the selection of the national university presidents: vote of intention by faculty members or top-down appointment?],

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Asahi Shimbun Digital November 12, 2020, accessed November 27, 2020, https://www.asahi.com/articles /ASNCD5SZ6NBRUTIL04Y.html. 26 Kaneko. 27 Kyoto U., “Overview of Medium-Term Goals and Plans,” accessed February 1, 2020, https://www.kyoto-u.ac.jp /en/about/operation/overview-of-medium-term-goals-and-plans-fy2010-2015.html. 28 Kaneko. 29 H. Newby et al. 30 Kuroki. 31 (i) Amano Ikuo, “Hōjinka no genjitsu to kadai” [The realities and prospects of national university reform in 2004] The Journal of Finance and Management in Colleges and Universities. Vol. 4 (2007): 169–205; (ii) Mitsumoto S., Kiki ni tatsu kokuritsu daigaku [National universities in crisis] Tokyo: Cross Culture Publishing Company (CPC), 2015; (iii) Kaneko. 32 Amano, Kaneko. 33 MEXT, Reiwa gannendo kokuritsu daigaku hōjin un’eihi kōfukin no jūten shien no hyōka kekka ni tsuite [The evaluation results of prioritized funding of operating grants for national university corporations], accessed April 3, 2020. https://www.mext.go.jp/content/1417263_01_1.pdf. 34 C. Shore and S. Wright, “Coercive Accountability: The Rise of Audit Culture in Higher Education,” in Audit Cultures: Anthropological Studies in Accountability, Ethics and the Academy, ed. M. Strathern (London: Routledge, 2000) 57–89. 35 Nikkei Shinbun, “Kokuritsu daigaku riji he shukkō hangen: monkashō gyōsei no tōmeisei kakuho” [Reducing by half the number of national university executive board positions from MEXT: securing more transparency in public administration], 2019, accessed February 1, 2020, https://www.nikkei.com/article/DGXMZO41332180V10C19A2CR8000/. 36 MEXT, Gakkō kihon chōsa kekka—reiwa gannendo kekka no gaiyō. 37 (i) Nakai K., Daigaku hōjinka igo: kyōsō gekika to kakusa no kakudai [After the corporatization of national universities: increased competition and widening disparity] (Tokyo: Chuokoron-shinsha, Inc., 2008) 303; (ii) Kono T., “Monkashō kokuritsudai gen’eki-shukkō 241 nin risuto” [A list of 241 MEXT officers working in national universities] Bungeishunju, April 2017, 176–186. 38 Kuroki. 39 Umezawa O., Book review: Kiki ni tatsu kokuritsu daigaku [National universities in crisis] by Mitsumoto Shigeru, Japan Academic Society for Educational Policy Annual Report Vol. 24, accessed February 1, 2020, https://www.jstage .jst.go.jp/article/jasep/24/0/24_202/_pdf/-char/ja, 202–204. 40 (i) C. Shore, “Audit Culture and Illiberal Governance: Universities and the Politics of Accountability,” Anthropological Theory 8(3) (2008), 278–299; (ii) Shore and Wright, (2000); (iii) C. Shore and S. Wright, “Audit Culture Revisited: Rankings, Ratings, and the Reassembling of Society,” Current Anthropology Vol. 56, No.3 (June, 2015), 421–444; (iv) M. Strathern, “Introduction” in Audit Cultures: Anthropological Studies in Accountability, Ethics, and the Academy, ed. M. Strathern (London: Routledge, 2000), 1–18. 41 G. Poole, “Faculty Members at a Private Japanese University: Professors as Conservative Actors in an Era of Reform,” in Higher Education in East Asia: Neoliberalism and the Professoriate, eds. G. Poole and Y. Chen (Rotterdam: Sense Publishers, 2009).

Bibliography Amano, Ikuo. “Hōjinka no genjitsu to kadai” [The realities and prospects of national university reform in 2004]. The Journal of Finance and Management in Colleges and Universities. Vol. 4 (2007): 169–205. Goodman, R. W(h)ither the Japanese University: An Introduction to the 2004 Higher Education Reforms in Japan. In The “Big Bang” in Japanese Higher Education: The 2004 Reforms and the Dynamics of Change edited by J.S. Eades, R. Goodman, and Y. Hada, Melbourne: Trans Pacific Press, 2005. JANU. “Current Situation of National Universities in Japan.” Japan Association of National Universities. Accessed February 1, 2020. https://www.janu.jp/eng/national_universities. 2020. Japan Society for the Promotion of Science. World Premier International Research Center Initiative (WPI). Accessed February 1, 2020. https://www.jsps.go.jp/english/e-toplevel/04_centers.html. 2020. Kaneko, M. “Incorporation of National Universities in Japan: An Evaluation Six Years On.” In University Governance and Reform: Policy, Fads, and Experience in International Perspective edited by H.G. Schuetze, W. Bruneau and G. Grosjean. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Kono, T. “Monkashō kokuritsudai gen’eki-shukkō 241 nin risuto” [A list of 241 MEXT officers working in national universities]. Bungeishunju. April 2017, 176–186. Kuroki, T. Rakkasan gakuchō funtōki: daigaku hōjinka no genba kara [A diary of the struggles of a “parachuted president”: from a site of university corporatization]. Tokyo: Chuokoron-shinsha, Inc., 2009.

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Kyoto U. “Overview of Medium-Term Goals and Plans.” Accessed February 1, 2019. https://www.kyoto-u.ac.jp/en /about/operation/overview-of-medium-term-goals-and-plans-fy2010-2015.html. 2016. MEXT. School Basic Survey, 2003. https://www.e-stat.go.jp/en. ———. Daisanki chūki mokuhyō kikan ni okeru kokuritsu daigaku hōjin uneihi kōfukin no arikata ni tsuite (shingi matome) [The modality of operating grants during the third cycle of the mid-term goals (final report)]. Accessed February 1, 2020. https://www.mext.go.jp/component/b_menu/shingi/toushin/_ _icsFiles/afieldfile/2015 /06/23/1358943_1.pdf. 2015. ———. Gakkō kihon chōsa kekka—reiwa gannendo kekka no gaiyō [Outline of results of the 2019 School Basic Survey] FY 2019 School Basic Survey. Accessed February 1, 2019. https://www.mext.go.jp/b_menu/toukei/chousa01 /kihon/kekka/k_detail/1419591.htm. ———. Heisei 29 nendo daigaku tō ni okeru sangakurenkei tō jisshi jōkyō ni tsuite [Presence of industry-university collaborations at universities and inter-university research institutes in FY 2017]. Accessed February 1, 2019. https://www.mext.go.jp/component/a_menu/science/detail/_ _icsFiles/afieldfile/2019/03/12/1413730_02.pdf. ———. Kokuritsu daigaku no hōjinka wo meguru jū no gimon ni okotae shimasu! [Answering ten questions about national university corporatization]. Accessed February 1, 2020. https://www.mext.go.jp/a_menu/koutou /houjin/03052702/001.htm 2020. ———. Kokuritsu hōjin no soshiki oyobi un’ei ni kansuru gaiyō ni tsuite. [An overview of organizations and the operation of National University Corporations]. Accessed February 1, 2019. https://www.mext.go.jp/b_menu /shingi/chousa/koutou/059/gijiroku/__icsFiles/afieldfile/2015/01/13/1354177_01.pdf. 2014. ———. Kōtōkyōiku kyoku shuyō jikō—heisei 28 nendo gaisan yōkyū [Key items for the higher education bureau —demand for budgetary appropriations in FY 2016]. Accessed February 1, 2019. https://www.mext.go.jp /component/b_menu/other/__icsFiles/afieldfile/2015/08/27/1361291_1.pdf. 2015. ———. Reiwa gannendo kagaku kenkyūhi josei jigyō no haibun ni tsuite [Distribution of Grants-in-Aid for Scientific Research in FY 2019]. Accessed April 3, 2020. https://www.mext.go.jp/content/20200327-mxt _gakjokik-1422129_1.pdf. 2019. Mitsumoto, S. Kiki ni tatsu kokuritsu daigaku [National universities in crisis]. Tokyo: Cross Culture Publishing Company (CPC), 2015. Morozumi, Akiko. “Higher Education Reform: Focusing on National University Reform.” In Education in Japan: A Comprehensive Analysis of Education Reforms and Practices. Edited by Yuto Kitamura, Toshiyuki Omomo, and Masaaki Katsuno. Singapore: Springer, 2019. Nagai, M. Higher Education in Japan: Its Take-off and Crash. Tokyo: University of Tokyo Press, 1971. Nakai, K. Tettei kenshō daigaku hōjinka [An exhaustive investigation of the corporatization of national university]. Tokyo: Chuokoron-shinsha, Inc., 2004. ———. Daigaku hōjinka igo: kyōsō gekika to kakusa no kakudai [After the corporatization of national universities: increased competition and widening disparity]. Tokyo: Chuokoron-shinsha, Inc., 2008. Newby, H. et al. (2009) OECD Reviews of Tertiary Education: JAPAN. Nikkei Shinbun. Kokuritsu daigaku riji he shukkō hangen: monkashō gyōsei no tōmeisei kakuho [Reducing by half the number of national university executive board positions from MEXT: securing more transparency in public administration]. Accessed February 1, 2020. https://www.nikkei.com/article/DGXMZO41332180V 10C19A2CR8000/. 2019. Osaki, H. Kokuritsu daigaku hōjin no keisei [The formation of National University Corporations]. Tokyo: Toshindo Publishing Co., 2011. Poole, G. “Faculty Members at a Private Japanese University: Professors as Conservative Actors in an Era of Reform.” In Higher Education in East Asia: Neoliberalism and the Professoriate. Edited by G. Poole and Y. Chen. Rotterdam: Sense Publishers, 2009. ———. The Japanese Professor: An Ethnography of a Japanese Faculty. Rotterdam: Sense Publishers, 2010. RU11. Research University 11 website. Accessed February 1, 2020. http://www.ru11.jp/eng/ 2020. Shima, Kazunori. “Changes in Governance and Finance at Japanese National Universities After Incorporation.” In Higher Education Governance in East Asia: Transformations under Neoliberalism. Edited by Jung Cheol Shin. Singapore: Springer, 2018. Shore, C. “Audit Culture and Illiberal Governance: Universities and the Politics of Accountability.” Anthropological Theory 8, no. 3 (2008): 278–299. Shore, C. and S. Wright. “Coercive Accountability: The Rise of Audit Culture in Higher Education.” In Audit Cultures: Anthropological Studies in Accountability, Ethics and the Academy. Edited by M. Strathern, 57–89. London: Routledge, 2000. ———. “Audit Culture Revisited: Rankings, Ratings, and the Reassembling of Society.” Current Anthropology Vol. 56, No. 3 (June 2015): 421–444. Strathern, M. “Introduction.” In Audit Cultures: Anthropological Studies in Accountability, Ethics and the Academy. Edited by M. Strathern, 57–89. London: Routledge, 2000.

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Toyama, A. Kokuritsudaigaku hō no seitei [Enactment of the National University Corporation Act]. IDE Vol. 600. Institute for Development of Higher Education, 2018. Tsuchiya, Ryo. “Konran suru kokuritsu dai no gakuchō senkō—kyōin no ikō ka toppu daun ka” [Confusion in the selection of the national university presidents: vote of intention by faculty members or top-down appointment?]. Asahi Shimbun Digital November 12, 2020. Accessed November 27, 2020. https://www.asahi.com/articles /ASNCD5SZ6NBRUTIL04Y.html. TUMSAT. Tokyo University of Marine Science and Technology “Philosophy and Objectives of the University.” Accessed February 1, 2020. https://www.kaiyodai.ac.jp/english/overview/vision/vision.html. 2020. Umezawa, O. Book review: Kiki ni tatsu kokuritsu daigaku [National universities in crisis] by Mitsumoto Shigeru. Japan Academic Society for Educational Policy Annual Report Vol. 24: 202–204. 2017. https://www.jstage.jst.go.jp /article/jasep/24/0/24_202/_pdf/-char/ja. University of Tokyo. Tōdai shinbun online: Tōdai sōcho ha kōyatte erabareru [UTokyo online newspaper: How the university president is elected]. 2014. Accessed February 1, 2019. http://www.todaishimbun.org/sochosen1127/.

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Chapter 5 Public Universities: Prefectural, Local Higher Education Bruce Stronach A note on terminology: Japan has three major categories of universities, national, (kokuritsu), public (kōritsu), and private (watakushi ritsu, usually shortened to shiritsu). These terms will be used here, though there is sometimes confusion, as of course national universities are also public universities. It is best to think of public universities as local universities. According to the Japan Association of Public Universities (JAPU), kōritsu daigaku kyōkai, or Kōdaikyō for short, 62 percent are prefectural universities (including urban metropolitan areas such as Tokyo and Osaka), 30 percent are city universities, four percent are consolidated city/prefectural universities, and four percent are some other form of incorporation.

Introduction In the fall of 2003, while serving as Provost and Chief Operating Officer of Becker College in Worcester MA, I was contacted by an old friend and mentor from my days at Keio University about whether I would be interested in returning to Japan and working with a public university. In a very Japanese way there were no specifics mentioned, but I was very interested and after a few months of discussion and learning that the university was Yokohama City University, following a visit to YCU, I agreed. I was appointed president elect and worked, first from the US and then from Yokohama from September 2004 in planning a drastic reform of the university to be enacted following its entry into the new category of “independently administered public university entities” or kōritsu gakkō hōjin. The national and public university gakkō hōjin was created by the National University Corporation Law of 2003 with the rationale for creating them embedded into the descriptive title of an “independently administered” (dokuritsu gyōsei) entity. A detailed description on the incorporation of national public entities will be given later in the chapter, but the basic idea was for them to become more independent from their government entities and also to develop more of an individual character. Until gakkō hōjin incorporation, a foreigner would not have been able to become president of a public university, as when Yokohama City University was directly governed by the City of Yokohama, those employed in the university were public servants, kōmuin, and foreigners could not become public servants. The above experiences as the president of a public university ended in 2008. However, while there have been changes over the intervening years since the original incorporation of public universities, many of the issues and challenges remain. In the early years few incorporated, but these days the vast majority of public universities are incorporated as gakkō hōjin. The development of public universities after incorporation as gakkō hōjin is one of the main issues in understanding the role of public

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universities today. The incorporation of national and public universities was intended to deregulate those universities as independent, thereby leading them to greater financial autonomy, private sectorstyle management techniques, the inclusion of people from the private sector, or outside the university, in management and decision-making, and bringing greater openness to the university and its management.1

The challenges All institutions of higher education in Japan, not just public universities, and the system of higher education, including secondary schools as well, are facing what can only be described as a severe crisis. The crisis is not just about education and research—although that is a part of it—it is fundamentally a crisis of administration and governance. Quality education and research are based upon the ability of an institution to develop a solid administrative and governance platform that can support the basics of recruiting and supporting students, recruiting and supporting faculty and researchers, bringing in and efficiently managing the revenues necessary to operate, and maintaining a positive, productive, and supportive relationship with its community and the nation. Moreover, increasingly, it needs to do so in a global context. The competition for faculty, students, and resources is a global competition. This crisis consists of several factors which not only pertain to education, but to the society as a whole. In that sense it can only be solved holistically within the context of social, economic, and political reform. This chapter on public universities begins with this statement because it is essential that while looking at the state of public universities in Japan, we do not lose sight of the context without which their conditions cannot be understood. It should also be noted that what is written here about public universities is, for the most part, generalization because, like any other categories of universities, there are many different kinds of public universities from the major urban comprehensive universities like Tokyo Metropolitan University to Chitose Institute of Science and Technology in Hokkaido with its highly specialized curriculum and a mere 718 degree-seeking students. It will also be dealing solely with those public universities that have become incorporated as independently administered public university entities, as they account for 85 percent (70 of 92) of all public universities.2 The number of universities grew at a substantial rate in the postwar years, and especially in the 1980s and 90s while the youth population began to decline. As a consequence, Japan is faced with too many universities chasing too few students. A second consequence of the declining population of Japan is the “magnet” effect where the population of Japan, and especially the student population, is inexorably drawn to the Kanto region surrounding Tokyo. That is where the nation’s top universities are, that is where the life blood of the nation flows, and that is where one finds the modern center of internationalization, popular culture, politics, finance, government, and commerce. Thus, the remoter regions are hollowed out, drained of their youth, while the elderly population passes into superannuated status with no one to pay the bills or take their place to drive the social and economic engine forward. Depopulation is not, however, the only crisis facing Japan and its universities. Globalization presents Japan with a challenge that is almost unique in its acceptance of the need to globalize for the future, while its homogeneity, isolation, domestic institutions, and behavioral patterns make globalization more difficult than for most other OECD countries. All of these problems pertain to the vast majority of universities in Japan, but they affect public universities especially as they are the most vulnerable as a category, and they are undergoing the greatest difficulty in adapting their governance structures to meet the challenges. Thus, much of this chapter will be devoted to how public universities are able to meet these future challenges through the reform of their administration.

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History The prewar history of Japanese higher education is dealt with elsewhere in this volume, but it is well known that as the 19th century progressed into the 20th century, a greater emphasis was placed upon the development of specialized schools specifically with the intent of developing a modern labor force. University education, as we know it, was concentrated in the hands of a few elite imperial universities and private universities. The Japanese postwar years mark a distinct separation from the years that went before in several ways, one being the democratization of higher education through the introduction of the 6-3-3-4 system, through opening admissions to a much broader segment of the population and through distributing national universities around the country in the various prefectures. The American influence under the Occupation stressed decentralization of higher education, the implementation of the basic principles of liberal arts education—especially the development of the self as an individual—diversity, and freedom of thought.3 From the beginning of the 1950s, those principles contested with the demands of local and national employers that colleges and universities produce graduates who were immediately able to play productive roles in the newly developing economy. What that meant in 1952 was quite different from in 1972 and so, in part, the development of universities, their rapid growth and the number of students studying in them, is related to the changes in what was needed to support the changing needs of the economy and society. This is directly related to the growth of Japanese public universities, as they were intended to be the foundation to support local higher educational needs. Although a total of 26 local-government-administered institutions of higher education were already operating in 1943, i.e., two universities and 24 specialized schools,4 one can trace the real origins of the public university to the late 1940s: to be precise, to 1949, a year in which 17 public universities were created, most of which incorporated various existing specialized schools into the newly-formed university organization. A good example is Yokohama City University, which was created in 1949 from a specialized commercial school and a medical school. Subsequently the number of public universities grew in proportion to private universities, meaning a quite rapid growth over the next few decades, for example from 39 universities in 1989 (Heisei 1) to 93 in 2019 (Reiwa 1).

What are Public Universities? The above-mentioned Japanese Association of Public Universities, or Kōdaikyō, is the group that represents public universities, acts as both a lobbying institution for public universities and, more importantly, is an association that is dedicated to research on and betterment of public universities. Frequent reference will be made to the Kōdaikyō in this chapter. Its definition of mission and goals are as follows (author’s translation):

The mission: This corporation aims to contribute to the promotion of public universities, higher education in Japan, improvement of academic research standards, and balanced development.

Implementation of mission: • Investigate and study higher education policy trends in national and local governments and provide information to society and members. • While looking at the policies of the national and local governments, consider the future and future vision of public universities. • Support public university education, research and promotion of community and community contribution activities.

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• Investigate and study management issues at public universities. • Speak to society on behalf of public universities. • Conduct business incidental to or related to the businesses listed in the preceding items. The Kōdaikyō both leads and reflects the challenges and changes that face the membership. When President of Yokohama City University I served on the First Strategic Policy Committee from 2005–2008 at the time when the incorporation of public universities into gakkō hōjin was just beginning. Therefore, the leadership, and the membership, comprised individuals and institutions that were government funded. The Kōdaikyō was just beginning to come to grips with the change and what that change meant. It might also be noted, as pointed out elsewhere in this chapter, that those years were the time in which the number of public universities was still growing but the percentage of gakkō hōjin institutions was still small. In 2005, only seven out of 73 public universities were gakkō hōjin institutions. Changes in the Kōdaikyō are manifested by the choice of its leadership and its Chairman, Kito Hiroshi, the President of Shizuoka Prefectural University. The Kōdaikyō today is all about finding the best path forward for public universities in the future of Japan, and helping them negotiate the many serious problems that will be discussed in this chapter. This chapter relies heavily on Kōdaikyō publications and data.

General condition The fundamental description of the public university is that given by MEXT: The university aims to develop knowledge, morals, and applied abilities as a center of academics, and to deeply teach and study specialized arts and crafts. Under the structure of national, public and private institutions, the level of education and research has been improved, and various and unique developments have been made. In particular, public universities have played a central role in providing higher education opportunities in the region and as an intellectual and cultural center in the local community, in addition to their objectives and the nature of being established and managed by local governments. In the future, contributions to society, economy, and culture are expected in each region.5 (Author’s translation) There is no doubt that public universities maintain a very limited share of higher education in Japan, and that tends to be, on average, less competitive than private and national universities. Tables 5.1–5.3 give some indication of scale or ranking. There is at least an informal understanding that in overall quality national universities are rated highest, with private universities second, and public universities third, but of course there are several public universities that do rank relatively highly. Table 5.1 Size of public universities by number of faculties / undergraduate schools6 Faculties

1

2

3

4

5 or more

48%

24%

11%

7%

10%

Table 5.2 Size of public universities by student numbers7 Students

68

< 1000

1000–2000

2000–5000

> 5000

41%

39%

15%

5%

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Table 5.3 Ranking in Japan’s top 150 universities (2019)8 Number of institutions in the top 150

Average rank

National

58

53.6

Private

23

80.4

Public

70

92.5

Gakkō hōjin Since 2004, the reorganization of public universities as corporations also has become an option for local public entities. Following the system designed for national university corporations, the public university corporation system has allowed any local public entity to organize and manage corporations at its own discretion.9 The establishment of a gakkō hōjin style governance is intended to create university administration which is based on a private corporate management—that is to say, more flexible personnel policies, opening the university to employment from outside the university, openness and transparency in administration, corporate finance policies, and greater leadership from the president of the university. In many ways it is reflective of new public management (NPM) principles that are intended to make local government agencies more responsible to their clients, i.e., local citizens, in the way that private corporations are responsible to their customers. Although it has been 15 years since the introduction of the independent incorporation status, there are still many struggles, especially, but not only, within newly incorporated bodies. The local government is the original establishing body and may create the public university for reasons that it believes will serve the needs of the community, but without fully comprehending the way in which universities are actually governed or administered. Thus, as the newly incorporated gakkō hōjin institution develops as a university, there may be real friction between the establishing government and the incorporated university. In addition, the funds that are provided by the local government for the establishment and operation for the first three to five years of operation may not be adequate. Second, one of the fundamental elements of the gakkō hōjin incorporation system is the use of mid-term planning and the evaluation committee. Each university creates a (usually) six-year midterm plan, chūki keikaku with its establishing government body at the time of incorporation by MEXT and then is evaluated by the evaluation committee on the extent to which it has met the goals of the plan. Most of the original gakkō hōjin institutions are now in their third mid-term plan. While this was intended to establish a transparent means of evaluating the university on clearly stated goals, like any other similar set plan, it allows for little, if any, improvisation. Rather like the five-year plans of the Soviet Union, once it is put in place there is little deviation allowed, even if external or internal circumstances change. Indeed, while it is intended to be a means of creating transparency and independence from the establishing government entity, it is a highly bureaucratic form of administration which allows for continued government control. The evaluation committee is appointed by the establishing government and therefore the university is judged not by its ability to act as a university so much as it is judged by the local government on how well it has accomplished the goals of the mid-term plan. Another gakkō hōjin goal was to allow each university to develop itself as a university using its own unique attributes. Universities, qua universities, should be relatively flexible entities that adjust their research and educational initiatives to the changing needs of society. The mid-term plan system is the very antithesis of flexibility. This problem becomes more and more significant as the universities try to adapt to ever increasing globalization and advances in information technology and artificial intelligence.

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Governance As noted above the main mission of public universities is to support the development of the areas in which they exist. According to the “Grand Design of Higher Education for 2040” created in November 2018: In an unpredictable era, local higher education institutions such as public universities are expected to serve as resources for revitalizing society, economy, and culture as a center of knowledge and human resources. In order to fulfill this role, it was shown that there is a need to establish a permanent collaboration with industry and local governments at multiple higher education institutions. Based on this report, each public university will actively work on reforms appropriate to the circumstances of its own university.10 (Author’s translation) The two most important elements of the above quotation are “unpredictable era” and “appropriate to the circumstances of its own university.” This report and other white papers, strategic plans, reports, etc. that plan the future of higher education 20 years from now and beyond cannot possibly comprehend the full effect that the depopulation of Japan will have on higher education, or the effect of advances in information technology and artificial intelligence. Second, the central problem for public universities has been to develop themselves as universities, as separate from either agencies of the government body that originally established them or the establishing committee of the gakkō hōjin corporation. In order to fulfill their missions, public universities will have to come to grips with their role as both an arm of local government policy and their development as independent universities under gakkō hōjin. This does set them apart from national universities, as national universities have a very clear relationship with only one entity, MEXT. Public universities are as varied as the many towns, cities, and prefectures across the nation to which they are attached and which they represent. If the local government has a clear idea of its policies, that will simplify the goals of the public university. But if it is not clear, it is the role of the public university, as a university, to develop a direction for the local government and its citizens. In the second decade since the beginning of the incorporation of gakkō hōjin, it is time for public universities to take a much greater role in their own development as universities and to implement with more authority the “independent administration” that is a central part of the original idea of the incorporation. For those who are familiar with national and private universities, but have less familiarity with public universities, it is hard to imagine the daily battles that may occur between the university as university, and the local establishing government. Even after a university becomes gakkō hōjin local government can maintain much control through the representation of government bureaucrats on the gakkō hōjin evaluation committee, the university Board of Trustees, and through government personnel who are seconded to the university. In the era of the gakkō hōjin, personnel policy is especially important. When universities were directly under the control of the local governing authority, all university full-time staff and faculty were public servants. The transition to gakkō hōjin incorporation created two fundamental problems. The first was that all faculty members lost their public servant status and became employees of the university. This created a great deal of backlash because local public servants in Japan have solid permanent employment, and extremely good salary and benefits packages, especially as relates to retirement. In today’s Japan retirement benefits are of increasing importance as the youth population declines and the number of retirees grows. The second aspect of gakkō hōjin status that many faculty members did not like was that it is intended to make university management more corporate, to give more power to the president and other members of senior administration, to the detriment of the faculty.

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This second major personnel challenge of gakkō hōjin status is the creation of a two-tiered personnel system within the university. Upon incorporation, faculty members lost their public servant status, while those members of the staff who were public servants at the time of transition did not. It was up to the university to begin to hire from outside the university staff who were university hires, as opposed to local government public servant hires. Thus were created two parallel personnel systems working simultaneously within the university: the university’s and the local government’s. More importantly, the local government public servants had a status that was far superior to the new university hires. Even the lowest ranked public servant could outrank a professional administrator hired from outside the university by dint of his/her public servant status. There is an old saying in Japanese which, while not as true as it used to be, still has some truth, “bureaucrats exalted, people reviled,” kanson minpi. In the first budget meeting at Yokohama City University I attended, we were discussing how much money the City would give us for the various projects we wanted to undertake, how we would manage what we thought we could get, and how we would go about asking the City Council’s Budget Planning Committee. I asked, “Why don’t we simply start raising more money ourselves? The point of gakkō hōjin is to reform the finances of the university and to increase its financial independence. Let’s think about how we can develop our own revenue separate from the operating funds we receive from the City.” The YCU finance and accounting office was completely staffed by seconded public servants from the City and the lowest ranked member looked at me and said, “This is not the business of the university president.” The point was clear: the City was in charge irrespective of the “independent administration” of the university under gakkō hōjin, and the lowliest public servant had more authority in these matters than the president of the university. The problem with the two parallel personnel systems is not only that public servants have the whip hand, but employees in the two different systems are looking to two different masters. Public employees are usually seconded to the university for a relatively short period of time, two or three years, as they are routed through the local government’s various departments. First, Parks and Recreation, then the University, then Water and Sewers, etc. Public servants will always have their eyes on the personnel department of the government, and on the government itself, for future advancement. As public universities have developed after incorporating as gakkō hōjin more and more university staff and administration have become direct employees of the university. However, local governments still tend to control the most important parts of the university administration, especially finance and accounting, and HR, and maintain positions on the gakkō hōjin evaluation committee and Board of Trustees. That being said, in general, as a university develops post-gakkō hōjin incorporation, the ratio of university-employed staff to seconded personnel increases. The good news is that, on average, over the first ten years of incorporation the ratio improved from 10 percent to 70 percent, but the bad news is that even after 10 years 30 percent of employees are still seconded from the government, and in the most central positions, in finance and HR. Another factor is the size of the university. Sixty-four percent of public universities are so small that they have 40 or fewer full-time staff.11 It is not that all public servants who serve in public universities are not competent and/or are not motivated to serve the interests of the university; indeed, many are very committed to the development of the university as a university, and are very professional in their work. However, there is no doubt that, as a general matter, government agencies want to retain as much authority and influence as they can over their client entities. That is particularly true if the tax revenues of the government are paying for a substantial share of the operation of the entity. Even today, on average, 62 percent of the university’s revenues come from the local government authority. The strong rebuke from the young man in the YCU Budget Planning Committee was not just a display of the power of public servants, it was also a statement of the authority of the City over university finances no matter what the corporate status of the University. See Chapter 15 for a more in-depth look at the issues of “generalists vs. specialists” and “clerical vs. academic.”

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Another aspect of incorporation that has made the situation more difficult for public universities, as opposed to national universities, is that all national universities were incorporated at the same time. Public universities have incorporated on an individual basis gradually over the past 15 years. Not only do they face more differentiated challenges from a greater number of sources, they have not been able to deal with the challenges as a unified group. This increases the importance of the Kōdaikyō.

Leadership Central to the question of governance is leadership. Incorporation was intended to strengthen the role of the president in the institution but, by and large, that has not happened. While it is true that the role of the faculty in presidential selection has been greatly reduced, so has the role of the establishing government been strongly increased. The Presidential Selection Committee in most cases is made up of members of the top administrative body, keiei shingikai and the top academic body, kyōikukenkyū shingikai. These bodies tend to represent rather conservative thinking within the university and can also be quite politically sensitive to the demands of the mayor or prefectural governor, to the point where it is not uncommon for the new president to essentially be appointed by one of them. One interesting phenomenon is that when gakkō hōjin universities are first established, there is a tendency to appoint presidents from outside the university as a means of “shaking things up.” That was certainly the case of my appointment by the Mayor of Yokohama. In addition, newly formed universities tend to hire from outside the university because there is no “insider” at the time of formation. However, as time has passed in the gakkō hōjin era most universities have reverted to hiring the next president from inside the university as a “safe” choice, or at least to hiring someone who is well known as the president of another university. Examples that come to mind are President Nishigaki of Shizuoka Prefectural University who was hired as the President of Miyagi Prefectural University, and President Suzuki of International Christian University, a well-known liberal arts private university, as the president of Akita International University, a well-known liberal arts prefectural university. Hiring true outsiders as president has on the whole not gone well. Although there may be some within the establishing government who may want to bring in an outsider to shake things up, there are often many others within the university who do not want to shake things up. There can be a great deal of resistance from both faculty groups and bureaucrat groups. There are also businessmen being appointed with the belief that they could bring concepts of corporate management to the university, only to find them difficult to implement within a non-innovative university administrative structure.

Finances One of the fundamental reasons for gakkō hōjin incorporation has been to reduce the reliance on central government spending, but universities have few ways of doing so. The most important means of increasing revenue—raising tuition—is not really an option. Tuition has been raised gradually over the past 30 years, but it is still very low. The result of the increase in the number of students at public universities in the 21st century has resulted in a severe decrease in the public government funds available per student; see Table 5.4. Table 5.4 Funding by local government per student in public universities12 2006

2016

Number of students

124,338

147,506

Amount of funding per student

¥1.436M

¥1.163M

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Given the decreased allocation per student, it makes sense that the amount of university expenses paid by the local supporting government is also down. In 2005 the establishing government paid on average 72 percent of the university’s operating expenses, but by 2018 that had declined to 60 percent.13 It would then make sense that the average tuition for public universities has increased 62 percent, from ¥331,686 to ¥538,633.14 However, as tuition rises to make up for the decrease in government support, the burden falls on the students’ families, who have the least ability to sustain it. As Table 5.5 demonstrates, of the three types of universities in Japan, the families of public university students have the lowest average income of any type of university. Table 5.5 Students’ annual family income by type of university15 ¥4M

¥6M

¥8M

¥10M

¥12M

¥13M

National

18%

19%

22%

16%

12%

13%

Private

18%

18%

20%

18%

12%

14%

Public

21%

22%

23%

16%

9%

9%

The model is not sustainable without a truly revolutionary approach to creating means by which the university can develop its own outside funding, as most national universities have done. The standard means of raising outside funds is through corporate tie-ups for research and development, fund raising, and MEXT, or other-national government-related, program funding. National universities and the highest ranked private universities have made great strides over the last decade in developing corporate ties for research and development. The situation for public universities is much more diverse and is better at each end of the spectrum. For major universities like YCU that have close ties to the city’s development of research clusters, major medical schools, affiliated hospitals and bio-medical research units, there are many opportunities for corporate collaboration in research and development, as well as funds from the central government for medical research and health and welfare support. At the other end of the scale, much smaller and very local nursing schools can receive support from both local entities and the national government for medical, health and welfare support for regional towns and municipalities. One question which has never been adequately answered is why public universities (and national universities for that matter) do not introduce differential tuition for those citizens within and outside the government’s area of taxation. Japanese university entrance fees can be quite high: in the early 2020s they are about ¥400,000 for public universities, and although some public universities do differentiate between local residents and outside residents, none do for tuition. The average tuition, while having been raised over the Heisei period, is still quite low, at ¥538,633, and the average government support from local taxation, as we have seen, is about 60 percent. If local tax revenues are being used to support the education of those outside the area of taxation, this amounts to the local taxpayer giving scholarships to non-locals, too. In addition, if public universities are to act like independent corporations and adopt at least some methods used in corporate management, one would think that the more popular urban institutions, like Yokohama City University, Tokyo Metropolitan University, or Hiroshima City University would raise their tuition for outsiders as the demand for places at these institutions would support such an increase. This would have another important side effect: it would discourage migration from the regions. Family income in the regions is lower than in the metropolitan areas, and so instead of creating policies such as not allowing new gakkō hōjin institutions to be created in the 23 wards of Tokyo, it would be better to allow the free market to determine academic migration. If metropolitan public universities’ tuitions were increased, the number of regional students entering would decrease. This

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idea may or may not appeal, and it may have very valid counter arguments. The problem is that, as is noted elsewhere, the most frequently heard response is, “Well, we just don’t do it that way in Japan.” As far as fund-raising for the university is concerned there are many barriers. The first and foremost is that Japan as a country has not developed the infrastructure to support large donations to any type of university. It has always been assumed that safety, health and welfare in Japan are the responsibility of the government and not the individual citizen. In this way Japan operates very much like a social democratic political economy. In that context, donating to a public university would be akin to donating to the local government itself. As a public entity it is assumed that the university supports the public and not the other way around. While many public university presidents have stated that they are interested in developing an administrative infrastructure to support fund-raising, in fact most have not.

Regional problems While the number of national universities was reduced by amalgamation in the 2000s, the number of public universities increased. Over the 30 years of the Heisei era, from 1989 to 2019, public universities increased by 138 percent from 39 to 93, while national universities decreased eight percent from 96 to 89, but private universities also increased 62 percent from 372 to 604. What is interesting is that while 18-year-olds as a percentage of the population decreased 40 percent during the Heisei period, the rate of university attendance increased from 30 percent to 50 percent, and the number of students increased from 60,000 to 150,000.16 The decline in youth population was not the only demographic factor in the face of which public universities continued to increase in number. From 1985 to 2018 the number of universities in Hokkaido and Tohoku (the northeast) combined increased from 5 to 16, and the number of public universities in Tokai and Hokuriku (the eastern and western central regions respectively) increased from 9 to 16. To take just one year, 2016, the net population outflow for some prefectures far from Tokyo was: Hokkaido –6,874, Aomori –6,323, Tochigi –2,988, Hyogo –6,760, Kumamoto –6,791.17 Although one can say that creating more universities at the same time as the 18-year-old population is decreasing makes no sense, conversely for many local areas the creation of local universities was seen as the only way to keep youth from leaving the region. The problem with this strategy is that those who are the best students will tend to leave anyway to attend the best universities, which in most cases means either national universities in the region, or universities in the metropolitan areas of Kanto (around Tokyo) or Kansai (around Osaka). Therefore, not only are the less capable students filling the newly created university seats, but the increase in universities and the decrease in the 18-year-old population mean that academic quality is being diluted. Increasing the percentage of university attenders from 30 percent to 50 percent is good in that it creates more opportunities, but Japan is already facing an era when every high school graduate can find a place at university. The Kōdaikyō has been supporting the development of individual university plans to support their local regions through the “LEAD” program, which stands for Link, Enhance, Assure, Develop. Its goal is to bring together all public universities in one collaborative whole to accomplish the regional development mission for each university, the core mission for all public universities. It is, in a sense, a “one for all, and all for one” philosophy. As part of this program, 89 of 93 public universities have published detailed plans of how they will “LEAD” in their communities and regions by Linking with regional values, Enhancing the value of local property, Assuring the stability of the regions, and Developing local potential.18 The programs outlined by the 89 universities in this document clearly display the way in which public universities are tied to their communities and, through that explication, also gives clear insight into the mission and type of each reporting institution.

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Globalization In higher education, globalization can be defined as a process of undertaking internal reforms of domestic institutions of higher education in order to compete externally, globally, for students, faculty and resources. Given that the very few Japanese universities in the Times Higher Education (THE) World University Rankings top 100 are all national universities and that even top private universities are not ranked highly, global competitiveness is a serious issue for all Japanese universities. For public universities, the need for global competitiveness is varied, but there is a need even on the most regional, local level. Major urban universities, such as Yokohama City University, Osaka City University, the University of Kitakyushu and Kobe City University have an advantage as obvious destinations for foreign students, and all have made efforts to attract more foreign students as a hedge against a declining domestic student population, to add diversity to the classroom, and because it can be argued that Asia, from which most draw their students, is an extension of its community. The cities of Yokohama (Kanagawa Prefecture), Kobe (Hyogo Prefecture), and Hakodate (Hokkaido) were three of the original treaty ports under the Treaty of 1858 and so have a historical mandate to promote themselves through their universities as international cities. For smaller institutions in the regions the need for globalization is as great, but less clear. It is clearest for a small regional university of public health and/or nursing, as increased aging increases the demand for medical support and elder care at a time when the youth of the region are decreasing in number and leaving for better career conditions in the metropolitan centers. This means that local facilities have begun to bring in health care workers from abroad for training in local care, and will increasingly do so in the future. Similarly, globalization and depopulation are affecting small and medium-sized local enterprises, so that local universities have to develop programs to train foreign workers, and also to educate SME business owners how to compete in the global market place. Finally, local universities will play a role in bringing foreigners to the region as tourists or as long-term residents. Over the five years between 2010 and 2018 tourism to Japan tripled from 10 million to 30 million visitors. Using the power of local and central government to channel this increasingly large number of tourists, half of whom have been from China or South Korea, away from the metropolitan areas to the regions decreases the pressure on the metropolitan areas and for the regions boosts both their revenues and their image.

Conclusion One of the most indelible memories as a foreign president of a public university was that when suggesting changes in administrative policies to City and University administrators, the immediate response was, “This is a Japanese university and so we do it the Japanese way.” Therein lies the conundrum for all Japanese universities, public or otherwise. The most important question is which universities in Japan can change their way of administering themselves to take into account the problems facing them over the next 10 to 20 years? National Universities have been making strides, although they are still very much tied to MEXT. Private universities get subsidies from MEXT and yet are allowed a great deal of leeway to improvise and develop as independent entities. It is public universities that have the most difficult road ahead due to the complexity of their administration. This chapter began by describing the problems faced by all Japanese universities, the most fundamental of which is that there are already too many universities—approximately 800, depending on how an institution is classified—for the current youth population. This situation will only get worse. There will have to be a winnowing of several hundred, and sooner rather than later. The vast majority of public universities, other than major city universities and outlying niche institutions like Akita International University, which has in only two decades become a leading liberal arts university, are going to

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have to face the situation clearly, with unified purpose, and immediately. This is not a future problem; it is an immediate problem. In order to survive and prosper it will be necessary to have a clarity of vision and purpose that many do not have, given the competing forces of the establishing government’s inclination to dictate university policy, and the inclination of the university to govern itself as a university. The Kōdaikyō LEAD concept is in part about allowing public universities to take the lead in government policymaking in support of their regions. Rather than having the policy flow from the government to the university, the idea is that the university will take the lead through research and practice to develop the ideas for policy which will then be implemented by the governing authority. In order to create the concepts that will become policy, the university has to be allowed to govern itself as a university and the government must be able to listen to and learn from the university. Those regional governments that allow their institutions to develop a mission-based focus, and then use the outcome to drive policy will create a virtuous cycle that benefits the region, the government, and the university. The default setting for government and university bureaucracies is the maintenance of the status quo. Nowhere is that truer than in Japan. Implementing the changes in government-university relations, the need to radically alter the way in which the mid-term plans are implemented and evaluated, and the need to reform the way in which universities are administered, are each individually very difficult; extremely difficult taken as a whole. However, if public universities are to survive by successfully carrying out their fundamental mission, supporting their region, then all three must happen.

Notes 1

Oba Jun, “Incorporation of National Universities in Japan,” paper for Organizational Reforms and University Governance: Autonomy and Accountability, Dec. 17–18, 2003, Hiroshima U., 12–13. 2 Kōdaikyō, Factbook 2018 6, accessed October 31, 2019, http://www.kodaikyo.org/wordpress/wp-content /uploads/2019/04/factbook_2018.pdf. 3 US Dept. of State, Report of the United Education Mission to Japan, (Tokyo: SCAP, 1946) 6. 4 Oba, 2. 5 MEXT, Kōritsu daigaku ni tsuite [About public universities], accessed October 31, 2019, https://www.mext.go .jp/a_menu/koutou/kouritsu/index.htm. 6 Kōdaikyō, “Setchi gakubusūbetsu kōritsu daigakusū,” [Number of public universities by number of faculties] (2019), accessed September 19, 2020, http://www.kodaikyo.org/?page_id=8413. 7 Kōdaikyō, “Gakusei teiinsūbetsu kōritsu daigakusū,” [Number of public universities by student numbers] (2019), accessed September 19, 2020, http://www.kodaikyo.org/?page_id=8413. 8 THE, World University Rankings, Japan University Rankings 2019, accessed September 19, 2020, https://www .timeshighereducation.com/rankings/japan-university/2019#!/page/0/length/25/sort_by/rank/sort_order/asc/cols /stats. 9 MEXT, “Higher Education in Japan,” accessed December 15, 2019, http://www.mext.go.jp/en/policy/education /highered/title03/detail03/__icsFiles/afieldfile/2012/06/19/1302653_1.pdf. 10 Kōdaikyō, 2040 nen ni muketa kōtō kyōiku no gurando dezain [Grand design of higher education for 2040], accessed October 31, 2019, http://www.kodaikyo.org/wp/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/181010.pdf. 11 Kōdaikyō, Kōritsu daigaku no shōrai kōsō [Public universities’ future concept], 2019, 12, accessed May 31, 2019, http://www.kodaikyo.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/srks_v2.pdf. 12 Kōdaikyō, Public universities’ future concept, 4. 13 Kōdaikyō, Public universities’ future concept, 8. 14 MEXT, Kokkō shiritsu daigaku no jugyōryō tō no suii [Annual changes in tuition and other fees at national, public and private universities], accessed December 15, 2019, http://www.mext.go.jp/a_menu/koutou/shinkou/07021403/_ _icsFiles/afieldfile/2018/12/26/1412031_04.pdf. 15 Kōdaikyō, Public universities’ future concept, 14. 16 Kōdaikyō, Public universities’ future concept, 2. 17 Statistical Handbook of Japan, 2018. 18 All 89 plans can be found in the Kōdaikyō publication “The Community Contribution Function of Public Universities: Local Program ‘LEAD” Analysis.” This document can also be found on line at http://www.kodaikyo.org /wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/180323_tiiki.pdf.

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Bibliography Kōdaikyō. 2040 nen ni muketa kōtō kyōiku no gurando dezain [Grand Design of Higher Education for 2040]. Accessed October 31, 2019. http://www.kodaikyo.org/wp/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/181010.pdf. ———. “The Community Contribution Function of Public Universities: Local Program ‘LEAD’ Analysis.” Accessed October 31, 2019. http://www.kodaikyo.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/180323_tiiki.pdf. ———. Factbook 2018 6. Accessed October 31, 2019. http://www.kodaikyo.org/wordpress/wp-content /uploads/2019/04/factbook_2018.pdf. ———. Kōritsu daigaku no shōrai kōsō [Public universities’ future concept]. Accessed May 31, 2019. http://www .kodaikyo.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/srks_v2.pdf. MEXT. “Higher Education in Japan.” Accessed December 15, 2019. http://www.mext.go.jp/en/policy/education/ highered/title03/detail03/__icsFiles/afieldfile/2012/06/19/1302653_1.pdf. ———. Kokkō shiritsu daigaku no jugyōryō tō no suii [Annual changes in tuition and other fees at national, public and private universities]. Accessed December 15, 2019. http://www.mext.go.jp/a_menu/koutou/shinkou/07021403/_ _icsFiles/afieldfile/2018/12/26/1412031_04.pdf. ———. Kōritsu daigaku ni tsuite [About public universities]. Accessed October 31, 2019. https://www.mext.go.jp /a_menu/koutou/kouritsu/index.htm. Oba Jun. “Incorporation of National Universities in Japan.” Paper for Organizational Reforms and University Governance: Autonomy and Accountability. Hiroshima: Hiroshima University, 2003. Statistical Handbook of Japan. 2018. THE. World University Rankings, Japan University Rankings 2019. https://www.timeshighereducation.com /rankings/japan-university/2019#!/page/0/length/25/sort_by/rank/sort_order/asc/cols/stats. Accessed September 19, 2020. US Dept. of State. Report of the United Education Mission to Japan. Tokyo: SCAP, 1946.

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Chapter 6 Private Universities: Diverse and Adaptable Jeremy Breaden and Roger Goodman This chapter is not an exercise in advocacy on behalf of the private university sector. It does, however, adopt a position sympathetic to the sector’s predicament on the basis that private universities have not, on the whole, featured heavily in analyses of Japanese higher education for international Anglophone audiences. The chapter has two main concerns. The first is to explain the different senses in which private universities are indeed “private.” It looks at the origins of these universities, their legal status and their relationship with public authorities, while seeking account for these attributes by reference to some key historical developments. The second aim is to describe the functions of private universities in the contemporary Japanese higher education system.

Introduction Appearing on the website of the Japan Association for Private Universities and Colleges,1 the statement below is more than just an idealistic self-affirmation. A common element among private universities and colleges is that each one of them was established by a founder with big dreams and high aspirations, an individual who was passionate to build an institution of higher education grounded on his or her own philosophy. These founding principles have been inherited by these institutions and continue to live on. The source of their potential lies in their uniqueness and diversity. Even with the circumstances surrounding private universities and colleges changing dramatically in recent years, their resolution remains firm. By proactively carrying out reforms and taking steps to enhance autonomy, private universities and colleges can adapt and will continue to produce diverse individuals capable of making significant contributions to human society. For one, it effectively encapsulates several of the key features of private universities: they were founded by autonomous, non-government actors, each with their own distinct motivations; as a product of these diverse origins there is great variety in institutional missions and academic activities within the private university sector; a number of changes in contemporary society are posing new challenges and opportunities for the sector. Statements such as these are also exercises in advocacy. At a general level, they are designed to offset the popular assumption (not unique to higher education, nor indeed to

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Japan) that private institutions are of lesser quality and legitimacy than their public cousins—a notion expressed in Japanese as kankō shitei or “public high, private low.” A more specific intention may be to remind readers of how important private universities actually are in Japan. Discussions of Japanese higher education, both popular and scholarly, tend to be centered on the national system. Orthodox histories, for example, often begin with the establishment of the Tokyo Imperial University and treat private institutions as a cast of supporting actors, their presence serving simply to draw the features of national universities into sharper relief. This treatment overlooks both the centrality of the private sector to the development of Japanese higher education ever since feudal times, and the fact that almost three-quarters of all university students today attend private institutions. Clearly their contribution to Japanese higher education is worth emphasizing. A more pointed sub-text to the above statement is the struggle of private universities to overcome the vast disadvantages they face in comparison with their relatively well-resourced public-sector counterparts. Some simple statistics illustrate the scale of this disadvantage. Government subsidies contribute less than 10 percent of a private university’s revenue on average, and the total amount of operating subsidies received by private universities is less than one-third of those received by the much smaller national university sector. On a per-student basis, national universities receive thirteen times the funding of their private counterparts.2 Yet there is evidence that private universities offer a much better return on public investment: one study found that every yen of public funds spent on national universities yields a total economic return of ¥1.9, while for private universities the return is ¥10.9.3

Origins As the quotation at the start of this chapter suggests, one crucial, if rather obvious, distinguishing feature of private universities is that they are founded privately, not by national or local government authorities. As an official category, private universities (shiritsu daigaku) were a rather late addition to Japan’s modern higher education system. The Private Schools Ordinance (shiritsu gakkō rei) of 1899 was the government’s first attempt to systematize private education, followed by the 1903 Professional Schools Ordinance (senmon gakkō rei), which created a second tier of formally-recognized HEIs below the imperial universities. The first private universities, however, were only established after the enactment of the University Ordinance in 1918, more than forty years after the Meiji government established the first incarnation of Tokyo University and twenty years after the imperial system started to take shape in earnest with the founding of the second imperial university, Kyoto, in 1897. Several private universities, however, have origins which pre-date the imperial universities by a comfortable margin. Indeed, an argument can be made that Japan’s first HEIs were private. Buddhist schools had been operating at least since the days of the luminary Kōbō Daishi in the 9th century; by the Edo period (1603-1868) there were countless religious schools and a growing number of academies training Confucian and Western scholars and, later, practitioners in fields such as medicine. Private academies were accessible to a much broader spectrum of social classes than the provincial and central government schools for training public servants in the late feudal era, which functioned mainly to reproduce the existing elite social classes. Private academies played a crucial role in delivering the human resources needed for Japan’s transition from a feudal to a modern society, and several of today’s well-known private universities are associated with key actors in this transition such as Fukuzawa Yukichi (Keio) and Meiji-era politicians including Okuma Shigenobu (Waseda) and Saionji Kinmochi (Ritsumeikan). In his tentative “typology by birth” of private universities, Japanese HE scholar Kaneko Motohisa4 describes such universities as being established by voluntary association: the creations of wellintentioned individuals keen to contribute to Japan’s modernization. These he contrasts with two other types: sponsored universities whose establishment was backed by religious organizations, business

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corporations and other groups with resources and missions broader than higher education specifically. For example, today there are around 80 “mission” (mishonkei) universities connected with the Christian church and almost 50 with Buddhist affiliations. Finally, there are the entrepreneurial universities founded by private actors, typically operators of other educational institutions who view the university as the crown jewel of their portfolios. These grew greatly in number in the postwar expansion period and following the relaxation of establishment standards in 1991—indeed, more than one-third of the private universities which exist in 2020 were founded post-1991. (See Chapter 2 for more about the 1991 relaxation of establishment standards.) This kind of classification itself may be criticized as perpetuating a rather stereotyped view of private universities, distinguishing between those founded for altruistic purposes and those established by opportunistic operators lacking an intrinsic interest in higher learning. As Kaneko acknowledges, however, the “entrepreneurial” category contains a great variety of institutions—including many which were founded by passionate educationalists. Equally, some “voluntary association” institutions now hold only very tenuous direct links with their illustrious founders, but self-mythologize liberally in an effort to enhance their brand name. A large minority of private universities today do, however, maintain a practical connection with the individuals who founded them. A 2018 survey of private university operators found that in 37 percent of cases the chair of the university’s governing board (rijichō) is either the founder him/herself or a successor from the same family.5 Clearly many of these institutions fit the definition of “family-owned or -managed higher education institutions” (FOMHEIs), an important category of private HE globally, but one which is only just starting to receive serious scholarly attention internationally.6 No official statistics are collected (or at least published) specifically on Japanese FOMHEIs, and their weighty presence in Japanese HE is far more often lamented than celebrated. As is the case in the business world generally, the family-centered mode of operation is seen as outdated and inefficient—and especially unsuited to a field such as higher education where expectations of public-mindedness are especially high. Nonetheless, just like family businesses generally, the “family” element in private universities can be a source of resilience in times of crisis.7 The diversity of origins makes for an exceptional degree of heterogeneity in the attributes of private universities. There were 592 private universities in Japan in 2019, and they ranged in size from tiny, single-faculty institutions (the smallest was Tokyo Union Theological Seminary [Tokyo Shingaku Daigaku] with just 43 students enrolled) to large, comprehensive institutions with students numbering in the tens of thousands, and more than one million alumni (Japan’s ten largest universities in 2019 were all private; the largest in terms of student numbers was Nihon University with 67,353; the highest number of applications for undergraduate admission was received by Kindai University, with 154,672). Private university campuses can be found everywhere from the central business districts of Japan’s major metropolises to far-flung rural locales. They offer a bewildering array of degree programs: the education ministry counted no less than 723 different undergraduate degree titles on offer at Japanese universities in 2015, more than half of which were offered by only one university.8 Financially, too, private universities range from those in chronic deficit and near the brink of collapse (see later in this chapter) to those with healthy operating surpluses and vast assets.9

Relationship with government The diversity of private universities is partly a function of the scope afforded to them to develop autonomously. Since the birth of Japan’s modern university system private universities have played a crucial role in enabling higher and higher proportions of Japanese school-leavers to undertake higher education in the absence of large-scale public investment. The government has used regulatory measures such as establishment standards and enrollment quotas as the primary mechanisms of control over the

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private sector, loosening and tightening the reins at different times depending on whether the priority was allowing the sector to grow to meet demand (and thus avert calls for heavier public expenditure) or reining it in to address “quality” concerns. Meanwhile, the government has refrained from dictating private universities’ specific institutional directions and day-to-day operations, in line with the postwar spirit of non-intervention in the private sphere. A system of public subsidies established in the 1970s (see below) occasioned a higher degree of regulatory attention to private universities, but this waned somewhat as the proportional importance of subsidies declined and the neoliberal emphasis on diversification and free market competition emerged in the 1990s. It would be manifestly inaccurate, however, to say that private universities are immune from government influence. Like their counterparts in public institutions, private university officials are highly sensitive to “advice” from the education ministry and to the latest policy trends, especially given the post-2000 emphasis on selective, competitive funding for innovative education and research projects. (See Chapters 3 and 4 for more discussion of competitive funding.) Over time a variety of strings have been attached to the private university subsidy scheme, including the reservation of a growing proportion of funds for “special subsidies” (tokubetsu hojo) which align with the government’s education and research priorities, and a longer list of grounds for adjustment of subsidy levels to individual institutions. Subsidies are still calculated basically by reference to full-time academic staff and student numbers, but are modified by reference to a number of criteria including staff-student ratios (which if not within an acceptable range trigger a downward adjustment), staff and executive salary levels (which likewise attract a penalty if excessive) and, recently, degree of disclosure of financial statements and other key information. The education ministry has become especially interested in the effect of demographic change on the private university sector, instituting elaborate schemes for rehabilitating failing institutions, dealing with the potential fallout of university closures, and rewarding sound management through variations in the subsidy system. At the time of writing, for example, private universities which enrolled between 90 and 100 percent of their official student quota—considered a “sweet spot” in a contracting market—stood to gain a subsidy bonus of between two and four percent, while subsidies are reduced on a sliding scale for those both over- and under-enrolling, until complete disqualification at the extremes of 50 and 130 percent.10 It is very difficult, therefore, to paint the government exclusively as either an overbearing meddler or a disinterested bystander in private university education. This ambiguity is mirrored in the stance of private universities themselves, which remain staunchly independent (as intimated by the quote which opened this chapter) but also are disinclined to neglect their relationship with government. Since the early postwar years, they have organized themselves into vocal lobby groups. There are two major private university associations in Japan: the oldest and largest is the Association of Private Universities of Japan (APUJ; shidaikyō in abbreviated Japanese), which was established in 1948 and counts around two-thirds of all private universities as its members. The other is the Japan Association of Private Universities and Colleges (JAPUC; shidairen). This association was established later, in 1951, by a group of prewar institutions which appear to have felt that their influence within APUJ and the capacity of that organization to represent their interests were diluted by the growing number of new universities postwar. Owing to the presence of large and well-resourced private universities in its membership, JAPUC is actually the larger organization on measures such as overall student enrollment and research revenue. The distinction between these two associations should not be overplayed, though. Both have attracted many new members in the decades since their establishment, including post-1991. Today there is no significant ideological divide between the two, and indeed there is much resource-sharing and collaborative advocacy, mainly through the Federation of Japanese Private Colleges and Universities Associations (shidai rengōkai), which is a joint body for both the associations founded in 1986. On the other hand, a small but notable minority of private universities opt to manage their relationship with government by maintaining a safe distance. More than 70 private universities are not affiliated

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with either of the above two associations; around 20 do not even apply for government subsidies, preferring to avoid the scrutiny which would accompany subsidization. Subsidies are by far the most prominent issue in the relationship between private universities and government. The 1946 Constitution expressly prohibited direct governmental intervention in university education and research activities through its protection of academic freedom (Article 23), and also contained a stipulation that no public money shall be expended on educational enterprises not under the control of public authority (Article 87). For many years this stipulation provided a powerful argument for the government not to fund private universities, despite their decisive role in the construction of the postwar higher education system. However, in the context of the rapid expansion and escalation of fees in private higher education in the 1960s and the backlash from students later in that decade (see Chapter 2), this argument became more and more difficult to maintain, and lobbyists were finally rewarded with the introduction of a subsidy scheme in 1970, which was enshrined in legislation in 1975. Positions on the constitutionality of this scheme still vary, but a mainstream view is that subsidies themselves do not automatically negate the original intent of the constitutional prohibition, which was mainly to ensure that private institutions would not be subjected to excessive state control. Subsidies have undoubtedly helped the private university sector to continue growing, but the original notion that they would enable universities to bring down their fees proved spectacularly mistaken. The cost of higher education actually rose sharply after subsidies were introduced, as the government’s tighter restrictions on expansion created a sellers’ market, and national universities were allowed to raise their fees dramatically. Private university fees (average annual tuition plus admission fee) increased by more than 150 percent between 1975 and 1985, and by another 45 percent between 1986 and 2000.11 On top of the base tuition and initial year admission fees (which form the basis of the percentage increase calculations above), private universities began to impose extra annual charges under headings such as “facilities fees” (shisetsuhi) and “educational enhancement fees” (kyōiku jūjitsuhi)—which today are considered a routine part of the costs of private university education. Government subsidy levels, meanwhile, first rose to cover almost one-third of university operating expenses in the early 80s, then gradually dropped to below 10% in the 2010s (see Table 6.1). Private universities’ continued calls for greater government support are thus neither unfounded nor purely self-interested. On the other hand, the decline in the proportional contribution of subsidies to private university revenue has weakened other objections regarding the government’s use of the subsidy scheme to dictate the priorities of education and research in the private sector. Table 6.1 National government subsidies and fees in private universities and colleges, 1975–2015 Year

1975

1980

1993

2006

2010

2015

Total

100.7

250.5

265.6

331.3

320.9

315.3

Special subsidies (% of total)

0.17 (1.7%)

0.73 (2.8%)

39.7 (15.0%)

110.9 (33.5%)

110.2 (34.2%)

44.1 (14%)

Overall operating expenses (billion yen)

489.2

818.8

2,135.9

2,884.9

2,969.1

3,177.3

Subsidies as % of overall operating expenses

20.6%

29.5%

12.4%

11.5%

10.7%

9.9%

278,261

545,269

1,010,939

1,110,616

1,127,189

1,124,516

Subsidies (billion yen)

Average fees (tuition + admission fee) (yen)

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Legal status and governance To understand how private universities work, and why they work in the way they do, requires an appreciation of the dual governance structure which they follow. A private university (shiritsu daigaku) is, like its public counterparts, an entity in its own right, with a president and other executive officers, academic departments, faculty councils and administrative offices. But the university is also established and operated by a parent body known as a private school corporation (shiritsu gakkō hōjin), a not-forprofit legal entity created pursuant to the Private Schools Act of 1949. This corporation is governed by a board of directors (rijikai) whose membership may overlap somewhat with the university executive body but which is a managerial rather than an academic entity. Corporations are also required to have an advisory council (hyōgiinkai) and independent auditors (kanji), but it is the board of directors, headed by a chairperson (rijichō), which has effective control over the management of the corporation and its university. Beyond this basic legal framework, there is very little which can be generalized about the governance of private school corporations, as most practicalities are dictated by an “act of endowment” (kifu kōi), similar to the articles of association for a company. Importantly, the corporate structure remains for the most part invisible to the regular academic staff and students of the university, and to the general public. The university (daigaku) is in a sense the visible, “public” arm of a highly private entity—the corporation. A private school corporation’s activities often extend well beyond the academic activities of the university. It may also establish primary and secondary schools, junior colleges, professional training colleges, and other miscellaneous educational institutions. Surplus operating funds from the education and research activities of these institutions can be rolled into the corporation’s endowment and are exempt from taxation. For a family business, this can provide an effective way of fixing wealth across generations by avoiding inheritance taxes which would apply if the funds were held by individuals. Under the Private Schools Act, no more than two individuals within three degrees of kinship from one another may be on a corporation’s board of directors at any one time, but there is no such statutory restriction on membership of the advisory council or any other executive role in the corporation or the educational institutions it operates, nor on cross-vesting of family interests across different corporations. The wealth held in a corporation cannot, of course, be freely appropriated—it must be used only for the legitimate purposes provided in the corporation’s act of endowment—but it can be kept within a closed circle through executive salaries, bonuses and expenditure on subsidiary business interests which service the university and other educational institutions which the corporation operates. Not surprisingly, many private universities are part of very large and lucrative business empires. Multiple corporations can form groups through cross-appointments of directors and other forms of integration, and these groups may in turn be embedded in much larger networks of mutual commercial interest. The role of a university in such a network is as a kind of flagship institution, adding a scholarly weight to the group’s activities and helping to cultivate a wider support base in the community. “Upgrading” (shōkaku) to university status remains an important legitimation strategy for many small corporations operating professional training colleges and junior colleges, and this helps to explain why the number of private universities continued to grow, counter-intuitively, during the dramatic downturn in university entrance-age population beginning in the early 1990s. Together these features—separation of managerial (corporate) line of command from academic organization, centralized decision-making by the board of directors, and scope to expand and integrate a variety of activities and interests—make the private educational corporation a highly versatile entity. Indeed, many of the national university reforms since the early 2000s have sought to imbue national university corporations with the same features. The most persuasive evidence of the success of the private educational corporation model, however, can be found in the fact that it has remained largely intact and unchallenged since its institution in 1949. In the reformist years of Heisei the government

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did seek to diversify the sector by allowing some conventional for-profit business corporations (kabushiki kaisha) to establish universities, but most struggled to compete with conventional operators. Only eight such kabushiki kaisha universities were ever established and only four remained in business at the time of writing—less than one percent of the total of 592 private universities in Japan.

Contemporary functions What roles do private universities play in Japan’s contemporary higher education system? The simple answer to this question, of course, is that they educate a lot of students—more than any other single type of HE institution. Below, however, we focus on those roles which distinguish private universities from the institutional types addressed elsewhere in this volume, based on the discussion above and looking to the possible future shape of Japan’s higher education sector. Viewed on a macro scale, one of the most important roles of the private sector is to respond with great agility to fluctuations in demand for undergraduate education. Given their strong research orientation, national universities are not well equipped to play this demand-absorbing role, nor are they particularly encouraged by the government to do so. Many local public universities were created strategically to address growing demand within their municipality or region, but these origins in turn make such universities answerable first and foremost to their local constituencies rather than to market forces per se, as well as being somewhat bound by the bureaucratic logics of local government. Regardless of the goals of their founders, private universities are highly attuned to the market, owing to their heavy reliance on fee revenue. This reliance extends even to the most prestigious private universities: they do not enjoy the same tradition of generous philanthropy as, for example, their counterparts in the United States; neither do they have the luxury of charging higher fees, as doing so would affect their ability to compete with public institutions of similar standing in the rankings and discourage many candidates from applying for admission—which would make their entrance examinations less selective and in turn affect their reputation. Private universities not only have more incentive to respond to changes in demand, but also more capacity to do so. The governance structure discussed earlier is conducive to centralized, manageriallydriven decision-making. Few private universities maintain the kinds of diffused collegial processes which still prevail in national universities even after corporatization and which constitute the doubleedged sword of academic autonomy and institutional inertia often termed kyōjukai shihai or “rule of the faculty council.” The rijikai shihai “rule of the board of directors” model followed in most private universities is double-edged in the inverse sense, of course, but it does enable such universities to be more nimble in their response to changing conditions. The system of retaining surpluses in endowment funds also ensures (provided they are managed prudently) that private universities have capital to draw on for new projects—capital which, in the absence of special government dispensation, is not available to their public counterparts. Thus, if there is new demand for university education, there will be private operators ready to exploit it. The huge proliferation of degree types following the Heisei-era deregulation of university establishment standards is testament to the flexibility and entrepreneurial vigor of private universities. Their success has thus far been limited, however, to the sphere of undergraduate education for schoolleavers. Predictions that universities would—and must—open up to mature-age students, fee-paying international students and other groups successfully targeted by their counterparts in other countries have largely failed to materialize. Close to 95 percent of private university students are in undergraduate courses and a similar proportion of new undergraduate enrollees are under the age of 20; even in master’s programs, only one in four new enrollees is aged over 24. Privately-funded international students account for little more than three percent of undergraduate enrollments.12

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It is therefore all the more remarkable that private universities managed to remain viable even as the population of school-leavers declined dramatically in the 1990s and early 2000s. The decline was supposed to result in an implosion of the private sector, as enrollments would inevitably plummet and the resultant loss of revenue would drive many operators—up to 40 percent of the sector, according to some predictions—out of business.13 As of 2019, however, only 11 private universities had actually disappeared, and only 17 had amalgamated or been rescued by local governments and transformed into public institutions. Granted, many appear to be on the brink14 of failure: in 2018 more than one in three private universities could not enroll their government-approved quota, and 30 percent had a negative operating balance.15 Yet they are surviving against all odds. They have cut salaries and other costs, making it possible to operate effectively despite significantly lower enrollments; they have tapped revenue streams beyond the university itself, a strategy made possible by the private school corporation structure mentioned earlier; they have succeeded in drilling deeper than ever into the school-leaver cohort, with creative new degree programs, novel admission procedures, and a clearer commitment to education quality and student wellbeing. Just as private universities allowed the government to keep its spending focused on the national university sector when demand for university education was growing rapidly in the second half of the 20th century, they have managed to avert a millennial bubble-burst which could easily have forced the government to commit to a major bailout of bankrupt institutions or scramble to rescue students left without classes to attend and staff without jobs. Once again, though, it is difficult to remove the government completely from this picture. The success of private universities in adjusting to the downturn is related somewhat to the major expansion of the national student loan system since the early 2000s. By the mid-2010s it had become clear that both the reliance on loans and difficulties experienced in repaying them after graduation tended to be highest in lower-ranked, struggling private universities, and the system was being accused of artificially sustaining private institutions on the brink of failure. The new package of higher education student financial aid rolled out by the government in 2019 under the rather misleading banner of “making higher education free” (kōtō kyōiku no mushōka) endeavored to address such criticisms by disqualifying institutions failing to meet certain minimum “quality” standards. The long-term effect of the growing availability of student financial aid on the private sector is yet to be fully understood, but it is important to remember that it does not in any case fundamentally alter the public-private balance of responsibilities for funding higher education. The bulk of aid remains loan-based: its proliferation is simply shifting the private burden from one group—parents paying their children’s fees up-front—to another—students repaying their loans after graduation. Financial aid is just one aspect of the process of opening up university education to a wider socioeconomic spectrum. In Japan, as in most other societies, students from less privileged backgrounds tend to perform less well in secondary education for a whole variety of reasons, and are thus less likely to succeed in the conventional, formal examinations for admission to highly selective universities. Private universities today operate an extremely broad range of admission processes—sometimes to attract students better aligned with their institutional mission and “culture,” sometimes to exploit market niches, sometimes as a desperate attempt to fill their classrooms—and these have greatly improved the opportunities for students to demonstrate their qualification for university education in different ways. Rather than requiring students to perform in line with narrow measures of scholastic aptitude, private universities have managed to adjust their educational offerings to accommodate a more diverse variety of abilities. Whether this is a worthwhile endeavor or a regrettable debasement of academic standards is largely a matter of perspective. The latter view is often founded on false recollections of a golden age in which undergraduate classrooms were populated by bright, engaged students and professors committed to delivering a rigorous and engaging educational experience. Such nostalgic imagining is completely at odds with the overwhelmingly critical literature on the Japanese undergraduate experience in the late 20th century.16

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Another aspect of private universities’ role in widening access is geographical. A number of recentlyestablished private universities form a part of regional development strategies, providing students with a close-to-home option for further education, helping to revitalize the local economy and catering to specific local needs in terms of both training and applied research. Some of these universities were actually bankrolled by local government authorities, which effectively recruited private operators to run a university for them—a model known as kōsetsu min’ei or “publicly-established, privately-run.” Other provincial universities are entirely private but benefited at the time of their establishment from incentives from local government such as free or discounted land and transport infrastructure. Both this model—often referred to as kōshi kyōryoku or “public-private collaboration”—and the aforementioned kōsetsu min’ei approach have experienced mixed success, but they do underline the scope for the private sector to respond to public needs—again in the absence of full-scale public sector commitment. While private universities may provide opportunities where public ones do not, it must be remembered that the overall effect of having such a privatized system is to make university less affordable than in many countries with public-dominant systems. The affordability problem has become worse rather than better as participation rates have grown and as universities have become less selective in the context of population change. This problem is exacerbated because private university fees tend to demonstrate the principle of inelastic demand—higher prices do not drive demand down—and less selective universities can thus charge high fees. From a student perspective, the fees are sometimes seen as a kind of “fine” for poor scholastic performance.17 By catering to such a wide audience, the private university sector sustains the steep and clearly defined hierarchy of universities in Japan. The distinctions between different institutions in the national and local public university categories, while important, are not nearly as great as those in the private sector, whose institutions range from the hyper-selective (where there is fierce competition for entrance not only to university but also to affiliated primary schools and kindergartens which provide a less demanding pathway to the same university) to those where selection of candidates is little more than a ritual observance. The middle ground between these two extremes has been eroded as the population declines. Top private universities have managed to maintain or indeed increase their application numbers: Waseda University, for example, had more applications in 2019 than it did in 2000.18 Uncompetitive, under-enrolled universities, on the other hand, can quickly enter a reputational downward spiral as under-enrollment leads to less selective entrance exams, causing a drop in the rankings and thus even lower enrollment. The entrance examination industry has faced the unprecedented situation of being unable even to assign a pass/fail borderline to some institutions, which it now simply labels “BF”—border free and outside the hensachi system. The polarization (nikyokuka) is exacerbated by the distribution of funds under new government subsidy schemes introduced since the early 2000s to encourage competition among universities and incrementally replace the per-capita funding model. The bulk of funds made available through major schemes such as the research Centers of Excellence and internationalization-related schemes including Global 30 and the Top Global University Project have gone to the same universities which are already at the pinnacle of the hierarchy.

The future of private universities Just as there is much to be said about the comparative disadvantages faced by private universities in the Japanese system, there is much scope for pessimism about their future in a depopulating country where there is little appetite for greater public spending and market forces are increasingly allowed to run their full course. In this chapter, however, we have presented a somewhat more optimistic picture, highlighting attributes which make private universities highly resilient and adaptable—and, more importantly, how these attributes have manifested more strongly as conditions have deteriorated in an objective sense. Far from being anachronistic, the private educational corporation model (not-for-profit but

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profitable; privately-run but government-regulated; managerial and academic organizations existing in parallel) has proven unexpectedly robust: far better suited to the demands of university operation in the 21st century than either traditional collegial models or mainstream commercial business structures. Universities have become more innovative as their operating conditions have become tighter, finding ways to attract and engage a more diverse student body. “It’s ironic,” observed one private university president looking back on the enrollment crisis precipitated by the population decline of the 1990s and early 2000s, “but it took this crisis to make universities realize they actually have to educate their students.”19 Similar silver linings can easily be discerned on the clouds hanging over the private university sector as the Reiwa period proceeds. The changes which private universities face in the 2020s are likely to be far less dramatic than the ones they weathered in the previous decade. The school-leaver population will continue to decline, but at a rate some 80 percent slower per year than in the period from 1992 to 2009, when it almost halved. (The population of 18-year-olds fell from 2.05 million in 1992 to 1.19 million in 2009. The forecast at the time of writing was for a far more modest decrease from 1.18 million in 2018 to 1.04 million in 2031.) Structural reforms to higher education may continue, but in piecemeal fashion rather than as the kind of “big bang” experienced in the Heisei period. Notwithstanding further deregulation, the vast majority of private universities—and thus most universities in Japan as a whole—will continue to be run by private educational corporations, and the managerial strengths of these corporations will continue to provide something of a model for national and local public universities as they are forced by funding changes to become more self-reliant. The existence of such a large private sector is clearly convenient for government, which will continue to do what is required to ensure the sector survives—but no more. It is difficult to imagine any increase in direct subsidization of private universities, especially as their public counterparts increasingly feel the pressure of grant cuts. At the time of writing this chapter, however, the government was boosting its investment in individual university students through loan and grant schemes, and this effectively means more indirect support for private universities. The net result of all these changes may well be to create an even more private-dominant higher education system than the one Japan has now.

Notes 1

The Japan Association of Private Universities and Colleges, Message from President, accessed December 29, 2019, https://www.shidairen.or.jp/english/about/message/. 2 Federation of Japanese Private Colleges and Universities Association, Asu o hiraku: shiritsu daigaku no tayō de tokushoku aru torikumi (zōhoban) [Pathways to tomorrow: the diverse and distinctive activities of private universities (augmented edition)] (Tokyo: Author, 2017). 3 Figures in this paragraph are from The Japan Association of Private Universities and Colleges, Shiritsu daigaku no miraizō [The future of private universities], accessed November 15, 2019, https://www.shidairen.or.jp/files/user/4181 .pdf. See also Ryūichi Tanaka, “Recent Debates on Public-Private Cost Sharing for Higher Education in Japan,” Social Science Japan Journal 22, no. 2 (2019): 271–276. 4 Motohisa Kaneko, “Japanese Private Universities in Transition: Characteristics, Crisis and Future Directions,” in Frontier of Private Higher Education Research in East Asia, ed. Akiyoshi Yonezawa (Tokyo: Research Institute for Independent Higher Education, 2007), 47–62. 5 Promotion and Mutual Aid Corporation for Private Schools of Japan, “Gakkō hōjin no keiei kaizen hōsaku ni kansuru ankēto hōkoku: daigaku/tanki daigaku hōjinhen” [Report of questionnaire survey of measures for improving management of educational corporations: corporations operating universities/junior colleges], Shigaku Keiei Jōhō 33, 2019, accessed December 18, 2019, https://www.shigaku.go.jp/files/keieikaizenanke-to_h30.pdf. 6 Philip G. Altbach, Hans de Wit, and Edward Choi, eds., The Global Phenomenon of Family-Owned/Managed Universities (Leiden: Brill, 2020). 7 Jeremy Breaden and Roger Goodman, Family-run Universities in Japan: Sources of Inbuilt Resilience in the Face of Demographic Pressure, 1992–2030 (Oxford University Press, 2020), chapter 5. 8 MEXT, Gakui ni fuki suru senkō bunya no meishō ni tsuite [Titles of areas of study appended to degree diplomas], accessed October 9, 2019 https://www.mext.go.jp/b_menu/shingi/chukyo/chukyo4/siryo/__icsFiles/afieldfile/2016

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/12/01/1379805_06.pdf. This survey included national and local public universities as well, but it is the private ones that are most creative in their pursuit of new market niches. 9 Nihon University, for example, had an operating revenue of ¥194.6 billion (around $1.8 billion) and valued its fixed assets, mainly land and buildings, at close to ¥700 billion (around $6.4 billion) in 2017. Yomiuri Shimbun Educational Network, Daigaku no jitsuryoku 2019 [The power of universities 2019] (Tokyo: Chuokoron-Shinsha, 2019). 10 MEXT, Heisei 31 nendo ikō no teiin kanri ni kakawaru shiritsu daigakutō keijōhin hojokin no toriatsukai ni tsuite [Handling of private university operating expense subsidies in relation to enrollment quota management in 2019 and beyond], accessed December 18, 2019, https://www.mext.go.jp/a_menu/koutou/shinkou/07021403/002/002/1409177 .htm. The 130 percent cap applies to small private universities. Larger ones (with capacities of over 8,000) are subject to caps as low as 110 percent. 11 MEXT, Kokuritsu daigaku to shiritsu daigaku no jugyōryō no suii [Change over time in tuition fees at national and private universities], accessed June 18, 2019, https://www.mext.go.jp/b_menu/shingi/kokuritu/005/gijiroku /attach/1386502.htm. 12 Statistics on HEIs and student enrollments in this chapter are taken mainly from MEXT’s Gakkō kihon chōsa [School Basic Survey], accessed December 20, 2019, https://www.mext.go.jp/b_menu/toukei/chousa01/kihon /1267995.htm, and JASSO’s Annual Survey of International Students in Japan, accessed December 20, 2019, https:// www.jasso.go.jp/en/about/statistics/intl_student_e/index.html. 13 Breaden and Goodman, chapter 1. 14 The term ‘universities on the brink’ (genkai daigaku) was coined to describe such universities by HE scholar Ogawa Yō. It is a reference to the pre-existing term genkai shūraku or communities on the brink of extinction as a result of the depopulation of rural Japan. See Ogawa Yō, Kieyuku “genkai daigaku”: shiritsu daigaku teiinware no kōzō [Vanishing “universities on the brink”: the framework of insufficient enrollment at private universities] (Tokyo: Hakusuisha, 2016). 15 Promotion and Mutual Aid Corporation for Private Schools of Japan. Heisei 30 nendohen konnichi no shigaku zaisei [Private university finances today, 2018 edition], (Tokyo: PMAC, 2018). It must be remembered, however, that as a result of the aforementioned capacity to divert funds to their endowment, some private universities may end up with a balance of operating revenue and expenditure which understates their actual long-term financial health. 16 One of the best-known examples in English is Brian McVeigh’s Japanese Higher Education as Myth (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 2002), an excoriating account of academic life at a non-elite private university around the turn of the millennium. McVeigh’s opening chapter surveys the highly critical popular and scholarly literature on Japanese university culture being produced at the same time within Japan. See also Marina Lee-Cunin’s Student Views in Japan (Lancashire: Fieldwork Publications, 2004). 17 Ulrich Teichler, “The Academic and Their Institutional Environment in Japan: A View from Outside,” Contemporary Japan 31, no. 2 (2019): 234–263. 18 Yoyogi Seminar, Nyūshi jōhō: Waseda daigaku [Admissions information: Waseda University], accessed December 10, 2019 https://www.yozemi.ac.jp/nyushi/data/waseda/. 19 Atsushi Hamana, President of Kansai University of International Studies, quoted in Martin Fackler, “Japan’s Universities Fighting to Attract Students” (The New York Times, Friday 22 June 2007).

Bibliography Altbach, Philip G., Hans de Wit, and Edward Choi, editors. The Global Phenomenon of Family-Owned/Managed Universities. Leiden: Brill, 2020. Breaden, Jeremy and Roger Goodman. Family-run Universities in Japan: Sources of Inbuilt Resilience in the Face of Demographic Pressure, 1992–2030. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020. Fackler, Martin. “Japan’s Universities Fighting to Attract Students.” The New York Times, Friday 22 June 2007. Federation of Japanese Private Colleges and Universities Association. Asu o hiraku: shiritsu daigaku no tayō de tokushoku aru torikumi (zōhoban) [Pathways to tomorrow: the diverse and distinctive activities of private universities (augmented edition)]. Tokyo: Federation of Japanese Private Colleges and Universities Association, 2017. Japan Association of Private Universities and Colleges. Message from President. Accessed December 29, 2019. https://www.shidairen.or.jp/english/about/message/. ———. Shiritsu daigaku no miraizō [The future of private universities]. Accessed November 15, 2019. https://www .shidairen.or.jp/files/user/4181.pdf. Japan Student Services Organization. Annual Survey of International Students in Japan. Accessed December 20, 2019. https://www.jasso.go.jp/en/about/statistics/intl_student_e/index.html.

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Kaneko, Motohisa. “Japanese Private Universities in Transition: Characteristics, Crisis and Future Directions.” In Frontier of Private Higher Education Research in East Asia, edited by Akiyoshi Yonezawa. Tokyo: Research Institute for Independent Higher Education, 2007. Lee-Cunin, Marina. Student Views in Japan: A Study of Japanese Students’ Perceptions of Their First Years at University. Lancashire: Fieldwork Publications, 2004. McVeigh, Brian. Japanese Higher Education as Myth. Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 2002. MEXT. Heisei 31 nendo ikō no teiin kanri ni kakawaru shiritsu daigakutō keijōhin hojokin no toriatsukai ni tsuite [Handling of private university operating expense subsidies in relation to enrollment quota management in 2019 and beyond]. Accessed December 18, 2019. https://www.mext.go.jp/a_menu/koutou/shinkou/07021403 /002/002/1409177.htm. ———. Gakkō kihon chōsa [School Basic Survey]. Accessed December 20, 2019. https://www.mext.go.jp/b_menu /toukei/chousa01/kihon/1267995.htm. ———. Gakui ni fuki suru senkō bunya no meishō ni tsuite [Titles of areas of study appended to degree diplomas]. Accessed October 9, 2019. https://www.mext.go.jp/b_menu/shingi/chukyo/chukyo4/siryo/__icsFiles/afieldfile /2016/12/01/1379805_06.pdf. ———. Kokuritsu daigaku to shiritsu daigaku no jugyōryō no suii [Change over time in tuition fees at national and private universities]. Accessed June 18, 2019. https://www.mext.go.jp/b_menu/shingi/kokuritu/005/gijiroku /attach/1386502.htm. Ogawa, Yō. Kieyuku ‘genkai daigaku’: shiritsu daigaku teiinware no kōzō [Vanishing ‘universities on the brink’: the framework of insufficient enrollment at private universities]. Tokyo: Hakusuisha, 2016. Promotion and Mutual Aid Corporation for Private Schools of Japan. Gakkō hōjin no keiei kaizen hōsaku ni kansuru ankēto hōkoku: daigaku/tanki daigaku hōjinhen [Report of questionnaire survey of measures for improving management of educational corporations: corporations operating universities/junior colleges]. Accessed December 18, 2019. Shigaku Keiei Jōhō 33, 2019. https://www.shigaku.go.jp/files/keieikaizenanke-to_h30.pdf. ———. Heisei 30 nendohen konnichi no shigaku zaisei [Private university finances today, 2018 edition]. Tokyo: PMAC, 2018. Tanaka, Ryūichi. “Recent Debates on Public-Private Cost Sharing for Higher Education in Japan.” Social Science Japan Journal 22, no. 2 (2019): 271–276. Teichler, Ulrich. “The Academic and Their Institutional Environment in Japan: A View from Outside.” Contemporary Japan 31, no. 2 (2019): 234–263. Yomiuri Shimbun Educational Network. Daigaku no jitsuryoku 2019 [The power of universities 2019]. Tokyo: Chūōkoron-Shinsha, 2019.

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Chapter 7 Foreign Universities in Japan: Opportunities Taken and Missed Andrew Horvat Though in every essential Japan’s higher education system is grounded on models imported and assimilated from the West, it has evolved for itself a kind of autonomy that now separates it from those very models. In the 21st century, it is possible for universities from overseas to have a presence in Japan that can and does bring modest successes, but also is faced with a variety of obstacles. This chapter reviews the early contributions made by Western institutions and personnel, regression during the years of extreme nationalism, and hesitant internationalization in recent decades.

Introduction In the 150-year history of modern higher education in Japan, foreign universities have assumed three different forms. The first variety are schools founded by Christian missionaries for the most part in the latter half of the 19th century that were subsequently upgraded to the status of universities. The second consist of branch campuses of American universities, established during a period of rapid foreign expansion into Japanese higher education in the 1980s and early 1990s. The third are overseas studies programs mostly of US institutions that bring their own students from their home campuses to Japan for either a single term or a full academic year. Of these three varieties, the first represents a successful albeit short-lived example of foreign influence on another country’s system of higher education, while the second is widely regarded as having been more or less a failure. Today there remain more than 100 colleges and universities founded by foreign Christian missionaries and their Japanese converts. About 30 of these can be counted among the country’s most prestigious private institutions. Of the second group, only two have survived from some 40 US institutions, most of which were established in partnership with Japanese investors during the “bubble years” of the late 1980s and early 1990s, when cash-rich local governments and private entrepreneurs sought ways to allocate excess funds. Although most of these joint venture branch campuses collapsed when the bubble burst and their local partners could no longer support them, the two institutions that have remained, as well as one that was subsequently transformed into a Japanese-managed international university, have thrived. The experiences of these three universities would seem to suggest that the failure of at least some of the US-Japan higher educational joint ventures was not due solely to poor decision-making on the part of foreign university administrators, but also to the unwillingness of Japanese educational policy-makers to recognize potentially positive influences that foreign institutions could have on higher education in

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Japan. With the collapse of the foreign branch campuses, thousands of Japanese students were denied the opportunity to acquire an international education. In the meantime, Japanese industry is turning to multilingual foreign graduates of Japanese universities or else recruiting students from foreign countries in order to deal with the shortage of globally competent graduates of Japanese universities. In the third category, overseas studies programs are managed by well-funded elite foreign universities that deliver courses reflecting their home institutions’ rigorous academic standards, while offering students opportunities for experiential learning in a foreign setting. Though their graduates are small in number, they play a prominent part in their countries’ relations with Japan. Twice in the history of Japanese higher education, foreign entities hoping to found schools in Japan received an initial warm welcome only to find themselves subsequently sidelined. In the late 19th century, fearing the harmful effects of foreign ideas, officials set conditions for Christian-founded schools that made it impossible for them to acquire legal status as universities unless they kept religion out of the classroom, a condition that was not demanded of local schools teaching the divine origins of the Japanese imperial line. A century later, in the 1980s and early 1990s, encouraged by a senior Japanese politician, about 40 American higher education institutions set up branch campuses in Japan only to have to shut them down a few years later in part as a result of their inability to qualify for legal recognition as colleges or universities. Even as the Americans were leaving, some 200 Japanese entities were granted permission to open new universities or to upgrade lower-level institutions to university status. But the story of foreign universities in Japan is by no means black and white. In the first few decades following the 1868 overthrow of the feudal Tokugawa government, during a period of officially encouraged Westernization, the work of Christian missionary educators was welcomed by Japan’s new leaders. Though suppressed during the xenophobic 1930s and in World War II, Japan’s Christian universities rebounded after Japan’s defeat to become the country’s leading group of liberal and international higher educational institutions, thanks to their ability to revive their foreign connections. Likewise, even though only two of the 40 American universities that set up branch campuses in Japan in the 1980s and early 1990s have remained, both succeeded after 2005 to obtain legal recognition as a result of a change in Japanese higher education policy in response to the demand for more global content in higher education. However, while Japanese leaders might have had good reason to fear foreign influence in their country’s higher education in the late 19th century, at a time when European powers were engaged in a race to acquire colonies and Japan had yet to prove its ability to defend itself against foreign aggression, one cannot help but feel that Japan’s present-day higher education policies represent a continuation of the nationalism of the past. These outdated policies end up depriving Japanese citizens and industries of opportunities to acquire skills needed to function astride boundaries of language and culture, the kind of knowledge necessary to be able to compete successfully in an internationally integrated global economy.

Auspicious beginnings In the early decades of the modern Japanese state, the future of foreign participation in the development of Japanese higher education seemed bright. One of the first acts of the young samurai who had emerged victorious from the civil war that established a new government was to issue a decree in the name of the young Emperor Meiji announcing a commitment to rapid modernization. Known as the Meiji Charter Oath, it called on imperial subjects to “seek knowledge throughout the world.” The statement, issued in 1868, set the tone for a roughly two-decade period known as bunmei kaika or “civilization and enlightenment” during which foreigners offering useful skills for the development of institutions of benefit to the new state were warmly welcomed.

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The Christian spirit When one talks of an enabling environment for the establishment of foreign higher educational institutions, the need to import foreign knowledge can be seen as the pull factor. The push factor was provided by the enthusiasm shown in the late 19th century by Christian churches in Europe and North America to spread the Gospel to heathen lands. Contributing to the pull factor was the perception at the time that Christianity and Western civilization were inseparable, and that becoming Christian was part of the process of acquiring Western civilization. Although this sentiment was not universally shared in Japan, it was embraced by members of the soon to be disenfranchised samurai class, many of whom would become converts and work together with foreign missionaries to “bring Japan to Christ.” Among the more prominent of these was Niijima Jo, a samurai who spent eight years in the United States and had become ordained as a Christian minister. Niijima would play a leading role in the founding in 1875 of the Doshisha English School in Kyoto, the precursor of Doshisha University. Another Christian convert from a samurai family was Nitobe Inazo, agricultural scientist, educator, author, diplomat, and the first president of Tokyo Woman’s Christian University. As an under-secretary of the League of Nations in the early 1920s, Nitobe would take an active part in the founding of the International Committee on Intellectual Cooperation, reconstituted after World War II as UNESCO. Among the many factors that enabled the work of the foreign missionaries and their Japanese converts in the founding of schools that later would become transformed into universities, was the need for the missionaries to link their real objective, the spreading of the Gospel, to education. This was because the lifting of the prohibition against Christianity in 1873 did not lead immediately to an acceptance among ordinary Japanese of a foreign faith that had been banned for centuries. As William Stevenson has pointed out, from 1868 to 1873 while the Meiji government was seeking help from the West, thousands of Japanese Catholics were forcibly relocated from Nagasaki to other parts of Japan where many died of starvation. Another case Stevenson cites involved a Japanese convert who died in jail in 1872 having been imprisoned for possessing a Japanese translation of the New Testament. Stevenson concludes: “It was because of the difficulty in evangelizing that missionaries turned to education as teaching provided the opportunity to interact with Japanese and to share with them the Christian faith. Additionally, as the majority of the early missionaries were themselves highly educated, teaching came naturally.”1 Among today’s leading Japanese universities that began as English language schools, Stevenson lists: “Meiji Gakuin University, which traces its roots to a school run by Presbyterian missionaries James and Clara Hepburn; Kwansei Gakuin University, established by the Methodist missionary Walter R. Lambuth; St. Paul’s University (Rikkyo), which began in the house of Episcopalian missionary Channing M. Williams; and the women’s university, Kobe College, that started out in the home of Congregational missionaries Eliza Talcott and Julia Dudley.”2 James Hepburn’s name today is remembered mostly in connection with the system of writing Japanese using Roman letters that carries his name. Although the Hepburn Romanization system has not been officially adopted in Japan, it is by far the most widely used in popular literature as well as on many public signs in Japan today. Among other aspects of the push factor that should be mentioned is the enormous wealth of the foreign missionary societies at this time. For example, when Niijima was delegated by the American Board of Commissioners of Foreign Missions to establish a school in Japan, he arrived in Kyoto with US$5,000, the equivalent of just under US$130,000 in today’s funds. With this he was able to purchase from a noble family a large property next to Kyoto’s Imperial Palace, which today remains the main campus of Doshisha University. Although often overlooked, mission work overseas held a special appeal for women in this era. Going abroad as a missionary “was one of the few ways that a respectable woman could break free of the narrow life of the day with its stifling social regimen and rigid domesticity,” writes Ann Shannon in her book on early Canadian encounters with Japan.3 Shannon describes the work of Martha Cartwell, the Canadian Methodist missionary who in 1884, in the midst of “civilization

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and enlightenment,” founded Toyo Eiwa Jogakko, a school for girls in an upscale part of Tokyo, where it continues to function as a university. Like Niijima, Cartwell was well financed by a church group in Hamilton, Ontario. Unlike schools for boys which would later be forced to choose between becoming universities or remaining Christian, girls’ schools such as Toyo Eiwa and well over a dozen others were left alone by Japanese officials who seem to have been unperturbed by Christian influence in the education of women.

The English language, common high moral standards Any discussion of foreign schools in Japan must include the key role English language education played both in the last years of the Tokugawa period (1600–1868) and in early Meiji (1868–1912). Today, when Japanese English skills as measured by standardized tests are among the lowest in Asia, most Japanese will find it hard to believe that in the 1870s, university age Japanese could read and write English well enough to be able to attend classes conducted entirely in that language. William Smith Clark, the celebrated American educator hired by the Meiji government to introduce the latest American agricultural techniques at the newly established Sapporo Agricultural College (SAC), wrote on his arrival in 1876 to his wife in Amherst that his Japanese students handled the English language better than his American students in Massachusetts.4 As to how these Japanese students achieved such high levels of English proficiency, we know for certain that a large number of samurai families, sensing that foreign relations would play a key role in Japan’s future, had begun to send their children to the many English language schools that foreign residents had opened in the 1860s. Young Nitobe, was sent by his samurai family from his home in Northeastern Japan to Tokyo in 1871 at the age of nine to live with a relative so he could attend an English-language school in Tsukiji, a district where foreigners including missionaries were permitted to reside.5 Nitobe would go on to study under American instructors who remained at SAC after Clark’s departure in 1877. It was at Sapporo that Nitobe would be converted to Christianity by the students who had embraced the faith in the year that Clark taught there. As Ota Yuzo put it, Nitobe was exceptionally skilled in English but not exceptional for being skilled in the language: “Nitobe had an excellent command of English. He had acquired it as a member of the special transitional generation of Japanese students educated at a time when Japanese higher education based on the Western model had just come into existence and when foreign teachers still played a dominant role, not only in higher education but also in preparatory secondary education leading to it.”6 Yet another factor enabling cooperation between foreign missionaries and leading Japanese administrators was the shared respect the samurai and the missionaries had for high moral standards, the encouragement of ethical behavior being a key component of higher education at this time in both Japan and the West. Meiji leaders had spent their teens studying at feudal fief schools that emphasized the importance of moral integrity for samurai leaders. As educational historian Kobayashi Tetsuya states, “[G]overnment was still simple enough so that the wisdom of the sages taught in the Confucian classics had practical meaning. When leadership depended primarily upon the moral quality of individuals, the study of Confucianism was through its moral instruction, a practical preparation of administrators.”7 The differences that did exist between the missionaries and their hosts—conflicting ideas about the Christian faith—the samurai were willing to set aside for the time being. In fact, the cooperation between Japan’s new breed of samurai-administrators and the foreign educators they relied on was so close that it was at times difficult to tell the difference between state institutions and those founded by missionaries, both being staffed by many foreigners including zealous Christians. The Sapporo Agricultural College is a case in point. Strictly speaking, the College was a government university and the administrative staff were Japanese. However, Clark was the de facto president and the teaching staff included two recent graduates of the Massachusetts Agricultural School which Clark had founded earlier. He had been scouted from there and invited to Japan at the request of Kuroda

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Kiyotaka, who at the time was the most senior government official in charge of developing Hokkaido and was later to become prime minister. George Oshiro cites an incident that not only demonstrates the willingness of Japanese officials to turn a blind eye to Christian evangelizing but points also to the concern for moral education shared by both Kuroda and Clark. In 1876 the two men together with 50 Japanese students selected for study at SAC were sailing from Yokohama to Otaru when the misbehavior of the boys caused such a commotion that Kuroda threatened to send the boys home. Oshiro writes, “[Kuroda] calmed down enough to discuss this problem of the apparent lack of morality among the youth they had recruited. Clark replied that it was indispensable to teach morals through Christianity.”8 Kuroda’s willingness to tolerate missionary activity would result in the formation of the so-called “Sapporo Band” of passionate Christians, whose later activity would have a lasting influence on Japanese higher education. Nitobe alone would go on to teach at both Tokyo and Kyoto Imperial universities, but even more important, as head of the preparatory school for the former, he would personally supervise the education of an entire generation of leaders including Yanaihara Tadao, president of Tokyo University (1951–57), Maeda Tamon, Minister of Education (later president of Tokyo Tsushin, now known as Sony), and Matsumoto Shigeharu, who as the first director of the International House of Japan would play a pivotal role in US-Japan cultural exchanges.

No more honeymoon The honeymoon between Christian educators and former samurai administrators ended abruptly, however, in 1886 when the language of instruction at Tokyo University, founded along modern lines that year, switched from English to Japanese. The foreign experts whose high salaries were putting a dent in the Japanese state’s budget were also sent home at this time, their positions filled by Japanese instructors. In 1890 the Imperial Rescript on Education, exhorting subjects to improve themselves so as to be of service to the state, set the tone for patriotic educational policies which would force the mission-founded schools ultimately to have to choose between remaining Christian or becoming recognized as universities. The sudden reverse in attitudes toward foreign-founded educational institutions was the outcome of a culmination of trends and events that led to a more realistic response to the West than during the era of “civilization and enlightenment.” A younger generation of Japanese leaders with more exposure to the West had begun to enter the ranks of decision-makers. Typical of this group was Toyama Masakazu who, during his three years at the University of Michigan in the 1870s, absorbed Darwinist ideas that offered a scientific alternative to Christianity. Toyama was not shy when expressing his negative feelings about the influence of Christian schools: “Unfortunately, foreign churches monopolize education in Turkey, the Ch’ing Empire, and India. This is very bad for the people of these empires. If the number of mission schools in Japan increases, then we must match this with the number of state-run schools….”9 Toyama, who would become the first president of Tokyo University in 1886 and Minister of Education in 1897, voiced attitudes that would be translated into policies restricting the influence of mission schools in higher education. The first of the new regulations, implemented not as a law (as that might have triggered the displeasure of the Western powers) but simply as an “instruction” (kunrei) issued by the Ministry of Education to its officials threatened to withhold legal status from private schools that engaged in the teaching of religion in classrooms or conducted religious ceremonies on school premises. Known as “Instruction 12,” the regulation caused a split among foreign schools. Some such as Doshisha and Rikkyo chose to compromise; Meiji Gakuin did not. By this time, all three schools had been upgraded to middle school rank, roughly equal to modern day high school.10 As we shall see, both before and after World War II, without legal status a foreign school faced major disadvantages. As Kate Nakai has stated: “Graduation from an accredited school became a criterion for admission to an institution at the next higher level and to sit for state qualifying examinations.

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Whether a school was accredited or not bore also on its students’ eligibility to obtain deferment of military service. Securing and maintaining accreditation thus became a necessity for private male secondary schools and higher institutions of education to attract a sufficient number of good students.”11 The accreditation issue surfaced again with the introduction of the University Ordinance in 1918, when private schools became eligible to obtain university status if they met certain formal conditions such as an endowment, a library, and academically qualified staff. Doshisha achieved university status in 1920 and Rikkyo in 1922.

Militarization, war and after The cost of obtaining this status was high, but the real test would come in the next decade, when remaining compliant with regulations would not be enough for Christian schools to stay on the right side of increasingly nationalistic public opinion. Starting in the 1920s the army dispatched officers to train students and to teach courses. International reaction against the Japanese seizure of Manchuria in 1930 triggered a strong nationalist response, at least some of which would be directed against universities which still sought to maintain their foreign character. When two students from Sophia University, a Jesuit school, refused in 1932 to bow in front of Yasukuni Shrine during a compulsory visit, the army withdrew its resident officer. Military training was similar to legal accreditation; without a resident officer to provide military training, a university in prewar Japan could not send out graduates into society. Even after Sophia accepted the government’s claim that bowing at Shinto shrines was not a religious act but merely a display of patriotism, popular dissatisfaction, fanned by inflammatory news coverage, forced the university to engage in a humiliating capitulation, and release a statement that in effect encouraged Japanese Catholics to show their patriotic feelings and attend State Shinto rituals.12 Worse was yet to come. Later in the decade, students at Doshisha occupied the chapel to protest against Christian activities and the university’s Christian Chancellor, Yuasa Hachiro, was forced to resign in 1937 for failing to show sufficient respect to the Imperial Rescript on Education. At Rikkyo too, the president had to step down also for alleged disrespect for the Rescript. Moreover, trustees deleted Christianity from the university charter, “completing a process that saw the university evolve from a Christ-oriented school to an Emperor-serving institution within a matter of years.”13 At Kwansei Gakuin the auditorium was turned into a munition factory during World War II. As for the Sapporo Agricultural College, by now Hokkaido Imperial University, all traces of the institution’s Christian roots had already been eradicated by a member of the original Sapporo Band, who for his efforts on behalf of the state would be known to Band members as Judas. As Oshiro put it: “The highly charged atmosphere—with its emphasis on Christian morality—had disappeared. Since the promulgation of the Meiji Constitution in 1889 and the Imperial Rescript on Education the following year, fostering nationalism in students became the highest priority in educational policy.”14 The tables turned with Japan’s defeat in 1945. With the disestablishment of State Shinto and the guarantee of freedom of religion under the new 1947 Constitution, Christian-affiliated colleges that had been denied accreditation such as Meiji Gakuin quickly achieved university status. New Christian institutions could also be founded, thanks to the enthusiastic support of the Allied Occupation’s commander-in-chief, General Douglas MacArthur.15 The general’s lasting legacy as promoter of Christian education is without a doubt International Christian University (ICU) built with $15 million in donations from the United States on the former site of a wartime aircraft factory. Today ICU is among Japan’s highest ranked universities, the only postwar institution to achieve prestige equal to prewar elite schools. Other Christian colleges were founded as well at this time thanks to US support. Incidentally, the first president of ICU was none other than Yuasa Hachiro, who had been forced to step down as Chancellor of Doshisha by ultranationalists in 1937.

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The main goal of Allied Occupation reforms in higher education was not to spread the Gospel, but to replace the prewar system of elitist universities to which fewer than one percent of students could gain entrance, with an American-style system of mass higher education to which all citizens would have equal opportunity to advance. However, the unintended consequences of the Occupation’s hastily implemented democratization policies would have negative implications for American institutions hoping to enter the Japanese higher educational market some 40 years later. In order to increase access to higher education, the Occupation’s Civil Information and Education Section (CIE) promoted the immediate elevation of vocational institutes, teacher training schools and various equivalents of junior colleges to four-year universities. Historian Harry Wray has described the results of this hasty promotion of mass higher education: Most postwar institutions do not demand a rigorous college academic climate, which was the American goal. University entrance standards are much higher than those of American counterparts, but performance expectations from enrolled students are relatively low. The CIE-fostered accrediting association failed to insist on high academic qualifications for the newly created universities. Subsequently, postwar colleges and universities have not policed their own academic standards. The low level of genuine study at Japanese colleges and universities today is…a national tragedy….16 The Ministry of Education’s remedy was to demand that private universities adhere to certain minimal formal criteria. These included requirements such as management by a sufficiently endowed educational foundation, presence of a library with a prescribed number of books, and ownership of a tract of land suitable for use as a campus. Ironically, it was these very criteria which, among other factors, would prevent American universities from establishing their own branch campuses in the 1980s, by which time the dollar had weakened against the yen and Japanese real estate had become the most expensive in the world. Similarly, the poor quality of education at most postwar Japanese universities combined with the custom of graduating 90 percent of students regardless of academic performance, would also frustrate American educators attempting to impose standards at their branch campuses.

The second wave The second wave of foreign influence on Japanese higher education started as little more than a ripple. In no time, however, it took on the proportions of a tsunami. In 1980, Philadelphia’s Temple University faced its worst ever financial crisis. Enrollments that had been expected to rise, went into a steep decline due in part to a dip in the ratio of 18- to 21-year-olds in the American population. The second oil shock that had struck the year before triggered a nationwide recession in the US, cutting into tax revenues which ultimately led to a decrease in higher education government subsidies. Worse yet, a political deadlock in the Pennsylvania state legislature resulted in a complete cut-off of state funding for a year forcing the university to borrow money at high interest rates.17 As if this weren’t enough, the oil shock also caused the university’s energy costs to rise. To bring down expenditures Temple’s president faced having to terminate 52 tenured positions. But just as he was contemplating how to break the bad news to faculty, he received word of a business proposition from Japan. The concept was tempting. A group of Japanese investors, led by an educational entrepreneur who had a solid track record of steering Japanese students to the Temple Philadelphia campus, would underwrite the costs of a branch campus in Tokyo where local students could improve their English prior to transferring to the Temple main campus in Philadelphia. There would also be an opportunity to teach TESOL courses to the increasing number of local English teachers wishing to upgrade their skills without having to leave Japan, where such training was not widely available.

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The proposal played to Temple’s strengths. The university already had experience offering courses in various European locations as well as training teachers of English as a second language. As for Japan, every year there were one million more high school graduates wanting to enter university than there were places for them at domestic institutions. In fact, the early eighties marked the beginning of a 15-year period during which the largest number of international students on US campuses came from Japan. By the middle of 1982, Temple University Japan (TUJ) was a going concern. And within a few years, both Temple and its Japanese investors were in the black. TUJ’s success would inspire Japanese and American political leaders to see in the export of American higher education services a solution to the ballooning Japanese trade surplus with the United States, a source of bilateral friction which threatened to undermine the security alliance between the two countries, partners in a Cold War rivalry with the Soviet Union. The central characters in this political drama were Nikaido Susumu, an aging former cabinet minister who at the time was vice-president of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party, and Richard Gephardt, a Democratic Congressional Representative from Missouri with undisguised presidential ambitions.18 Nikaido, who had been a student at the University of Southern California before World War II, had a high regard for American education. It was he who in 1985 initiated the contact with Gephardt, a vocal critic of Japan’s closed markets. The two politicians quickly agreed to set up non-profit organizations on both sides of the Pacific with the aim of introducing US higher educational institutions to Japanese partners. What followed were group tours of Japanese investors heading for US campuses, and American university leaders flying to Japan for site visits. In no time at all, as many as 100 American higher educational institutions were involved in discussions with potential Japanese investors. But the partnerships were not intended to link similar organizations, rather to forge what were hoped would be complementary relationships between US higher educational institutions and a variety of Japanese investors, including proprietary language schools looking to offer Japanese students a direct route to US universities, regional and local governments wishing to host universities as a means to keep high school graduates from migrating to Japan’s large cities, and entrepreneurs ranging from a Hiroshima manufacturer of electromagnetic construction signs, all the way to fly-by-night ventures promoted by unsavory characters. On the surface, the push and pull factors seemed to be in balance. On the US side there were strong financial incentives to expand markets and seek new clients. A shared view that American universities had a proven track record in offering quality higher education also seemed to justify the effort needed to go abroad. Among the institutions that would enter Japan from the late 1980s to the early 1990s were such well-regarded universities as Texas A&M, Southern Illinois at Carbondale, and a consortium of state universities from Minnesota. During the 1990s, there would be some 40 US institutions with facilities in Japan accepting Japanese high school graduates for a curriculum that started with mandatory English upgrading, proceeded to English-mediated general education courses, and culminated in transfers to US universities to complete a bachelor’s degree. On the Japanese side, pull factors were also evident. As mentioned above there were a million more students than university places. There was also capital waiting to be invested, in fact, an awful lot of it. The devaluation of the dollar against the yen under the 1985 Plaza Accords forced Japanese exporters to immediately convert their dollar earnings into yen and from there into Japanese stocks and real estate. The resulting asset inflation led to a huge excess of cash and since investment opportunities in Japan were limited, at least some of these funds flowed into US-Japan educational joint ventures. Local governments too were cash-rich thanks to increased tax revenues collected during a period of unprecedented prosperity. Even after funding the construction of new city halls and prefectural headquarters to say nothing of museums and art galleries, many municipalities still had money left over to cover the cost of facilities and pay the salaries of instructors at an American university. Most no doubt

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would have preferred a Japanese branch campus but, as mentioned above, the bureaucratic barriers were too great: Japanese universities had to be managed by foundations; once funds were invested in a foundation they could not be withdrawn; a library had to be constructed and its shelves stacked with expensive books; and finally a campus had to be built on land which, thanks to Japan’s investment bubble, had become the most expensive in the world. By comparison, a US branch campus, requiring only classrooms, salaries and housing for foreign staff, seemed like a bargain. Anyway, establishing an overseas branch campus of a university must be one of the most daunting ventures imaginable. The project requires bringing together a reliable host country partner, a welcoming regulatory environment, benefactors willing to put money into an activity which when performed conscientiously yields little or no profit, academically qualified local instructors, competent bilingual administrators, and most important of all, students willing to pay higher than normal tuition for degrees that may not be valued highly by employers. Even before contemplating expanding overseas, the institution must obtain the approval of its home campus governing board, find instructors able to design new curriculum and willing to relocate overseas for several years, put administrators in charge who will resist the temptation to micromanage across boundaries of language and culture, and if the institution is even minimally supported with public funds, provide assurances to state and federal agencies that not one penny of tax money will be used for the benefit of non-residents.

Folly, fraud, mediocrity, and excellence In spite of the above challenges, the Japan opportunity was especially tempting for US universities that depended on public funds. Under President Ronald Reagan (1981–89) federal government funding of higher education was cut by 50 percent.19 Although Reagan failed to achieve his 1980 presidential campaign promise to do away entirely with the Department of Education, which he called a “boondoggle,” his well-known hostility to public support for higher education should be seen as a factor encouraging university administrators to consider creative ways to raise funds to keep their institutions functioning. Joint ventures in Japan also proved to be appealing to junior colleges, unaccredited for-profit institutions and at least one venerable midwestern university on the verge of bankruptcy. A study prepared in 1990, at the peak of the Japan boom in US higher education, concluded: “The new developments in Japan-US higher education represent the full range of folly, fraud, mediocrity, and excellence that can grow in such a setting.”20 The Wild West atmosphere of US-Japan educational exchanges at this time can be ascribed in part to the barriers preventing US institutions from obtaining legal recognition as universities from the Japanese Ministry of Education. Their inability to partner with local universities forced many American higher educational institutions into relationships with disreputable partners. For example, in 1982, a few months before the scheduled start of classes in an office building in Tokyo’s Shinjuku district, Temple University was informed by board members of its Japanese partner organization that the local educational entrepreneur who had been the chief proponent of the branch campus venture had disappeared, taking with him the equivalent of about half a million dollars in tuition fees collected from prospective students, and that the school’s operating funds would run out in three months.21 There was also the case of American International College, set up by the owner of a chain of English conversation schools in Japan, that consisted of nothing more than a Washington DC postal address and a name that included the words “international” and “college.” But the Japanese El Dorado of the 1980s also offered surprises of a different kind. In 1990 teaching staff from CUNY’s Lehman College arrived at a village nestled in the mountains to the west of Hiroshima to find a freshly finished tastefully designed multistory concrete building that one former American employee described as having the look and feel of Club Med. “We had access to an Olympic size swimming pool, tennis courts and a football field,” recalled Mark Manyin, a student services coordinator at CUNY Hiroshima from 1990 to 1992.22 All this

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was thanks to the generosity of the abovementioned manufacturer of electromagnetic highway signs, Lehman’s local partner. Meanwhile, in Koriyama, host city of Texas A&M, political rivalry between the mayor and the governor of Fukushima Prefecture would culminate in law suits that would tie up funds needed for the construction of a campus, forcing classes to be moved into temporary buildings and leading ultimately to the collapse of the venture.23 As of the present time, the two US university branch campuses that remain in Japan from the 40 founded in the eighties and early nineties are TUJ and Lakeland University (LUJ). LUJ, based in rural Wisconsin, has successfully maintained a two-year college in spite of having started in 1991 just as other US schools were packing up and leaving. Almost all other US-Japan ventures collapsed with the bursting of the Japanese economic bubble starting in the early 1990s. CUNY Hiroshima’s resortlike former campus is reported to be functioning as a recreational facility. In Akita, where Minnesota State’s consortium attempted to teach local students enough English to allow them to transfer to US universities, a Japanese-managed school now stands. Known as Akita International University, it is the only example of a successful transformation of a second-wave branch campus into a locally managed international institution. However, the success of the two remaining US branch campuses should not be underestimated. Both TUJ and Lakeland have survived because they were able to cater to the needs of a niche market consisting of: the children of expatriate families hoping to obtain American university degrees in Japan; English-proficient Japanese seeking mid-career education not offered by Japanese institutions; and professionals keen to complete advanced degrees in law, business and second language instruction. In 2005, the legal environment for foreign branch campuses improved somewhat thanks to a change in the law, permitting special “foreign university” status to be conferred on both TUJ and Lakeland.

A qualified failure With just two US branch campuses remaining the foreign influence on Japanese higher education would seem to be severely limited. After all, the total fulltime enrollment of TUJ and Lakeland accounts for about 0.15 percent of the approximately three million students at Japan’s 775 universities and 326 junior colleges. To be sure, a few overseas programs operate from buildings on Japanese campuses, and there are several Japanese universities where foreign students make up a sizeable portion of enrollments and where foreign faculty are present in more than token numbers. However, even taking the above factors into consideration, Japanese higher education is more or less self-contained. For example, the ratio of international students at Japanese universities, in spite of a recent increase, stands at slightly above four percent. In the UK the ratio is 20 percent. Although in the United States foreign students account for less than six percent of the university student population, total enrollment at American higher education institutions is nearly seven times Japan’s. The ratio of international faculty at Japanese universities is the same as for students, four percent, compared with 30 percent at Harvard and 40 percent at Cambridge. Moreover, a very high proportion of foreign instructors at Japanese universities are working either part time or on short-term contracts. Unlike at Stanford, where the present president as well as a recent predecessor are foreign born and educated, it is extremely rare for foreign faculty at Japanese universities to be appointed to positions of authority, let alone leadership. In other words, by any measure, relative or absolute, the foreign presence in Japanese higher education is significantly smaller than at other leading industrialized countries. When compared with China, which hosts branch campuses of 27 US institutions including Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford and similar top-ranked American universities, Japan can hardly be described as having embraced the internationalization of higher education. At this point one is tempted to ask why bother to try to analyze the foreign influence on Japanese higher education when there is so little of it to be found today. However, the very absence of foreign

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participation in Japanese higher education in a period of active transnational educational exchanges elsewhere should offer a solid reason for serious analysis. Why have attempts by foreigners to build universities in Japan ended either in suppression or a hasty retreat? Were these attempts complete failures, or is it just that foreign influence is not readily visible but still present below the surface? An examination of the ebb and flow of foreign influence in Japanese higher education is worthwhile because it allows us to come to some conclusions as to what are push and pull factors and what common goals are needed for transnational educational joint ventures to succeed in Japan. Or conversely put, what factors stand in the way of international educational collaboration? There is a tendency among American academics looking back on the US-Japan joint educational ventures of the eighties and nineties to blame US universities for pulling out of Japan. For example, Dennis Yang concludes: “The experiment, in short, was largely a failure…. The unraveling of so many American higher educational institutions is an ideal case study for higher education leaders and administrators, who desire to create new programs, offices, and campuses in China, the country that has replaced Japan as the world’s major rising power.”24 In a similar vein, a PhD dissertation on US-Japan higher educational joint ventures concluded, “[M]ost US programs in Japan were hastily developed without adequate preparation in order to capitalize on a political and financial moment in history.”25 The three reasons anthropologist John Mock, writing as a participant observer, gives for the failure of US branch campuses are somewhat more helpful: 1) an unrealistic expectation on the part of most US institutions that their foray into Japan would be profitable; 2) absence of shared goals between the foreign institution and its local Japanese partners; 3) inflexible cultural attitudes and administrative practices on the American home campus.26 While there is more than a kernel of truth to the cultural myopia of monolingual US university administrators (although such criticism might be more usefully applied universally and not exclusively to the American variety), it is the position of this chapter that no matter how well American university administrators might have managed their Japanese branch campuses, there were two hurdles that they alone could not have overcome, and which sealed their fate. The first was the abysmally low level of English skills which the majority of Japanese students brought with them from high school; the second was the steadfast refusal of the Japanese Ministry of Education to grant legal recognition to US universities. Both of these barriers resulted from Japanese educational policies. The reasons that have been given for the exceptionally low levels of English language proficiency of Japanese high school graduates range from distortions caused by the need to prepare students for university entrance exams that stress written skills, to the use of outdated linguistic theories to justify delaying the introduction of English language study until junior high school, by which time most students are beyond the ideal age for learning their first foreign language. But whatever the cause, the consequence is clear. According to figures released by Educational Testing Services, which administers TOEFL-iBT, the test most commonly used by US universities to evaluate the English language skills of international applicants, in 2019 Japanese students obtained the second lowest scores in Asia, outperforming applicants only from Laos and coming in more than ten points behind cohorts from neighboring South Korea.27 Manyin, the student coordinator at CUNY Hiroshima from 1992 to 1994, recalled, “The Japanese students could not keep up. Korean students invited to take part in the CUNY program did not face the same difficulties.” It soon became clear that just one out of every three high school graduates who signed up at a US branch campus could achieve the minimum level of English proficiency required to transfer to the American institution’s home campus to complete a US bachelor’s degree. And it was here that the differences in cultural expectations Mock refers to became apparent. In Japan, universities are difficult to enter but graduation rates at most institutions are well above 90 percent. In the American case, entry is easy but one out of every two students fails to obtain a degree. Once this became clear to Japanese students and parents, enrollments plunged at branch campuses from what initially were in

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the 300 to 400 range, to double digits. That is when most closed down. To make matters worse for the foreign schools, the Ministry of Education, yielding to popular pressure in the early 1990s permitted the opening of new Japanese universities and the upgrading of junior colleges to four-year university status. As a result, it was no longer necessary for Japanese students to make a serious commitment to achieving functional literacy in English in order to be able to obtain a degree outside Japan. The damaging effect of official language policy in the failure of Japanese students to acquire English language skills cannot be ignored. This factor has been completely passed over by previous inquiries into the failure of foreign branch campuses and yet it is without a doubt a key determinant. On September 26, 2006, at a news conference marking his appointment as Minister of Education, Ibuki Bunmei stated, “English study among other things may be necessary [for students to function] in international society, but for Japanese being able to speak the Japanese language correctly occupies a higher priority. Surely this is the kind of issue that calls for clarifying what is truly important, where one’s priorities lie.”28 The minister was giving voice to a dominant view among Japanese educational policy-makers based on a long-discredited theory according to which the cognitive skills of children exposed to a second language too early might be damaged.29 That is why the minister took pains to appear to be defending the national language by stating that speaking English “may be important” but Japanese has a “higher priority.” As of present writing, despite decades of debate, foreign language classes have yet to be introduced into the elementary school core curriculum. The significance of the second hurdle, inability to qualify for legal recognition as a university, also ought not to be underestimated; it placed additional financial burdens on the foreign universities and it lowered their status in the eyes of the Japanese public. Absence of legal recognition meant that students were forced to pay consumption tax on tuition fees and full fare on public transport to and from school. Absence of legal recognition also served to damage the reputation of universities which were in fact fully accredited in their home country. The branch campuses were lumped together with vocational schools, many of which were run as profit-making enterprises with little commitment to quality education. Looking at the quality of education most US higher education institutions sought to bring to Japan during the 1980s and early 1990s, and noting the fact that at this time about a million Japanese students were unable in any given year to proceed to local universities due to lack of places, one cannot avoid coming to the conclusion that in failing to respond positively to what foreign branch campuses were offering, Japan missed an opportunity to enter the new globalized post-industrial world with human resources competent in foreign languages and capable of interacting effectively with foreigners. No discussion of higher education policy in Japan can be complete without reference to the long tradition of “education in the service of the state.” The 1890 Imperial Rescript on Education urged subjects to “pursue learning and cultivate arts.” If any clarification was needed as to why, in 1883 Toyama Masakazu, mentioned earlier for his opposition to education by foreign missionaries, defined a teacher as someone who “plays the vital role of transforming a child into an imperial subject who may grow up to become a soldier, a banker, a technician, a politician etc.”30 If individual students benefitted from education in the process, so much the better, but both before and after 1945 Japanese students studied to strengthen Japan, at first militarily to serve the emperor, and then later economically to become useful human resources for Japan’s expanding industries. Harry Wray’s comment on postwar Japanese education in general applies equally to the goals of higher education in particular: “Today’s schools continue the prewar focus on the group, subject matter, textbooks, teacher, and the needs of industry and the state as defined by the postwar Monbusho and the Liberal Democratic Party. Education focuses less on the child’s development and humanity as an end than on the creation of orderly, literate students useful to economic society, important reasons for Japan’s spectacular postwar economic development.”31 Ronald Dore, a pioneer historian of Japanese education, stated as early as the 1960s that the two bodies Wray pointed to, the Liberal Democratic Party and the Japanese Ministry of Education,

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were unabashedly taking credit for the role of centrally directed educational policy in Japan’s postwar economic miracle. Writing about the ministry’s annual review in 1962 Dore referred to “Left-wing critics [who] have seen in the report (and in speeches of the Prime Minister about the importance of adequate ‘human investment’ for the future) new attempts to make a nation of acquiescent little capitalists no less obnoxious than pre-war attempts to make a nation of acquiescent little militarists.”32 As Dore implies, the continuation of prewar state-centered education was not universally lauded but as Japan’s economy expanded and the lives of ordinary citizens improved, virtually every aspect of Japanese society, including higher education, was seen as in some way contributing to Japan’s success. When seeking to explain why the Ministry of Education refused to consider applications from foreign universities for legal recognition during the 1980s and 1990s, a decision that would contribute to the early departure of the majority of foreign educational institutions, one needs to remember that the 1980s were the time when the Japanese economic model was the envy of the world. Japanese industries possessed the best technologies and led world markets in steel, automobiles, machine tools, home electronic goods, semiconductors, and communication devices. By way of contrast, the United States appeared to be in decline, its industries unable to meet the challenge of Japanese competition. It would not be until the bursting of the Japanese stock market and real estate bubble in the early 1990s and the subsequent emergence of new, knowledge-intensive fields such as financial services, software and Internet commerce that the shortcomings of the Japanese system, with its overdependence on manufacturing would become clear. While Japan was a leader during the industrial age, a time when large scale manufacturers produced goods for export on assembly lines requiring a disciplined labor force, an educational policy that stressed rote learning and conformity may have seemed appropriate for the era. However, as profit margins on manufactured goods became razor thin and value adding shifted to new knowledge-intensive fields, an education system that produced competent speakers of English and graduates capable of interacting easily with foreign colleagues and customers was needed. Ironically, it is precisely these skills that US universities hoping to establish branch campuses in Japan during the final years of Japanese economic supremacy offered when they sought to attract Japanese students, and upgrade their English skills to levels allowing them to transfer to US universities where they could complete their degrees. It has been a goal of this chapter to point to the magnitude of the failure of the foreign campuses in Japan. However, so far little mention has been made of those whose lives have been most affected. Education, after all, is about students and what they do with the opportunities given to them. The tragedy for Japanese students, and ultimately for Japanese industry and the economy as a whole, that resulted from the failure of Japanese officialdom to perceive the efforts of American educators as an asset, can best be seen in the experiences of the alumni of two foreign campuses in Japan, both of which have since closed their doors.

The last class On January 11, 2009, Endo Masako, English instructor at a Hokkaido junior college, attended a ceremony marking the closing of the Sapporo branch campus of an American university where six years earlier she completed a master’s degree in second language education. “Of the hundred students who had studied for graduate degrees, four out of five were Japanese and of those, about the same ratio were women,”33 she wrote in her blog. Heidelberg University, no relation to its more famous German namesake, is a modest-size liberal arts college with an enrollment just under 1,300, located in Tiffin, 15 miles to the south of Cleveland, Ohio. The college may be small, but its influence on the lives of its Japanese alumni seems to have been enormous. “Some went on to complete their doctorates, others became English teachers, all had a chance to engage in self-improvement,”34 wrote Endo, who was so impressed by what she experienced at Heidelberg Sapporo that in 2006 she published a 50-page academic paper on

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the positive influence of study at American branch campuses on the careers of non-traditional students in Japan, especially women.35 The word Endo used to close her blog entry about her alma mater’s last day in Japan was “sabishii” (lonely, bereft). Endo was not alone in appreciating the arrival in Japan of US branch campuses in the late 80s and early 90s. In 1994, Yoshida Hideki, a transfer student from Texas A&M’s campus in Koriyama studying at the time at the school’s main campus in College Station, Texas, told the Chronicle of Higher Education, “I wanted to do something different. In Japan you have no freedom. The teacher tells you what to do and you do it.”36 But, by the time Yoshida spoke to the Chronicle, Texas A&M’s Koriyama campus had already been shuttered. The closure of both these institutions is especially significant because Endo and Yoshida represent two underserved segments of the Japanese higher education market: the so-called mature, or nontraditional student, and the individual, non-conformist who is keen to learn a foreign language in a real-life setting outside Japan. Although Endo sought to demonstrate in her academic paper that the foreign branch campus offered opportunities for career enhancement and self-improvement for older Japanese hoping to return to university mid-career or possibly after retirement, this is exactly the segment of the Japanese higher education market whose needs Japanese policymakers have chosen to ignore. Of 37 OECD countries, Japan has by far the lowest ratio of non-traditional students enrolled in higher education programs. According to figures for 2012, in Japan just 1.9 percent of students enrolled in a course of study for a degree were aged 25 years or over, compared with the OECD average of 18.1 percent. The US figure was 23.9 percent.37 This is in spite of a highly publicized campaign that pays lip service to shōgai gakushū or “lifelong learning.” Likewise, judging from the fact that Yoshida was granted the option to finish his degree in English on Texas A&M’s home campus after the university was forced to close down its Japanese operations, he had to have achieved a minimum English proficiency score that eluded the majority of Japanese students enrolled at US branch campuses in Japan in the 80s and 90s. As mentioned above, other than their failure to qualify for legal status as universities, US branch campuses in Japan faced having to accept students whose English language skills were so minimal that most were unable to reach proficiency levels needed to transfer to US universities to complete their degrees. There was, however, a minority of hard-working and ambitious students, such as Yoshida, whose hopes to prepare themselves to pursue international education in a student-centered environment were dashed when the US campuses closed their doors. The opportunities that these students lost were not theirs alone. The failure of Japanese leaders to see in the foreign branch campuses a potential training ground for globally competent human resources has been a lost opportunity for the country as a whole.

By way of a conclusion It should be clear by now that the normal definition of an overseas branch campus needs to be modified when talking about the role of foreign educators and the institutions they founded in Japan. Today, in an era when in many parts of the world higher education has become just another service industry whose products can be exported and income added to a country’s trade in invisibles, a standard definition of the overseas campus has come to be: “[A]n entity that is owned, at least in part, by a foreign higher education provider; operated in the name of the foreign education provider; and provides an entire academic program, substantially on site, leading to a degree awarded by the foreign education provider.”38 At first glance it is difficult to find fault with the above sentence. However, it misses a key point in international education. While TUJ and Lakeland Japan might conform to the above definition in a narrow, formalistic sense, the reason these two branch campuses succeeded where dozens of others failed will be found in the commitment to educational values that inspired their administrators and

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teaching staff to stick it out in spite of a long economic recession and an unfriendly regulatory environment. TUJ has prospered in part by giving non-traditional students, particularly Japanese women, a chance to upgrade their qualifications midcareer and reenter the work force better prepared, the mission that Endo Masako referred to in her paper on the positive role foreign universities can play in Japan. In the case of Lakeland, as one senior staff member at the Japan campus stated in an interview, “The decision to come to Japan was undertaken in order to diversify our student body, to link our rural Wisconsin campus to the rest of the world.”39 In this regard, Lakeland’s motives were identical to those of a group of top US universities spearheaded by Stanford, that set up two overseas studies programs in Kyoto during the late eighties and early nineties, both of which have continued to function with little regard for economic considerations or regulatory barriers. Historian Peter Duus, one of several Stanford faculty members to promote the launch of the university’s Japan programs, recalled that the initial motive was to balance the overwhelmingly European orientation of overseas study up to that time: “By the late 1980s the Japanese ‘economic miracle’ had impressed the general public—and also undergraduates with an eye to the future.”40 Initially housed in its own building adjacent to Kyoto University, the Stanford Kyoto Center offered one academic quarter combined with a summer internship with Japan-based technology firms for Stanford engineering students, and a maximum full year stay at the Kyoto Consortium for Japanese Studies (KCJS) aimed at humanities and social science students from Stanford and a dozen other topranked universities such as Columbia, Yale, Princeton, and the like. However, Ministry of Education bureaucrats were unimpressed and adamantly refused to grant legal recognition to the Stanford-led programs. The late economist Aoki Masahiko, who had taken two years off from his position at Stanford to move to Kyoto and lay the groundwork for the Stanford Center wrote with undisguised bitterness, “It is absurd that a university that has given the world so many Nobel Prize winners cannot be called a university just because it is not Japanese.”41 Although Aoki was able to obtain funding to build the center from Japanese business leaders, many of whom had studied at US universities on scholarships after World War II, Stanford was not allowed to build its center on the campus of Kyoto University because the land was Japanese government property. One senses that in his Japanese language writings Aoki is keen to inform his readers of the insularity of their country’s higher education policies. He writes, “In China, Stanford had no problems obtaining permission to build its branch campus on the grounds of Beijing University.”42 Perhaps it should come as no surprise that both the Stanford program for engineering students and KCJS are now located on the campus of Doshisha University together with the facilities of the Associated Kyoto Program, a group of 13 US teaching colleges including Amherst, Oberlin, Pomona and Smith. Doshisha is home also to the Japan branch campus of its German sister school, Tübingen, which in turn hosts Doshisha’s European campus. Neither is Doshisha unusual among mission-founded universities in maintaining fully functioning exchanges with a large number of foreign partner institutions. Likewise, even today, it is Christian-founded universities such as Sophia and ICU that are the most open to international educational exchanges and who hire a disproportionately large number of highly qualified foreign instructors. With the notable exception of Waseda University, non-Christian private institutions and public universities have been latecomers to internationalization. Although many Japanese universities claim to have as many as several hundred exchange agreements with foreign counterparts, most are undertaken in response to pressure from the Ministry of Education as part of a recent push toward globalization in higher education; few of the 31,000 exchange agreements that Japanese universities have signed in recent years have been activated.43 The overseas studies programs and the Christian-founded legacy universities share a common trait: they punch well above their weight in international education. In spite of the cold shoulder the Japanese state has shown them in the past, it is clear that their work does far more to promote the globalization of Japanese industry and society than counterpart “pure” Japanese educational institutions.

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For example, even though the Doshisha-based overseas studies programs of some 30 foreign universities send no more than 150 students to Japan each year, every one of these students spends either a semester or a full year staying with a Japanese family. On the Stanford program alone, each summer 20 to 25 students move to Japan’s leading companies and think tanks for 10-week internships. KCJS students engage in service learning with local NGOs. All overseas study programs invite students from Doshisha and Kyoto Universities to audit their courses for credit provided by their home institutions and all such auditors are invited to participate with the foreign students in field trips. Although the aim of the overseas studies programs is to provide opportunities for intellectual and emotional growth for individual students, the educational outcomes end up benefiting a host country whose system of higher education, as explained above, is designed to strengthen industry and the state. Among the alumni of the Stanford program are Jerry Yang and David Filo, founders of Yahoo, as well as at least one US diplomat who served on the Japan desk in Washington, and a senior executive of the Japan branch of a leading US financial firm. In all, the engineering program alone in its 40-year existence has produced just under 1,000 Japan-literate American business professionals whose firsthand knowledge of Japanese industry and society allows them to function as a bridge between Japan and the United States. It is truly ironic that after initially welcoming foreign educators, Japanese government officials have spent most of the past century and a half attempting to limit the influence of outsiders. One wonders how much more fully Japan would be prepared for the present era of globalization, if these same officials had poured their energies into encouraging transnational cooperation in higher education instead.

Notes 1

William R. Stevenson III, “Christian Universities in Japan,” in Higher Education and Belief Systems in the Asia Pacific Region, Education in the Asia-Pacific Region: Issues, Concerns and Prospects 49, eds. A. Jun, and C. S. Collins (Singapore: Springer, 2019), 53, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-6532-4_5. 2 Stevenson, 53. 3 Anne Park Shannon, Finding Japan: Early Canadian Encounters with Asia (Vancouver: Heritage House, 2012), 61. 4 Ota Yuzo, Eigo to Nihonjin [The Japanese and the English Language] (Tokyo: Kodansha, 1995), 72. 5 John Howes, ed., Nitobe Inazo: Japan’s Bridge across the Pacific, (Boulder: Westview Press, 1995), 8. 6 Yuzo Ota, Woman with Demons: A Life of Kamiya Mieko 1914–1979 (Montreal/Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2006), Kindle, Location 502. 7 Tetsuya Kobayashi, “Tokugawa Education as a Foundation of Modern Education in Japan,” Comparative Education Review, 9, no. 3 (October, 1965): 285. 8 George M. Oshiro, “Nitobe Inazo and the Sapporo Band: Reflections on the Dawn of Christianity in Early Meiji Japan,” Japanese Journal of Religious Studies 34, no. 1, (2007): 102. 9 Toyama Masakazu, “Kōchiken ni kōtōchūgaku o setsuritsu subeki no iken” [Opinion: high schools should be established in Kochi Prefecture], Chuzan Sonko. Volume 1, Part 2. (Tokyo: Maruzen, 1909), 107–110, as quoted in Megumi Wakabayashi, “‘Think in English’—Toyama Masakazu and Mombushō Conversational Readers,” Komaba Journal of English Education 6, (2015): 22. 10 Kate Wildman Nakai, “Between Secularity, Shrines, and Protestantism: Catholic Higher Education in Prewar Japan,” Japan Review, No. 30, Formations of the Secular in Japan, (2017), 102, accessed December 31, 2019, https:// www.jstor.org/stable/44259463. 11 Nakai, 101. 12 Nakai, 115. 13 Okawa Y. and Maeda K., Misshon sukūru to sensō: Rikkyō Gakuin no jiremma [Mission schools and the war: the dilemma for Rikkyo] (Tokyo: Toshindo, 2008), as quoted in Stevenson, 57. 14 Oshiro, 122. 15 Lawrence S. Wittner, “MacArthur and the Missionaries: God and Man in Occupied Japan,” Pacific Historical Review, 40, no. 1 (Feb., 1971), 82, accessed January 29, 2020, https://www.jstor.org/stable/3637830. 16 Harry Wray, “Change and Continuity in Modern Japanese Educational History: Allied Occupational Reforms Forty Years Later,” Comparative Education Review, 35, no. 3 (August 1991): 454. Stable URL, accessed February 20, 2020, https://www.jstor.org/stable/1188425.

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17

Richard Joclyn, History of Temple University Japan, Chapter 2, unpublished manuscript. Gail S. Chambers and William K. Cummings, Profiting from Education: Japan-United States Educational Ventures in the 1980s (New York: Institute of International Education, 1990), 36. 19 Gary K. Clabaugh, “The Education Legacy of Ronald Reagan,” Educational Horizons, (Summer, 2004): 257, accessed November 28, 2020, https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ684842.pdf. 20 Chambers and Cummings, 151. 21 Joclyn, Chapter 3. 22 Interview with author, June 2, 2020. 23 Hiroshi Fukurai and Yusuke Kataoka, “American Universities in Japan: Success or Failure—A Case Study of Texas A&M University-Koriyama,” Current Politics and Economics of Japan, 2, no. 2 (March 2015): 93, accessed November 28, 2020, https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2584159. 24 Dennis T. Yang, American Universities in China: Lessons from Japan (London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2018), 2. 25 Margaret Graves and Elizabeth Agopsowicz, “Charting New Waters: US Higher Education in Japan,” (Retrospective Theses and Dissertations 10436, 1993) 106, accessed November 29, 2020, https://lib.dr.iastate.edu/rtd/10436. 26 John Mock, “American Universities in Japan,” in The “Big Bang” in Japanese Higher Education: The 2004 Reforms and the Dynamics of Change, eds., J.S. Eades, Roger Goodman and Yumiko Hada (Melbourne: Trans Pacific Press, 2005), 198. 27 TOEFL iBT Data Summary 2019, accessed November 29, 2020, https://www.ets.org/s/toefl/pdf/94227_unlweb .pdf. 28 Transcript of Minister Ibuki Bunmei’s inaugural press conference, September 26, 2006, (author’s translation), accessed November 26, 2020, http://www.mext.go.jp/b_menu/daijin/06100201.htm. 29 Kenji Hakuta and Rafael M. Diaz, “The Relationship Between Degree of Bilingualism and Cognitive Ability: A Critical Discussion and Some New Longitudinal Data,” in Children’s Language, vol. 5, ed. K.E. Nelson (Hillside, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1985), 319, accessed November 29, 2020, https://web.stanford.edu/~hakuta/www/research /publications/(1985)%20-%20THE%20RELATIONSHIP%20BETWEEN%20DEGREE%20OF%20BILINGUALISM %20AND.pdf. 30 Wakabayashi, 20. 31 Wray, 460. 32 R.P. Dore, “Education in Japan’s Growth,” Pacific Affairs, 37, no. 1 (Spring 1964): 67. 33 Endo Masako, “Haiderubaagu daigakuin nihonkō heikōshiki” [Heidelberg University Japan graduate school closing ceremony], Ngchatte eigo gaido, blog accessed November 29, 2020, https://endoms.exblog.jp/9864278/. 34 Endo blog. 35 Endo Masako, “Amerika daigaku nihonkō shūryō no igi—shakaijin josei daigakuinsei no eigogakushū o jirei ni saikō” [The meaning of graduation from an American MA program in Japan—considering the case of lifelong education for adult Japanese female learners of English], Sapporo University Women’s Junior College Journal, 48 (September 2006), 74, accessed October 29, 2020, https://ci.nii.ac.jp/naid/110006556852/ . 36 Anya Magaro Rubin, “A Retreat from Japan,” Chronicle of Higher Education, October 26, 1994, accessed November 29, 2020, https://www.chronicle.com/article/a-retreat-from-japan/?cid2=gen_login_refresh&cid=gen_sign_in. 37 MEXT, “Shakaijin no manabinaoshi ni kan suru genjōtō ni tsuite” [Present conditions for adult learners], accessed November 30, 2020, https://www.mext.go.jp/b_menu/shingi/chousa/koutou/065/gijiroku/__icsFiles/afieldfile/2015 /04/13/1356047_3_2.pdf. 38 Jason Lane, “International Branch Campuses: Overview of Trends & Issue,” (sic) Lecture presented at 2018 University Quality Assurance Forum, accessed November 29, 2020, https://www.niad.ac.jp/media/015/201808 /International%20Branch%20Campuses;%20Overview%20of%20Trends%20&%20Issue.pdf. 39 Author interview with Alan Brender, Academic Dean, Lakeland University Japan, November 14, 2019. 40 Email exchange with author, February 9, 2020. 41 Aoki Masahiko, “Sutanfōdo to Kyōto no aida de” [Between Stanford and Kyoto] in Utsuriyuku kono jūnen: ugokanu shiten, [This ever-changing decade—from a stable viewpoint] (Tokyo: Nikkei Bijinisujin Bunko, 2002), 27. 42 Aoki Masahiko, Watakushi no rirekisho: jinsei ekkyō gēmu [My curriculum vitae: life as a transnational game] (Tokyo: Nihon Keizai Shimbun Shuppansha, 2008), 177. 43 MEXT, Overview of the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology, accessed November 29, 2020, https://www.mext.go.jp/en/about/pablication/__icsFiles/afieldfile/2019/03/13/1374478_001.pdf. 18

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Chambers, Gail S. and William K. Cummings. Profiting from Education: Japan-United States Educational Ventures in the 1980s. New York: Institute of International Education, 1990. https://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED320488. Clabaugh, Gary K. “The Education Legacy of Ronald Reagan.” Educational Horizons. (Summer, 2004): 256–259. https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ684842.pdf. Dore, R.P. “Education in Japan’s Growth.” Pacific Affairs 37, no. 1 (Spring 1964): 66–79. https://www.jstor.org/stable /2754530. Educational Testing Service. TOEFL iBT Data Summary 2019. https://www.ets.org/s/toefl/pdf/94227_unlweb.pdf. Endo Masako. “Haiderubaagu daigakuin nihonkō heikōshiki” [Heidelberg University Japan graduate school closing ceremony]. Ngchatte eigo gaido (blog) https://endoms.exblog.jp/9864278/. 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Graves, Margaret and Elizabeth Agopsowicz. “Charting New Waters: US Higher Education in Japan.” Retrospective Theses and Dissertations 10436: 1993. https://lib.dr.iastate.edu/rtd/10436. Hakuta, Kenji and Rafael M. Diaz. “The Relationship Between Degree of Bilingualism and Cognitive Ability: A Critical Discussion and Some New Longitudinal Data.” In Children’s Language, 5, edited by K.E. Nelson. Hillside, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1985. https://web.stanford.edu/~hakuta/www/research/publications/(1985)%20-%20 THE%20RELATIONSHIP%20BETWEEN%20DEGREE%20OF%20BILINGUALISM%20AND.pdf. Horvat, Andrew. “Beikoku no gaikokugo kiki to Nihon no gengo nōryoku kakusa” [America’s foreign language crises and Japan’s language divides]. In Gurōbaru shakai ni okeru ibunkakan komyunikeeshon [Cross-cultural communication in a global society], edited by Nishida Hiroko. Tokyo: Kazama Shobo, 2008. ———. “Bushido and the Legacy of “Samurai Values’ in Contemporary Japan.” Asian Studies 6, no. 2. 189–208. https://revije.ff.uni-lj.si/as/article/view/7762/8223. ———. “Hihan dake de wa wakamono wa kaigai ni ikanai” [Criticizing youth will not make them go abroad].(January 31, 2013). nippon.com. https://www.nippon.com/ja/column/g00077/. Howes, John F., ed. Nitobe Inazo: Japan’s Bridge across the Pacific. Boulder: Westview Press, 1995. Joclyn, Richard. History of Temple University Japan, unpublished manuscript. Kobayashi, Tetsuya. “Tokugawa Education as a Foundation of Modern Education in Japan.” Comparative Education Review, 9, no. 3 (October 1965): 288–302. https://www.jstor.org/stable/1186062. Lane, Jason. “International Branch Campuses: Overview of Trends & Issue.” (sic) Lecture presented at 2018 University Quality Assurance Forum. https://www.niad.ac.jp/media/015/201808/International%20Branch%20 Campuses;%20Overview%20of%20Trends%20&%20Issue.pdf. Lincicome, Mark. “Nationalism, Internationalization, and the Dilemma of Educational Reform in Japan.” Comparative Education Review. 37, no. 2 (May 1993): 123–51. http://www.jstor.com/stable/1188681. MEXT. Overview of the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology. Accessed November 29, 2020. https://www.mext.go.jp/en/about/pablication/__icsFiles/afieldfile/2019/03/13/1374478_001.pdf. ———. “Shakaijin no manabinaoshi ni kan suru genjōtō ni tsuite.” [Present Conditions for Adult Learners]. https:// www.mext.go.jp/b_menu/shingi/chousa/koutou/065/gijiroku/__icsFiles/afieldfile/2015/04/13/1356047_3_2 .pdf. ———. Transcript of Minister Ibuki Bunmei’s inaugural press conference, September 26, 2006, (author’s translation). Accessed November 26, 2020. http://www.mext.go.jp/b_menu/daijin/06100201.htm. Mock, John. “American Universities in Japan.” In The “Big Bang” in Japanese Higher Education: The 2004 Reforms and the Dynamics of Change, edited by J.S. Eades, Roger Goodman and Yumiko Hada. Melbourne: Trans Pacific Press, 2005. Nakai, Kate Wildman. “Between Secularity, Shrines, and Protestantism: Catholic Higher Education in Prewar Japan.” Japan Review, No. 30, Formations of the Secular in Japan, (2017): 102. https://www.jstor.org/stable/44259463. Oshiro, George M. “Nitobe Inazo and the Sapporo Band: Reflections on the Dawn of Christianity in Early Meiji Japan.” Japanese Journal of Religious Studies 34, no. 1, (2007): 99–126. https://www.jstor.org/stable/30234177. Ota, Yuzo. Eigo to Nihonjin [Japanese and the English Language]. Tokyo: Kodansha, 1995. ———. Woman with Demons: A Life of Kamiya Mieko 1914–1979. Montreal/Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2006. Kindle.

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Poole, Gregory S. “Higher Education Reform in Japan: Amano Ikuo on ‘The University in Crisis.’” International Education Journal 4, No 3 (2003): 149–176. http://iej.cjb.net 149. Shannon, Anne Park. Finding Japan: Early Canadian Encounters with Asia. Vancouver: Heritage House, 2012. Rubin, Amy Magaro. “A Retreat from Japan.” Chronicle of Higher Education. (October 26, 1994). https://www.chronicle .com/article/a-retreat-from-japan/?cid2=gen_login_refresh&cid=gen_sign_in. Stevenson, William R., III. “Christian Universities in Japan.” In Higher Education and Belief Systems in the Asia Pacific Region, Education in the Asia-Pacific Region: Issues, Concerns and Prospects 49, edited by A. Jun, C. S. Collins, 51–60. Singapore: Springer 2019. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-6532-4_5Stevenson. Torii, Yasuteru. “Beikoku daigaku nihonkō no shinshutsu to tettai” [Arrival and departure of US university branch campuses]. National Institute of Educational Research 132 (March 2003): 199–206. Wakabayashi, Megumi. “’Think in English’—Toyama Masakazu and Mombushō Conversational Readers.” Komaba Journal of English Education 6, (2015): 19–43. http://park.itc.u-tokyo.ac.jp/eigo/KJEE/006/019-043.pdf. Wittner, S. Lawrence. “MacArthur and the Missionaries: God and Man in Occupied Japan.” Pacific Historical Review 40, no. 1 (Feb., 1971): 77–98. https://www.jstor.org/stable/3637830. Wray, Harry. “Change and Continuity in Modern Japanese Educational History: Allied Occupational Reforms Forty Years Later.” Comparative Education Review 35, no. 3 (August 1991): 447–475. https://www.jstor.org/stable /1188425. Wollons, Roberta. “The Black Forest in a Bamboo Garden: Missionary Kindergartens in Japan, 1868–1912.” History of Education Quarterly 33. no. 1 (Spring 1993): 1–35 https://www.jstor.org/stable/368518. Yang, Dennis T. American Universities in China: Lessons from Japan. London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2018.

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Chapter 8 The Financing of Higher Education in Japan Fukui Fumitake The purpose of this chapter is to explore how the Japanese higher education system tries to secure ample financial resources to support future higher education in an era of a decreasing population and a mature economy. First, the characteristics of the financial resources of public and private universities in Japan are described. The second section explains the size of higher education in Japan and the policy issues in an era of a decreasing population. The third section describes the trends in the revenue and expenditure of public and private universities from 2007 to 2017, and the reform of the government’s operational funding allocation system in Japan. The fourth section deals with student access to financing and equity, as well as student loans and scholarship policies in higher education. Lastly, some trends are suggested for the future challenges for government and universities regarding the funding of higher education in Japan.

Overview Public funding vs. private funding There are two main types of funding for supporting higher education: public and private. Public funding is the money provided by the government. The government collects taxes from taxpayers and allocates money directly or indirectly to universities to support education and research. Economically, public funding for higher education can be justified by positive externalities or spillovers from higher education and the effect of relaxing credit constraint issues.1 In a knowledge-based society, high-skill workers play an important role in providing innovative ideas and employment, and there is a positive relationship between the knowledge capital of countries and economic growth.2 Additionally, it has been pointed out that higher education may increase social benefits through increasing tax revenues, encouraging people to make better political decisions, reducing criminal activity, and improving social cohesion.3 However, if students cannot afford to pay for higher education and cannot borrow money at a low interest rate, higher education will be underfunded. In this context, not only public funds going directly to universities but also public funds in the form of scholarships or student loans play a principal role in the financing of higher education. The Japanese government has allocated subsidies both to public and private universities to support their operational and specific education or research activities. In 2018, MEXT gave operational subsidies of ¥1,097 billion ($9.9 billion) to national universities and ¥317 billion ($2.8 billion) to private universities.4 Public and municipal universities are also supported by the central government indirectly

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by transferring central government tax revenues to local governments, which allocate those subsidies to their universities. In addition to these institutional funds, the Japanese government supports college students through student loans and scholarship policies. The Japan Student Services Organization (JASSO), an independent administrative corporation supported by MEXT, provides student loans and scholarships to students and their families. Additionally, the Japanese government applies tax policies such as charitable deductions, and gives tax benefits to donors who support higher education. This means that the government partly supports donations to universities. On the other hand, higher education has also been regarded as private goods because graduates tend to earn higher wages after their higher education. For example, the private internal rate of return on higher education in Japan is around 10% for men and 3% for women.5 Thus, private funds such as tuition fees from students and their families also play an essential role in supporting higher education. There are also other types of private funds such as gifts, grants, and contracts from private entities such as business corporations, philanthropists, and non-profit organizations. Although donating to higher education has generally not been widespread in Japan, increasing donations revenue has become a policy issue. The ratios of public to private funding are diverse, even among the OECD countries, and Japan can be classified as a country whose public expenditure on higher education is less than private expenditure. Table 8.1 shows the fundamental indicators related to public and private funding for higher education, comparing Japan with the OECD averages. Table 8.1 Public funds and private funds for supporting higher education in Japan Adapted from OECD (2018) OECD average

Japan

US$15,656

US$19,289

Total spending on tertiary education, % of GDP

1.52%

1.39%

Public spending on tertiary education, % of GDP

0.99%

0.45%

Private spending on tertiary education, % of GDP

0.47%

0.94%

Share of public sources

66%

32%

Share of private sources

31%

68%

Share of household expenditure

22%

52%

Share of expenditure by other private entities

9%

16%

Total expenditure on tertiary education per full-time equivalent student

In 2015, Japan’s total expenditure on higher education per full-time equivalent student was US$19,289, which ranked 7th among the OECD countries, but government expenditure on higher education as a percentage of GDP was only 0.45%, ranking at the bottom of the OECD countries. On the other hand, private expenditure on higher education as a percentage of GDP was 0.94%, against the OECD average of 0.46%. When looking at the relative proportions of disaggregated public and private (households, other private entities) expenditure, public expenditure accounts for 32% and private expenditure for 68% (households’ expenditure 52% and other private entities 16%). These statistics show that one of the characteristics of the Japanese financing of higher education is the large share of private expenditure, relying mainly on students and their families. Kobayashi suggested that one of the reasons for the high private expenditure on higher education is that Japanese people tend to regard higher education as a private matter and culturally have assumed that the cost of higher education should be paid by parents.6 Another reason for the high private expenditure on higher education is that the Japanese

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higher education system is characterized by a large number of private universities. In 2018, there were 86 national universities, 93 prefectural and municipal universities, and 603 private universities, which means private universities account for 77% of all universities in Japan. Moreover, 2.1 million students enrolled in private universities in 2018, comprising 74% of the total number of students.7 As discussed below, the composition of revenues differs hugely between public and private universities, and Japanese private universities strongly rely on private expenditure.

Revenues of public and private universities Tables 8.2 and 8.3 show the average revenue composition of national, prefectural and municipal public, and private universities in Japan. In the case of national universities, government operational grants account for 54% total revenue in general. Another substantial source of revenue is tuition fees, which represent 18%; private donations account for only 4% of the revenue. With regard to prefectural and municipal public universities, the share of government operational grants is 60%, tuition fees amount to 28%, and private donations cover no more than 2% of total revenue on average. In contrast, private universities’ operations rely most heavily on tuition fees. On average, 75% of total revenue is tuition fees, and government operational grants account for only 12%. Additionally, unlike American private universities, the share of private donations is low, representing only 1% of the revenue. Thus, Japanese higher education has mainly relied on government subsidies and tuition fees. However, Japanese society is now faced with low economic growth, a low birth rate with an aging society, and a huge government budget deficit. Due to these recent economic, social, and political trends in Japan, the financing of higher education in Japan has arrived at a historic crossroads. In the next three sections, I will focus on three main policy issues relating to the financing of higher education in Japan: • the size of higher education in Japan in an era of population decline; how much public money should government invest in higher education? • the allocation system of public funding for higher education; how can government allocate public money efficiently and effectively to higher education? • access to higher education in an era of low economic growth; how should society support lowincome students in an era of low economic growth? Table 8.2 Revenues of Japanese public universities in FY 2017 (hundred million yen)8 Government operational grants and subsidies

Tuition fees

Private donations

Grants and contracts

Other

Total

National universities

10,449 54%

3,487 18%

723 4%

2,917 15%

1.762 9%

30,391 100%

Prefectural & municipal universities

1,976 60%

922 28%

75 2%

150 5%

167 5%

3,290 100%

Revenue of university hospitals and Grants-in-Aid for Scientific Research are excluded. Table 8.3 Revenues of Japanese private universities in FY 2017 (hundred million yen)9

Prefectural & municipal universities

Government operational grants

Tuition fees

Private donations

Other

Total

4,344 12%

27,689 75%

512 1%

4,242 12%

36,787 100%

Private universities with medical schools or dental schools are excluded. Grants-in-Aid for Scientific Research are excluded.

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The size of higher education in an era of low birth rates Historical trends in the size of HE The size of higher education has become an important policy issue regarding its financing. Due to the massification of higher education and government budget constraints, the stability of the financing of higher education has become a common policy issue in OECD countries. In Japan, the ratio of school leavers going on to receive higher education was 10% in 1960. It rapidly increased in the 1960s, growing to about 30% in the mid-1970s. Although the trend was stagnant from the late 1970s to the 1980s, the university entrance rate has been growing again since the 1990s and reached 57.9% in 2018.10 From a supply side perspective, private universities have played an important role in this expanding trend of higher education in Japan. Figure 8.1 shows the number of public and private universities from 1960 to 2018. As can be seen, the number of private universities expanded rapidly from 1960 to the early 1970s. In this era, the generation of the first postwar baby boom of 1947–49 reached university age, and there was a high demand for technical workers from the industrial sector.11 To deal with these issues, the Japanese government approved the establishment of many private universities in the 1960s. However, after the 1970s, the quality of private universities was taken up as a political issue and resulted in the government restricting the chartering of new universities. Instead, to provide a stable higher education system, the Japanese government started to allocate operational grants to private universities in 1970. These subsidies for private institutions were legislated in 1975 when the government enacted the Act of Subsidies for Private Schools, and it remains in force to this day. Because of the policy of restricting the establishment of new universities, the growth of private universities slowed until the mid-1980s. By then, the government realized that the second baby boom generation born 1971–74 would reach 18 years of age around 1990 and that the government would need to provide higher education for them. However, at that time national universities could not offer sufficient capacity, and as a consequence, private universities were permitted to increase their enrollment. Additionally, as the UK and US began introducing a new form of liberalization of economies, the Japanese government also liberalized higher education markets, aiming to create a diverse higher education system. As a result, the number of private universities increased at a faster pace from the 1990s. This liberalization policy was accelerated in the early 2000s, but the size of higher education is now at a historical turning point because of demographic changes in Japanese society. Figure 8.1 Number of universities by type from 1951 to 201812 700

Prefectural & Municipal

National

Private

600

500

400

300

200 4-year

2-year

4-year

4-year

2-year

2-year

100

112

2011

2001

1981

1991

1971

1961

1951

2011

2001

1991

1981

1971

1961

1951

2011

2001

1991

1981

1971

1961

1951

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Demographic change and reconsidering the size of higher education Because the government has limited resources to spend on higher education, the massification of higher education raises the question of how much government-supported higher education (including public and private universities) is needed. In particular, Japan has been faced with a low birth rate and a decreasing size of the 18-year-old cohort since the early 1990s. MEXT estimated that the number of students peaked in 2017 and would then gradually decrease. In fact, in 2018, 36% of private universities had fewer freshmen than the university admission quota for that year.13 In this situation, there is an argument that the size of higher education should be reconsidered based on the expected 18-year-old population, and that the Japanese government should encourage the reorganization and mergers of national universities and reduce subsidies to private universities that cannot attract students. However, it must also be pointed out that there is a regional disparity in the provision of higher education in Japan. For example, university enrollment capacities in each prefecture (the ratio of the universities’ enrollment quota in the prefecture to the students living in the prefecture and going to university) clearly suggest that higher education provision is overconcentrated in Tokyo, where the enrollment capacity is more than 200%. The decentralization of power of Tokyo and regional revitalization was one of the key policy issues from 2014 in the Abe Administration. To control this regional disparity, the Japanese government introduced a new plan that restricts increasing the enrollment limit of universities located in Tokyo from 2018. When considering the size of higher education, not only 18-year-old populations should be taken into account, but also the number of non-traditional students, such as adult or mature students. According to Cabinet Office reports, about 50% of people in their 30s and 40s are interested in taking recurrent education at universities.14 However, Japanese higher education has been characterized by a very low share of adult students. In fact, on average, the proportion of college entrants over 25 years old is about 20% in OECD countries, while the share of Japanese adult students is only 1.9%, which is the lowest among the OECD countries.15 It has been estimated that if Japanese universities play a central role in one-year re-education or vocational training programs for adult students, it will be possible to maintain a management environment with levels of enrollment similar to the current level.16

Government funding of public and private universities Trends in government operational funding Due to huge government budget deficits and the massification of higher education, the government aims to create more efficient and effective systems for allocating public funding to higher education. Public universities particularly rely on government subsidies for at least more than half of their operational revenues. If universities were to lose these ample resources, they would not be able to attract talented faculty or invest in infrastructure. Thus, financial stability is essential for providing high quality higher education. This section firstly describes the trends of revenue and expenditure in Japanese national universities and private universities and then describes recent government funding reforms for higher education institutions. Table 8.4 summarizes the change in revenues and expenditures of Japanese private and national universities from 2007 to 2017. In the case of private universities, the median of government operational grants has decreased from ¥648 million to ¥609 million, and revenue from tuition fees has decreased from ¥2,790 million to ¥2,613 million. Because of the decreasing size of 18-year-old cohorts, the higher education market has become more competitive, resulting in a polarization in attracting students. In fact, the trends of tuition fees differ among private universities; 43% of universities increased their tuition fees and 57% lowered them. As a result, the quantile range has become larger in these ten years.

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Table 8.4 Revenues and expenditures of universities 2007 and 201717 2007 Median: million yen

2017 Median: million yen

9

16

Change of median 2007 to 2017: million yen

2007 Quantile range: million yen

2017 Quantile range: million yen

32

42

% of increased universities

% of decreased universities

Private universities* Grants-in-Aid for Scientific Research*

7

75%

25%

Tuition fees

2,790

2,613

–177

4,353

4,480

43%

57%

Expenditures on salaries

2,211

2,086

–125

3,317

3,165

46%

54%

Government operational grants

9,432

8,662

–770

10,716

8,159

5%

95%

Grants and contracts**

1,177

1,752

575

2,219

2,877

77%

23%

Tuition fees

3,715

3,355

–360

4,044

3,817

16%

84%

399

469

70

711

878

66%

34%

7,452

7,569

117

7,765

8,117

43%

57%

National universities*

Private donations Expenditure on faculty salaries

* Estimated using data from 602 private universities for 2007, 654 private universities for 2017, and 82 national universities. Grants-in-Aid for Scientific Research were estimated using data from 462 private universities for 2007, 414 private universities for 2017, and 82 national universities whose data were available. ** Revenue of Grants-in-Aid for Scientific Research is included.

Moreover, the Finance Ministry is applying pressure to optimize government subsidies to higher education and tries to make efficient use of government institutional funding for private universities that cannot attract students. This is based on an idea that government subsidies should be used for supporting universities which actively enact educational reform to improve the quality of education and attract students. When looking at the recent criteria for calculating government subsidies for private universities, the ratio of enrollment to intake quota has become a more important indicator for calculating the subsidy amount. If the enrollment is less than 90% (or more than 107%) of the intake quota, they will receive lower subsidies from the government, and the discount rate of subsidies increases when universities cannot attract students. Thus, government operational grants will correlate with tuition fees in the case of private universities. As these two main sources of revenue have decreased for some universities, the median of expenditure on salaries also decreased from ¥2,211 million to ¥2,086 million. Because higher education is a labor-intensive industry, the expenditure on salaries will affect future education quality. With regard to national universities, the median of government operational grants has decreased in these ten years. Since Japanese national universities were incorporated and became independent organizations from the government in 2004, government operational grants decreased by 1% per year. Although this 1% reduction policy was abolished in 2010, the basic principle of government subsidies to national universities continues to be shifting from operational grants to competitive grants. The government operational grants to 95% of national universities decreased from 2007 to 2017, with the median changing from ¥9,432 million to ¥8,662 million. On the other hand, 77% of national universities increased their competitive grants and contracts from government and private entities, and the median rose from ¥1,177 million to ¥1,752 million. However, there is a big variation in these increased rates at national universities, so that the quantile range of competitive grants and contracts becomes more significant, changing from ¥2,219 million to ¥2,877 million. It means the disparity in competitive

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grants among national universities has increased during these ten years. With regard to tuition fees, because most of the national universities’ tuition fees were stable during these ten years, the median decreased from ¥3,715 million to ¥3,355 million after controlling for inflation. As a result, the median expenditure on faculty salaries has increased from ¥7,452 million to ¥7,569 million. It is clear that this increased expenditure on faculty salaries is mostly derived from increased trends in competitive grants and contracts. It must be pointed out that the competitive funds are apt to be more restricted by external entities than operational grants. Additionally, competitive grants tend to subsidize short term projects. Thus, the increasing trend of restricted funding makes it difficult for national universities to employ faculty with tenure. According to Morozumi, 59% of national universities decreased their number of full-time faculty members from 2004 to 2014.18

Funding based on “the progress of university management reform” While the government operational grants have decreased both for public and private universities, the allocation system of government operational funding has also been reformed, encouraging university management reform with a view to improving their activities. In the case of private universities, there have been two types of government operational funds. The first one is called general subsidies, which support the salaries of faculty and staff, as well as the operational costs of education and research. The second is called special subsidies, which are allocated to specific activities selected by the government. The general subsidies account for 90% of government operational grants to private universities and have been calculated by a funding formula using input-related criteria such as the number of faculty, staff, and students. However, in 2019 MEXT introduced new criteria called “objective educational quality indicators” to be included in the formula for calculating the general subsidies. Table 8.5 summarizes the new indicators. They are classified into three categories: a university-wide check system, a curriculum management system, and a system for assuring student learning. Table 8.5 “Objective educational quality indicators” affecting general subsidies for private universities in 201919 Items

Examples

I University-wide check system

(a) whether a self-evaluation system based on their diploma, curriculum and admission policies has been established (b) whether a university-wide academic management system consisting of the president, vice presidents, deans, and specialized support staff has been established to verify the appropriateness of the curriculum using institutional research (IR) information (c) whether an office of IR has been established and information is shared with stakeholders (d) whether a faculty education evaluation system has been established.

II Curriculum management system

(a) whether course diagrams are created to ensure the systematic linkage of all course subjects (b) whether assessment policies are established (c) whether a Grade Point Average (GPA) system is implemented (d) whether the maximum number of credits are set (e) whether the syllabus includes information about the required time for preparing class work (f ) whether the syllabus is checked by other faculty.

III System for assuring student learning

(a) whether a student engagement survey is conducted (b) whether student learning outcomes are captured (c) whether the results of class evaluations are used for faculty development.

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The criteria mainly focus on the university’s educational administration system (such as items I(a) to I(d) in Table 8.5), rather than on student outcomes. Universities are scored by these assessment criteria, and the total score affects the overall general subsidy that is allocated. Based on this score, the general subsidy will increase (or decrease) by 2%. The allocation system for government operational grants to national universities has also been reformed since 2004. After Japanese national universities’ status changed from governmental organizations to incorporated administrative agencies in 2004, the government operational grants have been allocated as block grants to universities by using a historically determined allocation method that uses the previous year’s subsidy amount. Additionally, to encourage efficient university management, a 1% annual reduction policy was applied. The 1% reduction policy was abolished in 2010; however, the government withdrew 1% of base funds from universities and re-allocated them to universities that did organizational restructuring. From 2016, to strengthen each national university’s function in society, the government started a new scheme of weighted allocation funding. In this scheme, the government withdrew 1% of base funds from national universities, and re-allocated it based on university evaluation. The evaluation system works as follows: The government set up three categories where they would provide special assistance: (1) promoting human resource development and research to meet regional needs; (2) promoting excellent education and research bases and networks in specialized fields; and (3) promoting world-class education and research. Each national university selects one category and sets its own strategic plan and key performance indicators (KPIs). Based on those indicators, MEXT’s evaluation committee evaluates each university’s progress every year, and the evaluation results affect part of the government operational grants. In 2016, the funding based on this evaluation started with ¥10 billion, but it grew to ¥20 billion in 2017, and ¥30 billion in 2018. Because universities set their own key performance indicators and there were no common indicators for comparing universities, the type of indicators became larger and more complex and the validity of evaluation has become an issue. Therefore, the government added new allocation systems that use common evaluation indicators for allocating part of the base funds from 2019. The amount of the funds allocated by these “common indicators” is ¥70 billion. Added to the ¥30 billion allocated according to universities’ self-set KPIs, the government operation funds based on university evaluation increased to ¥100 billion, accounting for 10% of government operational grants to national universities. The new common indicators are classified according to five items: (1) the implementation status of university management reform of their accounting system; (2) the amount of acquired external funds per faculty; (3) the percentage of young full-time faculty; (4) the number of articles published in the top 10 percent of the most-cited journals per government operational fund; and, (5) the implementation status of management reform of personnel, salaries, and facilities. The characteristics of the new common indicators are that the government evaluates the implementation status of each aspect of university management reform, which are represented in items (1) and (5). For example, detailed indicators related to the first item are: (a) whether the information on departmental budgets and settlements accounts is administered, shared within the campus, and used for budget allocation; (b) whether the information on departmental budgets and settlements accounts is open to the public with an explanatory booklet, or an explanatory meeting with stakeholders is held; and, (c) whether the indirect cost of collaborative research is calculated, and whether the indirect cost was set by each collaborative research study. Additionally, detailed indicators related to the fifth item include: (a) whether performance evaluations are reflected in salaries, bonuses, employment, and internal research grants, and fed back to faculty and staff; (b) whether there are policies to increase the number of young faculty, the percentage of foreign faculty, female faculty, faculty employed on an annual salary system, and faculty employed on a cross-appointment system, and whether a personnel plan to optimize age structure is implemented; and, (c) whether systems to promote university-wide

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facility management, efficient use of facilities, appropriate maintenance, and a sustainable campus are established. Although the Japanese government implemented the new funding allocation system based on university evaluation, the criteria introduced in the new scheme are mainly focusing on “the progress of university management” rather than the outcome of education and research activities indicators such as attainment of degrees and student retentions used in performance-based funding in the US and European countries. The Japan Association of National Universities issued a statement to oppose this reform: “Unstable funding based on short-term evaluations makes it difficult for autonomous and strategic management, the original purpose of incorporation of national universities, and prevents steady reform from a medium and long-term perspective. In addition, it is causing inefficiencies due to plan changes during various projects.”20

Loans, scholarship policies and tax policies supporting private funding Low economic growth, student loans, scholarship policies With regard to private funds in the financing of higher education, access to finance and equity is a key policy issue. Since the 1990s, Japanese society has been faced with a low economic growth rate and this macro-economic situation makes it more difficult for households to pay for higher education. The Japanese economic growth rate was around 9% in the 1960s, and it remained around 4% even until the 1980s, but this situation has changed since the 1990s. Since then, the economic growth rate has been around 1% as Japan’s economy has matured. Household income had risen until the 1990s but has declined since the 2000s. Although Japanese higher education was historically supported by private funding under a strong economy, the situation has changed. Nevertheless, tuition fees in private and national universities have risen since the 1980s. Table 8.6 shows the historical trends of the ratio of tuition fees in national universities and private universities to the average disposable income. In 1985, the ratio of tuition fees to disposable income was 6.7% for national universities and 12.7% for private universities, but by 2015 it had risen to 12.5% and 20.3% respectively. This shows that the cost of higher education has become a heavy financial burden for households. Table 8.6 Disposable income and tuition fees21 Year 1985

Disposable income (million yen) 3.74

Tuition (yen) National Private universities universities 252,000

475,325

Tuition / Disposable income National Private universities universities 6.7%

12.7%

1990

4.41

339,600

615,486

7.7%

14.0%

1995

4.82

447,600

728,365

9.3%

15.1%

2000

4.74

478,800

789,659

10.1%

16.6%

2005

4.41

535,800

830,583

12.1%

18.8%

2010

4.30

535,800

858,265

12.5%

20.0%

2015

4.27

535,800

868,447

12.5%

20.3%

Instead, student loans took on a vital role in supporting the cost of higher education.22 JASSO has provided a large proportion of the student loans in Japan, offering two types of student loan: Type 1 (interest-free) and Type 2 (low-interest) loans. According to JASSO, 37.2% of students used their

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student loans in 2017, which is 1.3 times as many as 10 years ago.23 Notably, the number of students who used Type 2 (low-interest) loans rapidly expanded from the end of the 1990s to the mid-2000s. One reason for this growth in student loans is a decline in interest rates, Kaneko says. Japan’s monetary policy has shifted to low interest rates to stimulate the economy, and the interest rate for student loans dropped below 2% in the 2000s. On the other hand, the economic returns of higher education measured by the internal rate of return have remained around 7% since the 1980s, which is much higher than the interest rate. In this way, students could get student loans with a lower interest rate than the expected internal rate of return from higher education. As a result, the number of students who use student loans has dramatically increased since the 2000s. However, it has also given rise to student loan debt issues. Because JASSO’s support menu only offers student loan programs (and no scholarships), it is difficult for low-income families to use the loans. It has been pointed out that there is a still a correlation between household income and the entrance rate to higher education in Japan. In 2007, 62.4 % of students from households with an income of over ¥10 million attended 4-year colleges after graduating from high school, as opposed to only 31.4% of students from households with an income of less than ¥4 million.24 Additionally, from a political context, the high cost of education is regarded as an obstacle to having babies and a factor in the low birth rate in Japan. The estimated cost of raising one child, including providing private higher education, is around ¥23 million,25 and the first reason why Japanese people cannot have their ideal number of children is high educational cost.26 In this context, access to and equity of higher education becomes a critical policy issue, and new student loan schemes and new scholarship policies were introduced in the late 2010s. Firstly, the government encouraged an increase in Type 1 (interest-free) student loans and a decrease in Type 2 (lowinterest). Secondly, in 2017, JASSO introduced an income-contingent loan (ICL) scheme for Type 1 student loans. The characteristic of this scheme is that graduates repay student loan debt based on their annual taxable income after graduation. With ICL, the borrowers should repay at a rate of 9% of their taxable income per year, but if the borrower’s taxable income is less than ¥1.44 million per year, they only need to make a minimum repayment of ¥2,000 per month. Secondly, in 2019 the government passed a bill that implements new scholarships for low-income students. The bill expands subsidies to universities to compensate for tuition fee reductions or exemptions for low-income students and also establishes new need-based scholarships for supporting their living expenses. To secure the money for these policies, the government raised the consumption tax rate from 8% to 10% and uses part of the increased tax revenue. On the other hand, the government ruled that this scholarship can only apply to universities fulfilling the following criteria: (1) more than 10% of lectures are by faculty with practical experience; (2) multiple persons from external industry are appointed as trustees; (3) strict and appropriate graduate administration by using objective indicators such as GPA is conducted; and, (4) information related to financial stability and educational activities is disclosed. Besides, the government excluded universities with poor financial stability and enrollment less than 80% of their quota.

Philanthropy and higher education In addition to supporting students and families through government subsidies, the Japanese government encourages donations to higher education. As is shown in Table 8.4, donation revenue as a percentage of overall higher education revenue is tiny in Japan. In particular, national universities were governmental organizations before 2004, and they rarely engaged in fundraising activities. However, since around the mid-2000s, national universities have set up endowments and have been trying to increase donations. The government also supports this movement with tax policies. In 2011, the government allowed people who donate to private universities to declare their donations for tax credit

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deductions. Moreover, in the tax reforms of 2016, the tax credits were also applied to donors who give to national universities to support scholarships. While tax benefits for donors are expanding in Japan, the carryover deductions system for donations permitted in the US is not permitted in Japan, and the tax benefits for appreciated property gifts are still smaller than in the US system.27

Conclusion The financing of higher education includes complex topics, but a major item in Japan is that public funds going to universities and scholarships need more accountability as government sets detailed criteria for allocating the money. Performance-funding schemes have become common in the US and in European countries, and the allocation system in Japan is also shifting from formula funding or historically determined funding to funding using indicators. However, the characteristics of the criteria introduced by the Japanese government are mainly focused on the “progress of university management reform” rather than on educational or research outcomes. In addition, to implement the new scholarship policies that constituted a drastic change of Japanese scholarship policy, the government decided to set the requirement for universities related to governance and faculty background. Those reforms may accelerate the reform of university management but, as the Japan Association of National Universities and the private universities association voiced their concerns, there is a potential to standardize the higher education management style and system. While it is too early to evaluate the result of these reforms, it is clear that financing of higher education in Japan is at a historical crossroads and we have to look for the intended and also the unintended effects of the new funding scheme of national and private universities in Japan.

Notes 1

M. Lovenheim and S.E. Turner, Economics of Education (Duffield, UK: Worth Publishers, 2017). E.A. Hanushek, “Will More Higher Education Improve Economic Growth?” Oxford Review of Economic Policy 32, no. 4, (2016): 538–552. 3 S. Winter and A. Pfitzner, Externalities and Optimal Subsidization of Higher Education, (2013), http://dx.doi. org/10.2139/ssrn.2281207. 4 (i) Ministry of Finance, Heisei 31 nendo bunkyō, kagakugijutsu yosan no pointo [Key points for 2019 education and science and technology budget], (2018) accessed November 26, 2019, https://www.mof.go.jp/budget/budger_workflow/budget/fy2019/seifuan31/11.pdf; (ii) Promotion and Mutual Aid Corporation for Private Schools of Japan, Heisei 30 nendo shrtitsu daigaku tō keijōhi hojokin kōfu jōkyō no gaiyō [FY2018 overview of subsidies for private universities], (2018), accessed November 26, 2019, https://www.shigaku.go.jp/files/s_hojo_h30.pdf. 5 Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), Education at a Glance 2018: OECD Indicators (Paris: OECD, 2018). 6 Masayuki Kobayashi, “International Comparison of Higher Education Cost Sharing and Japanese Challenges,” The Japanese Journal of Labour Studies, 694, (2018): 4–15. 7 MEXT, FY2018 School Basic Survey, accessed November 26, 2019, http://www.mext.go.jp/b_menu/toukei/chousa01/kihon/kekka/k_detail/1407849.htm. 8 MEXT, Heisei 31 nenban shogaikoku no kyōiku tōkei [International education statistics for FY 2019], http://www. mext.go.jp/b_menu/toukei/data/syogaikoku/1415074.htm. 9 Promotion and Mutual Aid Corporation for Private Schools of Japan. 10 MEXT, FY2018 School Basic Survey, accessed November 26, 2019, http://www.mext.go.jp/component/b_menu /other/__icsFiles/afieldfile/2018/12/25/1407449_1.pdf. 11 T.J. Pempel, Patterns of Japanese Policymaking: Experiences from Higher Education (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1978). 12 MEXT, FY2018 School Basic Survey. 13 Promotion and Mutual Aid Corporation for Private Schools of Japan, Heisei 30 nendo shiritsu daigaku, tankidaigaku nyūgakushigan dōkō [Trends in application to private universities and junior colleges], (2018), https://www .shigaku.go.jp/files/shigandoukouH30.pdf. 2

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14

Cabinet Office, Public Opinion Survey on Lifelong Learning, accessed November 26, 2019, https://survey.gov -online.go.jp/h30/h30-gakushu/index.html. 15 MEXT Shakaijin no manabinaoshi ni kan suru genjō tō [The present conditions of adults returning to learning], (2015), accessed November 26, 2019, http://www.mext.go.jp/b_menu/shingi/chousa/koutou/065/gijiroku/_ _icsFiles/afieldfile/2015/04/13/1356047_3_2.pdf. 16 Kiyoshi Yamamoto, “Dispensing With Fees for Higher Education and the Possibility of the Sector’s Reorganization,” The Japanese Journal of Labour Studies 694 (2018): 39–47. 17 Author’s estimates from Toyokeizai University Financial Data and Kakenhi-Database. Toyokeizai University Financial Data was provided by Morozumi Akiko (The University of Tokyo). 18 Morozumi Akiko (2017). “Kokuritsu daigaku keiei to kyōin jinkenhi” [National university management and labor cost]. IDE (2017): 20–25. 19 Promotion and Mutual Aid Corporation for Private Schools of Japan. 20 The Japan Association of National Universities (2018), accessed November 26, 2019, https://www.janu.jp/news /files/20181102-wnew-seimei.pdf. 21 Disposable income is adapted from Statistics Bureau of Japan (Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications) Annual report on the family income and expenditure survey, 2019, http://www.stat.go.jp/data/zenkokukakei/2019 /index.html; Tuition is adapted from MEXT (2017) Trends of tuition fees at national, public and private universities, http://www.mext.go.jp/a_menu/koutou/shinkou/07021403/__icsFiles/afieldfile/2017/09/26/1396452_03.pdf. 22 Motohisa Kaneko, “Higher Education in a Context of Slower Growth,” Japanese Journal of Higher Education Research, 22 (2019): 9–27. 23 JASSO, Nippon gakusei shien ni tsuite [About support for Japanese students], 2019, accessed January 19, 2020, https://www.jasso.go.jp/about/organization/index/html. 24 Center for Research on University Management and Policy Kōkōsei no shinro tsuiseki chōsa [High school students career path survey], Graduate School of Education, The University of Tokyo, (2007), accessed November 25, 2019, http://ump.p.u-tokyo.ac.jp/crump/resource/crumphsts.pdf. 25 MEXT, Kyōikuhi futan [Educational investment reference materials], (2012), accessed November 26, 2019, https:// www.mext.go.jp/b_menu/shingi/chukyo/chukyo2/siryou/__icsFiles/afieldfile/2013/01/30/1330218_11.pdf. 26 National Institute of Population and Social Security Research, Shussei dōkō kihon chōsa [Basic survey of fertility], (2015), accessed November 26, 2019, http://www.ipss.go.jp/ps-doukou/j/doukou15/NFS15_gaiyou.pdf. 27 Fumitake Fukui, “Do Government Appropriations and Tax Policies Impact Donations to Public Research Universities in Japan and the USA?” Higher Education (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-020-00543-0.

Bibliography Cabinet Office. Public Opinion Survey on Lifelong Learning. Accessed November 26, 2019. https://survey.gov-online .go.jp/h30/h30-gakushu/index.html. Center for Research on University Management and Policy. Kōkōsei no shinro tsuiseki chōsa [High school students career path survey]. Graduate School of Education, The University of Tokyo. 2007. Accessed November 25, 2019. http://ump.p.u-tokyo.ac.jp/crump/resource/crumphsts.pdf. Fukui, Fumitake “Do Government Appropriations and Tax Policies Impact Donations to Public Research Universities in Japan and the USA?” Higher Education. 2020. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-020-00543-0. Hanushek, E.A.“Will More Higher Education Improve Economic Growth?” Oxford Review of Economic Policy 32, no. 4 (2016): 538–552. The Japan Association of National Universities. 2018. Accessed November 26, 2019. https://www.janu.jp/news /files/20181102-wnew-seimei.pdf. JASSO. Nippon gakusei shien ni tsuite [About support for Japanese students]. 2019. Accessed January 19, 2020, https://www.jasso.go.jp/about/organization/index/html. Kaneko, Motohisa “Higher Education in a Context of Slower Growth.” Japanese Journal of Higher Education Research, 22, (2019), 9–27. Kobayashi, Masayuki “International Comparison of Higher Education Cost Sharing and Japanese Challenges.” The Japanese Journal of Labour Studies, 694, (2018), 4–15. Lovenheim, M. and S.E. Turner. Economics of Education. Duffield, UK: Worth Publishers, 2017. MEXT. FY2018 School Basic Survey. Accessed November 26, 2019. http://www.mext.go.jp/b_menu/toukei /chousa01/kihon/kekka/k_detail/1407849.htm. ———. FY2018 School Basic Survey. Accessed November 26, 2019. http://www.mext.go.jp/component/b_menu /other/__icsFiles/afieldfile/2018/12/25/1407449_1.pdf. ———. Kyōikuhi futan. [Educational investment reference materials]. 2012. Accessed November 26, 2019. https:// www.mext.go.jp/b_menu/shingi/chukyo/chukyo2/siryou/__icsFiles/afieldfile/2013/01/30/1330218_11.pdf .

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———. Shakaijin no manabinaoshi ni kan suru genjō tō [The present conditions of adults returning to learning]. 2015. Accessed November 26, 2019. http://www.mext.go.jp/b_menu/shingi/chousa/koutou/065/gijiroku/_ _icsFiles/ afieldfile/2015/04/13/1356047_3_2.pdf. Ministry of Finance. Heisei 31 nendo bunkyō kagakugijutsu yosan no pointo [Key points for 2019 education and science and technology budget]. 2018. Accessed November 26, 2019. https://www.mof.go.jp/budget/budger_workflow/budget/fy2019/seifuan31/11.pdf. Morozumi, Akiko. Kokuritsu daigaku keiei to kyōin jinkenhi [National university management and labor cost]. IDE 2017, 20–25. National Institute of Population and Social Security Research. Shussei dōkō kihon chōsa [Basic survey of fertility]. 2015. Accessed November 26, 2019, http://www.ipss.go.jp/ps-doukou/j/doukou15/NFS15_gaiyou.pdf. Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). Education at a Glance 2018: OECD Indicators. Paris: OECD, 2018. Pempel, T.J. Patterns of Japanese Policymaking: Experiences from Higher Education. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1978. Promotion and Mutual Aid Corporation for Private Schools of Japan. Heisei 30 nendo shrtitsu daigaku tō keijōhi hojokin kōfu jōkyō no gaiyō [FY2018 overview of subsidies for private universities]. 2018. Accessed November 26, 2019, https://www.shigaku.go.jp/files/s_hojo_h30.pdf. ———. Heisei 30 nendo shiritsu daigaku, tankidaigaku nyūgakushigan dōkō [Trends in application to private universities and junior colleges]. 2018. https://www.shigaku.go.jp/files/shigandoukouH30.pdf. Winter, S. and A. Pfitzner. Externalities and Optimal Subsidization of Higher Education (2013). http://dx.doi .org/10.2139/ssrn.2281207. Yamamoto, Kiyoshi. “Dispensing With Fees for Higher Education and the Possibility of the Sector’s Reorganization.” The Japanese Journal of Labour Studies 694, (2018): 39–47.

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Chapter 9 Undergraduate Admissions: Shifting Trends Ishikura Yukiko This chapter sheds light on the shifts in university admissions policies and practices that have taken place in Japan. It enables readers to understand how university admissions take place, what reforms are being implemented, the challenges they are meant to address, and the rationales behind these reforms. In Japan, admissions processes have long played a significant role in bridging high school and higher education. The common practice, often described colloquially as “examination hell,” relies heavily on standardized testing and requires students to earn high scores on written examinations to win entrance to top-tier institutions. However, admissions practices are currently undergoing significant reforms, coinciding with other reforms to high school and college learning. These reforms have redefined the concept of learning itself, as well as what to assess in the applicant selection process and how to do so. Thus, in recent times, the process of learning has gained more attention; today, it is not merely the possession of knowledge that is valued, but the ability to apply that knowledge and to learn more effectively.

The college admissions system in Japan In Japan, college admission processes play a significant role in bridging high school and college education. Early specialization and a devolved selection process are two of the unique characteristics which define Japanese college admissions practices. Early specialization sets a young applicant on his or her educational track while still in the application process. Applicants are required to determine what they would like to study before entering a college. When applying, they must apply to their chosen faculty or department, not to a centralized institutional admissions office. This devolved selection process means that each department has its own admissions criteria and requirements. While central admissions offices do exist within Japanese universities, their functions differ from those of their overseas counterparts. Unlike admissions offices in other countries, they do not visit high schools, recruit students, manage applications to the university as a whole, or select students. Instead, they primarily deal with administrative and managerial tasks. Faculty members within each department set admissions policies and practices, review documents, select students, and make final decisions on acceptance. Japanese universities in general offer three different pathways to college: regular, Admissions Office (hereafter, AO), and recommendation-based admission.

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Regular admission Regular admission is based on a student’s test scores on two kinds of written examinations measuring scholastic ability, called “gakuryoku” in Japanese. This pathway is often part of a two-day national examination administered by the National Center for University Entrance Examinations (hereafter, NCUEE) in early January each year. Commonly known simply as the Center Test it is often used in combination with second-stage examinations held by individual universities. National and public universities are the most likely to use the Center Test as part of the regular admission pathway. Renamed the Common Test in 2021, it is undergoing reforms to its aims and contents. Private universities offer applicants their own written examinations measuring gakuryoku. Some use the Center Test solely for the admissions process.

AO admission In the AO admission pathway, applicants are reviewed holistically, using multiple documents, assessments, and methods. Keio University, one of the country’s top private universities, was the first to introduce holistic admissions in Japan. It first implemented AO admissions in 1990, modeling its procedure after the US higher education model. Subsequently, other major private universities have followed suit. AO admissions do not rely on gakuryoku as strongly as the regular admissions pathway, but make decisions holistically based on both academic and non-academic factors of applicants with document screening and interviews as well as written tests in some cases. The issue for this admission pathway would be that some universities do not measure applicants’ academic factors at all. Consequently, some students admitted through AO admissions do not have academic readiness for college. AO admissions have often been considered an “easy” pathway and described colloquially as “All OK” admissions.

Recommendation-based admission Recommendation-based admission requires a recommendation from a student’s high school principal. Decisions employing this pathway are often made based on screening of documents such as highschool transcripts, interviews, and one or more essays. According to MEXT,1 84.0% of students enter national and 72.6% of students enter public universities through regular admissions. The percentage for recommendation-based admission is 12.2% for national and 24.4% for public universities; AO admission was just 3.3% for national and 2.4% for public universities as of 2017. On the other hand, 48.5% of students who enter private universities do so through regular admissions; 40.5% choose recommendation-based admission and 10.7% use AO admission. Clearly, regular admission still predominates among national and public universities, while approximately half of students admitted to private universities choose an alternative pathway. These institutions have persisted in pursuing traditional admissions practices because gakuryoku has long been considered an important indicator not only of students’ knowledge and skills but also of their motivations and character.2 Written examinations are considered key to assessing a student’s level of gakuryoku and identifying “high-quality” students. The national university entrance examinations use this measure most extensively. Obtaining a high score on these kinds of multiple-choice examinations requires memorization and quick recognition of concepts learned in high school rather than displaying adaptability or the ability to apply concepts in practice. To better equip students for real-world success and to address changes in society, MEXT is striving to encourage the implementation of alternative assessments. Thus, MEXT has begun to recommend the use of the AO admissions and recommendation-based admissions pathways, which overseas are often called holistic admissions or contextualized admissions.

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The relationship of “juku” to college admissions Juku or yobikō, which are privately run “cram schools,” provide Japanese students with supplementary education that takes place outside the school environment. They play an important role in preparing high school students for the traditional college admissions process. According to a 2019 MEXT survey,3 37.8% of students attending public high schools and 38.4% of students attending private high schools attend juku. In addition to providing extra education, drills, and learning practice, juku assist with the admissions process for students. Most juku collect a range of data on college admissions, from which schools can coach students on which departments and universities may be most appropriate or attainable for them. To best serve their clients, juku coordinate their services to match the requirements of various colleges. Thus, juku practices can be updated in response to college admissions reforms.

Current college admission reforms Significant reforms to the college admissions process in Japan are currently taking place under the auspices of various government initiatives. Several motivations underpin this reform movement: decline of the 18-year-old student population, changing diversity of students, and shifting definition of knowledge and fairness.

Drivers of reform Japan is currently experiencing an extended population decline. Specifically, the youth population, including those 18-year-old students potentially entering college, is decreasing dramatically. According to MEXT,4 there were approximately 1.2 million 18-year-old students in 2017; this is predicted to decline to just 800,000 in 2040. College enrollment may not suffer quite as dramatic a loss, as overall enrollment has increased with the number of non-traditional students entering higher education; MEXT estimates that the enrollment number of 630,000 in 2017 will decrease to 506,000 in 2040. However, the population decline will still inevitably affect higher education overall and small-scale private universities in particular. According to a survey conducted by the Promotion and Mutual Aid Corporation for Private Schools of Japan in 2019,5 33% of the private universities experienced difficulty in filling their student quota. This is expected to expand to large-scale private universities and even national and public universities eventually. Because of the decrease in the number of 18-year-old students, universities must strive to attract a more diverse student population that includes adult learners, disabled learners, repatriate students, international students, and students who have studied through alternative education systems. When welcoming a diverse student population, universities need to be aware of students’ varied learning backgrounds. Each student has unique knowledge and skills that can contribute to the university or classroom dynamic and universities need to evaluate these students differently during the admissions process. Notably, the definition of gakuryoku is shifting over time. It used to indicate knowledge and skills that require rote memorization and the recall of information. However, the implications of this term are changing. Today, it encompasses not only the knowledge and skills which students have gained but also what they are able to do by applying such knowledge and skills. MEXT is actively promoting this new interpretation of gakuryoku to better address the rapid pace of change globally; the next generation of Japanese citizens must have additional competences. According to MEXT, the new gakuryoku concept has three elements: 1) knowledge and skills; 2) critical thinking and the ability to make judgments and expressions based on one’s knowledge and skills; and 3) the ability and willingness to work collaboratively and learn with diverse people on one’s own initiative.6

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Even as the concept of gakuryoku shifts, the idea of fairness has also been changing within Japanese society. It has traditionally been considered fair to assess everyone using the same multiple-choice, pen-and-paper written examinations, which ask for a single right answer; these exams are applied regardless of a student’s background. However, each student has a different history and universities are tasked with developing each student’s potential to their maximum capacity. In this sense, there is a need to shift the idea of fairness from equality to equity, making sure that universities measure students’ skills, knowledge, and potential in a variety of ways to promote better access to college education. Holistic admissions that can assess students from multiple angles are one means to approaching this challenge. However, as mentioned earlier, some of the holistic admissions procedures in Japan do not measure applicants’ academic achievement from high school or may even comprise a simple way to fill a student quota.

The shape of admissions reform in Japan In order to develop the three elements of the updated gakuryoku concept among Japanese students, MEXT takes a long-term view of education. The elements should be inculcated in students throughout high school education, assessed during the college admissions process, and then further developed through college education. With this in mind, the reforms promulgated by MEXT apply not only to college admissions but also to teaching and learning in high schools and colleges. This multipronged effort aligns high school and college education with admissions in what is called sanmi ittai no kaikaku, the “trinity reform.” In 2013, the Education Rebuilding Implementation Council released a statement on the alignment of high school and college education, as well as the role of university admissions in bridging these areas.7 It specifically noted the need for universities to introduce multifaceted and comprehensive assessments of students’ knowledge, encouraging institutions to give consideration to the full spectrum of students’ academic and non-academic qualifications. It also emphasized the importance of reforming what and how students learn. Following this statement, in 2014, the Central Council for Education and the Japan Association of National Universities echoed the need to align university admissions with high school and college education, as well as the need to develop a new national university examination.8 The Japan Association of National Universities set a goal of raising the percentage of holistic admissions (including AO admissions, recommendation-based admissions, and admissions for International Baccalaureate [IB] students) to 30 percent by 2018.9 They also called for admissions screenings that would assess critical thinking, judgment, and expression in addition to straightforward knowledge and skills. To reflect this change in values, a revision of the Center Test was begun in 2021. Each admission pathway has some challenges. In particular, some universities do not measure the three elements of gakuryoku properly, most typically failing to account for students’ high school achievements. College admissions should measure what students have achieved already and how they can further develop through college education. In this sense, college admissions do not function well enough at present. In order to re-examine the role of college admissions and admission pathways, their names and practices have been revised. Regular admissions (ippan nyūshi) have been renamed “regular selection” (ippan senbatsu). In addition to the written examination, transcripts and certain documents that can demonstrate applicants’ learning achievements and outcomes will be used to assess the “ability to work collaboratively and learn with diverse people of their own initiative.” University-administered examinations should include some descriptive or open-ended questions to assess “critical thinking and the ability to make judgments and expressions based on one’s knowledge and skills.”

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AO admissions have been renamed “comprehensive selection” (sōgō senbatsu), and recommendation-based admissions have been renamed “school recommendation-based selection” (gakkō suisenkei senbatsu). There is currently an ongoing dispute over introducing holistic admissions. Some universities use AO admissions without measuring students’ academic achievements. As a result, there is a stereotype that students who are admitted through holistic admissions have not reached a sufficient academic level to enter college and are not able to perform well in higher education. In order to assess “knowledge, skills, critical thinking, judgment, and expression” properly, universities are required to use at least one of the following measures when making student selections: essay examination, presentation, oral examination, practical examination, or the result of the Common Test for University Admissions in addition to application documents such as transcripts. In the “comprehensive selection” pathway, universities are encouraged to ask applicants to submit their own portfolio records of their scholastic and other activities accomplished thus far, describing what made them apply to the university, and what and how they would like to learn and achieve through higher education. For the school-recommendation-based selection pathway, high schools are required to include their evaluations of applicants’ three elements of gakuryoku, encompassing both academic and personal achievements. Universities are also required to assess three elements of gakuryoku for college admissions.10

Introduction of the Common Test for University Admissions In the academic year of 2020 (admissions for 2021), the Center Test was replaced by a new exam called the Daigaku Nyūshi Kyōtsū Test, or Common Test for University Admissions. This examination would strive to measure students’ basic academic achievements gained in high school as well as their college readiness. It would cover Japanese, geography, history, civics, mathematics, science, and English. Whereas the Center Test consisted exclusively of multiple-choice questions, the new test would also include descriptive-answer questions in addition to the multiple-choice questions for mathematics and Japanese. The English section would assess students’ reading and listening skills with a weight of 50 percent for each, compared with 80 percent for reading and 20 percent for listening with the old test. Universities are also encouraged to measure students’ English skills using tests administered by private sector entities, though logistic problems prevented this from immediately becoming mandatory.

Measuring English skills using outsourced examinations In order to become global citizens, students must have the ability to communicate clearly in English. This involves developing capacity in four English language skills: listening, speaking, reading, and writing. The current education and college admissions systems tend to teach and measure just two of these skills, reading and listening, with a focus on English understanding, vocabulary, and grammar. To address this gap, MEXT is promoting the development of all four skills throughout students’ middle and high school education and will measure the acquired skills during college admissions. In addition, students will be encouraged to continue developing their skills through college education. To assess students’ skills, MEXT is encouraging the use of English tests developed and administered by the private sector. Approximately 500,000 students have been taking the Center Test each year. As the exam has been held over the course of just two days in January, it has been difficult to assess appropriately all four requisite English skills in this format. Thus, rather than rely on the Center Test or even the upcoming, expanded Common Test for University Admissions, it was felt necessary to use English tests offered by private sector entities.11 When choosing the companies and tests to be employed, MEXT wishes to ensure that students are offered proper and fair conditions in which to take the tests. Some of the test selection criteria include: inclusion of all four English skills; balance between skills; test aim; test level; environments, locations, and times for test administration; and cost. In 2018, the NCUEE approved the following English tests

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for use: Cambridge Exam Series, TOEFL, IELTS, TOEIC, GTEC, TEAP, TEAP CBT, and Eiken. Universities may choose which of these tests they use and how they use that test for student selection. The new testing process will not be implemented instantaneously; a transition phase is expected to span from 2020 to 2023, during which time universities will have the option of using either the new Common English Test, an English test administered by the private sector, or both. Beginning in 2024, private-sector English tests will be fully introduced. Students will be permitted to take the English tests a maximum of two times between April and December in the academic year during which they are applying to college. This limitation has been set in order to make the process fairer, as some students have limited access to testing due to financial restrictions or their location. Exam results will be sent to the NCUEE, which will collect, manage, and send the results to universities when requested. A system called the “University Admissions English Result Provider System” was planned for introduction in 2020 and to be used for the 2021 selection period. Each university may decide whether or not to use this system. According to a MEXT survey, 95.1% of national universities, 85.7% of public universities, and 65.1% of private universities planned to use the system.12

Admissions pathway for International Baccalaureate students The Japan Association of National Universities is actively encouraging universities to welcome diverse applicants such as International Baccalaureate (IB) students. Much attention has been paid to IB in recent times because Japan is currently introducing the “IB 200 Schools Project” aligned with the development of the Dual Language IB diploma program jointly initiated by MEXT and the IB organization. This initiative aimed to increase the number of IB schools in Japan to 200 by 2020, as well as to have the IB diploma recognized at more Japanese universities, thus offering IB students better access to local universities. The IB diploma has been recognized as a college qualification since 1979, yet it is still not embraced fully in Japan. Alongside their greater acceptance of AO and recommendation-based admissions pathways, private universities have a longer history of accepting and accommodating IB students compared with national or public universities. Only recently have national or public universities begun to offer IB students a special admissions track; previously, IB students had limited access to these institutions. They were able to apply only through the regular admissions pathway, which required them to take the national examination, or the returnee admission pathway, an infrequently used admissions option for applicants who have resided abroad for several years. Okayama University was the first national university to launch the IB admission pathway. It began to offer a special admission track for IB students within four departments in 2012, opening the track to all departments in 2015. Following the Okayama initiative, other universities began to introduce a special IB admissions pathway. An increasing number of national or public universities now offer the special IB admissions pathway as a response to the increasing number of IB schools and students in Japan.

Alignment of three policies: reforming teaching and learning In order to help applicants to understand each university’s educational vision and requirements, MEXT has begun asking universities to redefine their admissions policies to indicate what kinds of applicants they are seeking, what qualifications they prefer, and how they select applicants. Admissions policy is based on two other policies: the curriculum policy and the diploma policy. The curriculum policy outlines what is taught and how it is taught at the university. The diploma policy defines graduate attributes, or what kinds of learning outcomes students should achieve by the end of their time in higher

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education, with a consideration of the institution’s educational philosophy. All three policies should be consistently aligned. Most universities keep these policies vague. Despite the good intentions in the establishment of the three policies, applicants often cannot tell what kinds of students universities are seeking, nor can they assess whether students at that university are able to learn what they would like to or gain the skills needed to succeed in their future careers. Beyond reforming the ways in which colleges assess applicants to include the three elements of the new gakuryoku, it is clear that substantial additional changes to Japanese educational policy and technique are needed to better serve modern students. Aligning high school and college educational initiatives, implementing learner-centered methodologies and active learning, and coordinating university policies to better inform and serve students are all key elements to address as part of higher education reform in Japan.

College admissions reform challenges Aligning changes in admissions, teaching, and learning As new admission pathways attract and accommodate different student populations, teaching and learning should be aligned with the needs of these new students. However, while considerable effort has been put into reforming college admissions, little has been spent on updating teaching and learning practices. Many universities continue to provide students with the same teaching and learning experiences despite the varied backgrounds and learning needs of these new populations. Therefore, students are often not able to develop further and gain proficiency in the new gakuryoku. Reforms in admissions, teaching, and learning should happen at the same time to make students’ college experience more meaningful and relevant.

Capacity to conduct holistic admissions Because of the nature of college admissions practices in Japan, faculty members are the key drivers for the admissions process. Thus, implementing holistic admissions is a substantial burden on faculty. Universities ask applicants to submit multiple application documents to allow consideration of the full spectrum of applicants’ qualifications; these may include personal statements, portfolios of their achievements, letters of recommendation, high school transcripts, results of national examinations, and sometimes interviews or presentations. Although holistic admissions systems can examine applicants’ various qualities in a more balanced manner, the process is intense and time-consuming. In addition to their teaching and research efforts, faculty members need to make time for the student selection and admissions process. Moreover, many faculty members do not have training in holistic admissions and may lack the knowledge or skills to conduct the process appropriately. Although the percentage of universities currently practicing holistic admissions is low, it is expected to increase under the new government initiatives. As it does, the question remains about whether faculty members have sufficient capacity to conduct appropriate holistic admissions. One current debate revolves around whether Japan should begin using centralized admissions and admission professionals to conduct holistic admissions. Some universities and institutions are providing university staff and faculty members with professional education programs and seminars to learn how to review documents and make student selection decisions in line with holistic admissions principles. Meanwhile, some universities are hiring admissions professionals to facilitate holistic admissions. When introducing and hiring admissions professionals, universities are faced with certain key questions: Who can be admissions professionals? Are faculty or staff members best suited for these

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roles? What kinds of educational backgrounds, knowledge, and skills must such professionals have? These questions should be continuously explored over time at each university, as each institution has its own needs when implementing admissions policies.

Fair and objective admissions A core concern regarding college admissions reform throughout the reform process has focused on how to ensure fair and objective admissions. As stated previously, the definition of “fairness” has been shifting over time. However, the old idea of fairness, in which everyone should be subjected to the same process regardless of his or her unique background or circumstances, has strongly persisted. There are concerns about how universities can implement a holistic admissions process that considers each student’s academic and non-academic achievements without relying on overly subjective decisions. When using test scores to make admissions decisions, it is possible to select students on a completely objective basis. However, when selecting students in consideration of multiple criteria with a holistic approach, subjectivity can be minimized but never completely eliminated. To provide fair and objective admissions, universities would need admissions professionals who have specific knowledge, skills, and experience for holistic admissions. Introduction of admissions professionals, as mentioned above, would be a key solution for this issue.

Burden on high schools and universities Overall, the new admissions practices place a substantial burden on both high schools and universities. Admissions reform policies are not yet stable or completely codified, and clarifications and changes are certain to come. High schools need to prepare their students for the new admissions practices far in advance. To better develop the three elements of gakuryoku, new approaches to teaching and learning should be implemented at an early stage of high school education. These skills are not something students can develop instantly; accumulated skill and growth over time are necessary. Universities also require a significant amount of time to shift their college admissions practices, to say nothing of their aligned teaching and learning methodologies. When changing their admissions practices, universities are required to make an official announcement to applicants two years in advance. Given the proposed timeline for overhauling the admissions process in Japan, this gives universities a tight deadline for implementing the new admissions pathways. Running as they do on a parallel track to the primary education sector, juku and yobikō have also been trying to understand the current changes so as to develop ways to better support their students in the new admissions climate. More are offering their students multiple services in response to the changes, such as providing services aimed at enhancing students’ interview, essay writing, and presentation skills to improve their performance on holistic admissions.

Conclusion Japanese college admissions practices are becoming both more diverse and more complex. The current reforms make college admissions more complicated than in the past, but also provide applicants with a variety of pathways and opportunities to access higher education. Moving beyond the rigorous single assessment procedure of the past, there are now multiple admissions pathways. Students can choose which pathway is most appropriate for their unique academic and personal background. Moreover, students may be able to select the university that is best matched with their interests, learning style, and aspirations, rather than choosing a university simply because it is highly ranked.

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These reforms are not without their challenges, particularly because of the sweeping nature of the proposed changes. Already, the government announced that it would delay implementing certain aspects of the reform: introduction of the University Admissions English Result Provider System and descriptive answer questions for the Common Test for University Admissions that were planned for introduction in the academic year of 2020 were delayed. In November 2019, the minister of MEXT announced that the University Admissions English Result Provider System was not yet ready for implementation.13 When developing the system, challenges such as applicants’ economic situations and access to English exams were considered in order to provide fair and equal opportunities to all applicants. However, addressing these challenges meant that the system was not ready for use for the academic year of 2020. In the meantime, universities may still decide for themselves whether to use English tests offered by private sector entities in their selection process. Following the official postponement of the University Admissions English Result Provider System, another statement was made in December 2019 postponing the introduction of descriptive answer questions for the Common Test for University Admissions for the academic year of 2020.14 MEXT stated that this delay was necessary to ensure quality when marking examinations. Each marker interprets written answers differently, leading to potential issues of subjectivity. It is also hard for students to predict what score they may receive, as there is no single correct answer for descriptive questions. However, students’ predicted scores have long been used as an indicator to help students decide which universities they are qualified to apply to. Moreover, some examination markers may include not only career educators, but undergraduate or graduate students. These student markers can influence admissions decisions, thus significantly affecting applicants’ future lives. Such issues must be addressed in order to create a fair and equal admissions process and minimize questions of subjectivity. The reform initiative has created considerable confusion among high schools, universities, thirdparty providers, applicants, and their parents. Many are against the reforms; however, reforms are necessary to address a host of current issues in Japan, including a shrinking 18-year-old student population, changing student demographics, and shifting conception of knowledge. College admissions play a crucial role in shaping students’ futures, affecting what they are able to learn and do during college and beyond. It is time for Japanese universities to undergo a paradigm shift from college entrance management to exit management, as expressed by Professor Kawashima at a MEXT symposium in 2017.15 By placing more significance on teaching and learning after entering college than on college admissions, universities can return to their original role as institutions of higher education dedicated to enhancing students’ knowledge, skills, and ability to succeed in their careers and lives. Selecting students can be a simple process for a college, but providing teaching and learning that helps students grow is the most significant effort a university can make. Once an admissions process focused on student success is in place, universities can focus on ensuring they can be ready to meet students’ needs now and in the future.

Notes 1

MEXT, Heisei 29 nendo kokkōritsu shiritsu daigaku nyūgakusha senbatsu jisshi jōkyō [2017 status of admissions implementation at national, public and private universities], (2017), accessed December 1, 2019, https://www.mext .go.jp/b_menu/houdou/29/12/__icsFiles/afieldfile/2017/12/01/1398976_01.pdf. 2 Matsushita, K., Atarashii nōryoku ha kyōiku o kaeru ka: gakuryoku, literacy, and competency [Do new competencies change education? Academic achievement, literacy, and competency], (Kyoto: Minervashobo, 2011), 26. 3 MEXT, Kekka gaiyō—Heisei 30 nendo kodomo no gakushūhi chōsa [Overview results: 2018 survey on learning costs for children], (2019), accessed December 1, 2019, https://www.mext.go.jp/b_menu/toukei/chousa03/gakushuuhi/kekka/k_detail/mext_00102.html.

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4

MEXT, Daigaku he no shingakushasū no shōrai suikei ni tsuite [Future estimate of numbers of applicants to college], (2018), accessed December 1, 2019, https://www.mext.go.jp/b_menu/shingi/chukyo/chukyo4/042/siryo/__icsFiles /afieldfile/2018/03/08/1401754_03.pdf. 5 MEXT, Daigaku he no shingakushasū no shōrai suikei ni tsuite [Future estimate of numbers of applicants to college]. 6 MEXT, Daigaku nyūgakusha senbatsu kaikaku ni kansuru shiryō [Report on college admissions reforms], (2016), accessed December 1, 2019,  http://www.mext.go.jp/component/b_menu/shingi/toushin/__icsFiles/afieldfile/2016 /06/02/1369232_04_2.pdf. 7 Education Rebuilding Implementation Council, Kōtō kyōiku to daigaku kyōiku tono setsuzoku, daigaku nyūgakusha senbatsu no arikata ni tsuite dai yonji tegen [Connection between high school education and college education, role of college admissions 4th announcement], (2013), accessed December 1, 2019, https://www.kantei.go.jp/jp /singi/kyouikusaisei/pdf/dai4_1.pdf. 8 Central Council for Education, Atarashii jidaini fusawashii kōdaisetsuzoku no jitsugen ni muketa kōtōgakkō kyōiku, daigaku kyōiku, daigaku nyūgakusha senbatsu no ittaiteki kaikaku ni tsuite—subete no wakamono ga yume ya mokuhyō wo mebukase, mirai ni hana sakaseru tameni [On integrated reforms in high school and university education and university entrance examination aimed at realizing a high school and university articulation system appropriate for a new era: creating a future for the realization of the dream and goals of all young people], (2014), accessed December 1, 2019, https://www.mext.go.jp/b_menu/shingi/chukyo/chukyo0/toushin/__icsFiles/afieldfile /2015/01/14/1354191.pdf. 9 Japan Association of National Universities, Kokuritsu daigaku no shōrai vision ni kansuru action plan [Action plan on future vision for national universities], (2014), accessed December 1, 2019, https://www.janu.jp/news /files/20150914-wnew-actionplan3.pdf. 10 MEXT, Heisei 33 nendo daigaku nyūgakusha senbatsu jisshi yōkō no minaoshi ni kakaru yokoku no kaisei ni tsuite [Revision on the guideline of college admissions reforms for 2021], (2018), accessed December 1, 2019, https://www .mext.go.jp/component/a_menu/education/micro_detail/__icsFiles/afieldfile/2018/11/06/1397731_03.pdf. 11 MEXT, College admissions English portal site, (n.d.), accessed December 1, 2019, https://www.mext.go.jp /a_menu/koutou/koudai/detail/1420229.htm. 12 MEXT, Daigaku nyūshi eigo seiseki teikyō system riyō yotei jōkyō ichiran [Universities that will use the University Admission English Result Provider System], (2019), accessed December 1, 2019, https://www.mext.go.jp/component/a_menu/education/micro_detail/__icsFiles/afieldfile/2019/10/25/1420469_4_2_2_1.pdf. 13 MEXT, Reiwa san nendo daigaku nyūgakusha senbatsu ni kakaru daigaku nyūshi eigo seiseki teikyō system un’ei taikō haishi ni tsuite [Postponement of the introduction of the University Admissions Provider System for the 2021 selection], (2019), accessed December 1, 2019, https://www.mext.go.jp/component/a_menu/education/micro _detail/__icsFiles/afieldfile/2019/11/15/1397734_19.pdf. 14 MEXT, Hagiuda monbu kagaku daijin no kakugigo kisha kaiken ni okeru bōtō hatsugen [Opening remarks from MEXT Minister Hagiuda at the press conference], (2019), accessed December 1, 2019, https://www.mext.go.jp /content/20191217-mxt_kouhou01-000003280_2.pdf. 15 Kawashima, T., Nyūshi kaikaku no sekaiteki jōkyō to Nihon no kadai [College admissions practices in the world and challenges of college admissions in Japan], (Tokyo, Japan: National Center for University Entrance Examination Symposium held on September 24, 2017), accessed December 1, 2019, https://www.dnc.ac.jp/albums/abm.php ?f=abm00011171.pdf&n=1.pdf.

Bibliography Central Council for Education. Atarashii jidaini fusawashii kōdaisetsuzoku no jitsugen ni muketa kōtōgakkō kyōiku, daigaku kyōiku, daigaku nyūgakusha senbatsu no ittaiteki kaikaku ni tsuite—subete no wakamono ga yume ya mokuhyō wo mebukase, mirai ni hana sakaseru tameni [On integrated reforms in high school and university education and university entrance examination aimed at realizing a high school and university articulation system appropriate for a new era: creating a future for the realization of the dream and goals of all young people]. 2014. Accessed December 1, 2019. https://www.mext.go.jp/b_menu/shingi/chukyo/chukyo0/toushin/__icsFiles /afieldfile/2015/01/14/1354191.pdf. Education Rebuilding Implementation Council. Kōtō kyōiku to daigaku kyōiku tono setsuzoku, daigaku nyūgakusha senbatsu no arikata ni tsuite dai yonji tegen [Connection between high school education and college education, role of college admissions 4th announcement]. 2013. Accessed December 1, 2019. https://www.kantei.go.jp/jp /singi/kyouikusaisei/pdf/dai4_1.pdf. Japan Association of National Universities. Kokuritsu daigaku no shōrai vision ni kansuru action plan [Action plan on future vision for national universities]. 2014. Accessed December 1, 2019. https://www.janu.jp/news /files/20150914-wnew-actionplan3.pdf.

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Kawashima, T. Nishi kaikaku no sekaiteki jōkyō to nihon no kadai [College admissions practices in the world and challenges of college admissions in Japan]. Tokyo, Japan: National Center for University Entrance Examination Symposium held on September 24, 2017. Accessed December 1, 2019. https://www.dnc.ac.jp/albums/abm .php?f=abm00011171.pdf&n=1.pdf. Matsushita, K. Atarashii nōryoku ha kyōiku o kaeru ka: gakuryoku, literacy, and competency [Do new competencies change education? Academic achievement literacy, and competency]. Kyoto: Minervashobo, 2011. MEXT. College admissions English portal site. (n.d.) Accessed December 1, 2019. https://www.mext.go.jp/a_menu /koutou/koudai/detail/1420229.htm. ———. Daigaku he no shingakushasū no shōrai suikei ni tsuite [Future estimate of numbers of applicants to college]. 2018. Accessed December 1, 2019. https://www.mext.go.jp/b_menu/shingi/chukyo/chukyo4/042/siryo/_ _icsFiles/afieldfile/2018/03/08/1401754_03.pdf. ———. Daigaku nyūgakusha senbatsu kaikaku ni kansuru shiryō [Report on college admissions reforms]. 2016. Accessed December 1, 2019. http://www.mext.go.jp/component/b_menu/shingi/toushin/__icsFiles /afieldfile/2016/06/02/1369232_04_2.pdf. ———. Daigaku nyūshi eigo seiseki teikyō system riyō yotei jōkyō ichiran [Universities that will use the University Admission English Result Provider System]. 2019. Accessed December 1, 2019. https://www.mext.go.jp /component/a_menu/education/micro_detail/__icsFiles/afieldfile/2019/10/25/1420469_4_2_2_1.pdf. ———. Hagiuda monbu kagaku daijin no kakugigo kisha kaiken ni okeru bōtō hatsugen [Opening remarks from MEXT Minister Hagiuda at the press conference]. 2019. Accessed December 1, 2019. https://www.mext.go.jp /content/20191217-mxt_kouhou01-000003280_2.pdf. ———. Heisei 29 nendo kokkoritsu shiritsu daigaku nyūgakusha senbatsu jisshi jōkyō [Academic year 2017 status of admissions implementation at national, public and private universities]. 2017. Accessed December 1, 2019. https://www.mext.go.jp/b_menu/houdou/29/12/__icsFiles/afieldfile/2017/12/01/1398976_01.pdf. ———. Heisei 33 nendo daigaku nyūgakusha senbatsu jisshi yōkō no minaoshi ni kakaru yokoku no kaisei ni tsuite [Revision on the guideline of college admissions reforms for 2021]. 2018. Accessed December 1, 2019. https:// www.mext.go.jp/component/a_menu/education/micro_detail/__icsFiles/afieldfile/2018/11/06/1397731_03.pdf. ———. Kekka gaiyō—Heisei 30 nendo kodomo no gakushūhi chōsa [Overview results: Year of 2018 survey on learning costs for children]. 2019. Accessed December 1, 2019. https://www.mext.go.jp/b_menu/toukei/chousa03 /gakushuuhi/kekka/k_detail/mext_00102.html. ———. Reiwa san nendo daigaku nyūgakusha senbatsu ni kakaru daigaku nyūshi eigo seiseki teikyō system un’ei taikō haishi ni tsuite [Postponement of the introduction of the University Admissions Provider System for the 2021 selection]. 2019. Accessed December 1, 2019. https://www.mext.go.jp/component/a_menu/education/micro_detail/__icsFiles/afieldfile/2019/11/15/1397734_19.pdf.

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Chapter 10 The Hensachi: Its Dominant Role in University Rankings Roger Goodman and Chinami Oka This chapter will look at how Japanese universities are ranked domestically. The key measure of internal rankings is the hensachi system, which first appeared in the 1960s as a de facto measure for scholastic achievement. From the mid-1970s onwards, hensachi increasingly came to be seen as the source of many educational “evils” in Japan, but predictions of its demise have proven to be premature—despite attempts to set up alternative domestic ranking systems such as by graduation and employment rates.

Introduction There has been a huge market in Japan for many years which has played on showing students how they can improve what is known in Japan as their “hensachi” scores. Okamoto Masayoshi has suggested that greater control over one’s respiratory rhythm has a positive benefit on hensachi scores;1 Otani Masaru, a professor at Tokyo University, has set out how changes in dietary habits and the intake of appropriate nutrients, such as amino acids and vitamins, contribute to improved hensachi scores;2 Miyaguchi Kimitoshi’s “Miyaguchi method of memorization” supposedly can improve a student’s hensachi scores to such an extent that they can get into Tokyo University,3 the most competitive of all universities in Japan. So, what exactly is hensachi and how and why has it become such an important concept in Japan’s higher education? In Japanese-English dictionaries it is often defined somewhat opaquely as a “deviation value,” and is essentially a “standardized rank score” which indicates a prospective university applicant’s position relative to her/his peers. An individual student’s hensachi is determined through mock entrance exams conducted by major supplementary education providers such as juku and yobikō. These providers publish the overall hensachi of students admitted to different universities and departments each year, so that a system originally intended to help applicants make decisions about where to apply based on their likelihood of success (by comparing their own hensachi with the previous year’s results) also generates a simple and transparent ranking of departments and universities based on their selectivity.4 Since hensachi is not an officially condoned system but a mechanism developed by supplementary education schools to help students and parents calculate to which institution they should apply, there is some variation in the figures and calculations used. It is generally calculated, however, by subtracting the population mean from an individual raw score, dividing the difference by the population standard deviation, multiplying by 10 and adding 50, the mean score. In such a system, the hensachi range is from 20 to 80 and 95.4% of the population fall within the 30–70 range. Two well-known and trusted

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hensachi sites are Daigaku Hensachi.biz and Daigaku Hensachi Jōhō. In the former, all 751 universities in 2018 were divided into eight categories. A small group of 15 super-competitive institutions, called S, have an institutional hensachi (i.e., the average of all the departmental hensachi) of 65–70. These are followed by 30 universities in the A group (hensachi 59–65); 50 in the B group (54–59); 135 in the C group (49–54); 95 in the D group (44–49); 120 in the E group (39–44); 265 in the F group (34–39) and 40 in the G group (31–34). In 2018, none of the 171 national or public universities were in a group lower than C (i.e., they were all in the top 30% of most competitive universities to enter). Put the other way around, all the universities in the four lowest-ranked categories were private universities, which constitute 77% of all universities in Japan. As well as a measure of the competitiveness of individual departments and institutions, hensachi is also a reflection of the overall competitiveness of university entrance. The average hensachi which was needed to get into university in 1992 (at the peak of competition among university applicants for places) was 47; by 2000 (when the number of applicants to university places had dropped by around 30%) it was down to 39.5

The emergence of hensachi in Japan In helping their students decide on which universities they should apply to, individual teachers until the early 1960s had to make judgements on their pupils’ chances without any obvious objective and external assessments. Their rough assessment on which universities their students would be able to get into was based on their intuition, experience, and other rather ambiguous criteria.6 The multiple practice tests which the students took were not a reliable guide to how they were doing compared with others who would be applying to the same institutions. It was the lack of a reliable measurement tool to assess students’ progress in their study that led a school teacher, Kuwata Shōzō, widely known as the “Father of the hensachi” or just “Mr. Hensachi,” to invent the hensachi system. He saw the need for a norm-referenced relative ranking system to help parents, teachers and students all make the best possible choice when they applied to universities. This information would let them know not only how they were doing in their own right, but also how they were doing relative to others. To achieve sufficient accuracy, the data would need to be collected from large cohorts of students taking the same tests under the same conditions, so that students could be placed on a bell curve of relative ranking. At the same time, institutions and programs at universities would need to have a relative ranking so that students could make informed choices about which schools and programs they should apply to. These tests became known as mogi shiken (mock exams) and the relative ranking scores of institutions, programs and students as their hensachi. Mogi shiken continue to play a key role in the Japanese education system. They are generally taken at the weekend or during holidays when pupils do not have school, and often take a whole day. The price of a full day of mogi shiken varies, depending on whether they are being taken as part of a broader package of educational support or independently, and currently ranging up to ¥6,500 yen (approx. $65). Mogi shiken are almost always taken in the five most important subjects for high school or university entrance: English, mathematics, Japanese, science, and social studies (history, geography and civics). They come in two main variants, both of which complement the exams which students take to enter university: multiple-choice style or short-answer style. For the multiple-choice tests, students use a pencil to fill out a computer-processing card which is fed through a machine reader to deliver a score. Following each mogi shiken, students receive a report card, which shows each student’s raw scores as well as their standardized rank score (hensachi), in each individual subject as well as overall. The card also shows the probability of getting into the university of their preference, based on their hensachi and the hensachi of each university course.

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The hensachi system, as we will see, serves the interests of many players. For the education system as a whole, it complements what is being taught and tested in schools. For parents, teachers and students, it provides clarity regarding to which institutions and programs applications should be made; most students apply for institutions a bit below, exactly at and a bit above their hensachi in order to maximize and insure their chances. For the private companies which run the mogi shiken, it provides a lucrative market based on the insecurity of families and teachers; the greater the insecurity, the more practice tests they need to take and hence the greater the income for the companies. The key point about the hensachi system which makes it immediately attractive to teachers is that standardized rank scoring can be applied to any normally distributed data. Scholastic attainment can be analyzed on the basis of such curves, and probability theory gives a good idea of the likelihood of attaining any given score on a test as well as how someone who has that given score stands in relation to their peers. An objective rationale for making pass/fail decisions about student placement can be obtained from the bell curve distributions. Unlike absolute scoring systems (such as A-level grades in the UK), hensachi gives an indication of the probability of getting a place on a particular course at a particular university rather than just informing applicants where the bar sits that they need to get over in order to have a chance of being offered a place. In understanding the spread and the early development of the hensachi, there are two key points which need to be borne in mind: the educational context of the 1960s and the role of private companies in Japanese education. It is doubtful if the hensachi would have come about the way it did without these two variables in play. The 1960s was the period when Japan first became a “mass” education system. The decade saw the postwar baby boom come through the high school system: the total number of 18-year-olds in the population increased from 1.4 million in 1964 to 2.49 million in 1966, while the number of senior high school graduates expanded from 870,000 to 1.56 million over the same two-year period.7 This rapid “massification” of high school education meant an equal intensification of competition. As competition for university places increased, so students’ anxieties intensified, and hensachi helped alleviate some of those concerns. At the same time, reliance on hensachi for making decisions on school and university entrance could also provoke anxiety because one’s hensachi could change from one mock test to another. People quickly realized, though, that the more mock tests one prepared for and took, the more confidence one could have in one’s hensachi score. The emergence of the hensachi in the 1960s helped the development of what came to be called the “entrance exam industry” preparing candidates for the actual “exam hell” tests set by each university in Japan. Private supplementary education companies were already very active in Japan in the immediate postwar period. It was a competitive industry that required companies to look continually for new products, and so it should have been no surprise that they quickly took full advantage of the new opportunities afforded by the development of the hensachi. In order for hensachi scores to have statistical value, they needed to be based on very large samples, the larger the better. The development of new computer technologies in the 1960s also enabled companies to process massive amounts of data in ways that they had not been able to do in the past, and thereby substantially improve the quality of their hensachi-based pass/fail predictions.8 Japan’s system of supplementary education schools (juku or yobikō) at that time was consolidated around four big companies, Yoyogi Seminar (colloquially known as Yozemi), Kawaijuku, Sundai and, after 1965, Daishinken.9 Hensachi calculated by these major companies became accepted as the most accurate. The higher education system in Japan in the 1960s was already very stratified. Kuwata insisted that it was never his intention to support the development of hierarchies of institutions based on their hensachi level, but only to quantify a pass-or-fail border line for each institution and thereby help students decide on—and prepare for—the most appropriate for them to apply to. Nonetheless, not only students but also high schools and universities quickly found themselves ranked based on their

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hensachi. As the data sets grew, so the gradations between institutions became ever finer, what Dore and Sako called “sausage slicing.”10 Hensachi helped, therefore, to create and solidify a clear hierarchy of universities in Japan; it became a proxy for quality and, as we shall see, hugely influenced but also restricted student choice and ambition.

The “banning” of hensachi Hensachi purported to be simply a method for comparing the results of mock tests on a regional or national scale but, at certain points since the 1960s, it has been blamed for a wide variety of social ills. It has been blamed for underpinning an education system based not on learning but on fact cramming, multiple-choice examinations, teaching to the test and an obsession with educational scores. It has been blamed for violence and bullying in schools.11 It has been blamed for preventing the development of other forms of assessment of the potential of young people, such as communication skills and life skills; it has been blamed for limiting students’ educational and social choices, through a process which Kariya, in his study of elementary and junior high school students, has referred to as “self-selection.”12 As Sugimoto explains, “[B]ecause the emphasis on hensachi marks generates a culture in which scholastic ability is viewed as the only measure of individual competence, low hensachi performers also tend to have low self-esteem.”13 According to Kawanishi, “hensachi status…painfully suggests to many students that they are inferior to others. Its impact on them and on their attitude to life is so strong that it often lingers throughout their lifetime.”14 The expression “hensachi ningen” (hensachi humans) came to refer to the idea that products of the Japanese education system were best thought of as nothing more than their hensachi scores. According to Dore and Sako, indeed, the hensachi education became what they called the “boo-word par excellence,”15 summing up all that was stifling, uncreative and antieducational in the school system. We will explore some of these charges against the hensachi system in the context of three periods when they gained particular media attention. The first public wave of criticism against the hensachi system arose in the mid-1970s, especially in Osaka and Tokyo. Schools allowed private companies to use their classrooms when conducting mogi shiken. This close relationship between public schools and private test companies—including the leaking of students’ marks and results of senior high school entrance exams to test companies, as well as an over-reliance on the hensachi scores themselves—came to be seen as problematic not only by the mass media but also by Osaka’s Board of Education.16 The Osaka Prefectural Board of Education asked local school principals to refrain from using mogi shiken in 1976. The Tokyo Board also asked junior high schools to stop conducting mogi shiken during class hours and not to rely on hensachi in guidance counseling. A second wave of criticism of hensachi occurred in 1983 and was linked to wider concerns which were being expressed in Japan at that time about “juken jigoku” (exam hell) and the intensifying pressure that was seen as being applied to students. A large part of the blame for this situation was laid on the hensachi system and the mogi shiken. Given the mounting criticism against the exam hell, the Ministry of Education, under instruction from Prime Minister Nakasone Yasuhiro, who was in the process of setting up a major review of the whole of Japanese education,17 issued a new notification. This notice was primarily a reissue of the 1976 notice against mogi shiken and the use of hensachi scores, but, acknowledging its ineffectiveness, was promulgated at a higher administrative level.18 Despite these interventions, hensachi and mogi shiken remained an active tool in preparation for university entrance. Following the introduction of the first-stage university entrance exam (kyōtsū ichiji shiken) for all applicants of national and public universities in 1979 (changed to sentā shiken, the National Center Test for University Admissions, from 1990 and kyōtsū shiken, the Common Test, from 2021), data provided by private companies became increasingly important for students at senior high school. After students finished their first-stage university entrance exams, they would mark their own

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papers (based on results which were published in the newspapers) and send them, together with the names of the universities to which they were considering applying, to private companies which would then predict their chances of entry based on their hensachi.19 This information helped students decide which universities to apply to in the second-stage entrance exams which took place at each individual institution. One private company claimed that it received data from the self-marked papers of 170,000 out of all the 350,000 test-takers of the first-stage university entrance exam in a particular year.20 The market for the companies which ran the hensachi system was massive; from mogi shiken for elementary school children to the sales of “pass underpants” (gōkaku pantsu), one of the largest companies claimed to be earning more than ¥10 billion yen ($93 million) in a single year by the early 1980s.21 By the mid1980s, third-year junior high school students were taking between six and ten mogi shiken every year in at least half of Japan’s prefectures.22 The third and, as it turned out, the most significant wave of protest against the hensachi system began in 1992. This time the Ministry banned mogi shiken from public junior high schools (which constitute 97% of all junior high schools in Japan) and prohibited the use of hensachi data in guidance counseling and in the admissions process to private senior high schools. It was unable to stop the use of hensachi for university entrance.

The persistence of hensachi since 2000 As Japan entered the 2000s, the demise of the hensachi was widely predicted for a different set of reasons. Just as the hensachi had been introduced in the 1960s to help guide student choice as demand for high school and university places rapidly outstripped supply, so the rapid decline in the number of young people passing through the education system in the early 2000s implied the opposite, namely that the supply of places at senior high school and university would outstrip demand, and that the hensachi could therefore become a redundant tool. The drop in the number of 18-year-olds in the population in Japan—over 42% in the 20 years between 1992 and 2012—is well documented, and it was widely predicted that by the end of 2008 the number of places at university would be equal to the number of applicants (the so-called zennyū jidai) and hence competition for places and the contingent “examination hell” would disappear.23 Predictions of the end of hensachi proved wrong, in part because the proportion of high school graduates who went to university went up by 25% between 1992 and 2000, which largely compensated for the smaller cohort size. What did change, however, was the way that universities recruited students. From the late 1990s onwards, lower-tier universities realized that they were now in a competitive market to get students to apply. While competitive written exams were still widely used for selection to elite universities, alternative forms of entrance procedures such as via the recommendation of certain schools were increasingly used at the less elite institutions to fill their places.24 By around 2010, one out of three students were offered places at university through recommendation. Ironically, though, some students were submitting as part of their recommendation materials25 the results of mogi shiken, for which there was still huge demand as suggested by the following statistics. According to the company Kawaijuku, at least 3.07 million mogi shiken they had set were taken by first-, second-, and third-year senior high school students during 2016.26 According to the company Benesse, nearly 448,000 university applicants took one of their mogi shiken in June 2017; this accounted for almost 76.8% of those who applied to take the sentā shiken in January 2018.27 Despite the introduction of new forms of university entrance, schools and mock exam companies remain inseparable. Many senior high school students still apply to take mogi shiken through their schools even if they do not take them at the school itself. Nearly 95% of senior high schools from which more than one student entered national and public universities in 2017 continued to support mogi shiken organized by a private company.28 The main means of ranking institutions and programs

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remains their hensachi score. This can be seen not only in the annual Asahi Daigaku Ranking, which continues to publish the hensachi score for every university program, but also in publications such as Abunai Daigaku, Kieru Daigaku (Universities at risk and those that will disappear) published annually since 1993 by the journalist Shimano Kiyoshi, which lists universities by a single overall hensachi score and places them into one of ten categories from most to least selective (the most selective including just 15 of Japan’s 800 or so universities). That hensachi still has a major influence on university admissions is undoubted. More surprising is a phenomenon, which was recognized in the early 2000s, that institutions which had higher hensachi entrance scores found their application rates going up every year after 1992 as the number of school leavers went down. The common explanation for this counter-intuitive trend was that applicants who failed, in any year after 1992, to get into as high-ranking a university as they had hoped could tell themselves that there would be fewer school-leavers in the following year and it would be worth trying again. Unfortunately for them, many others thought exactly the same way, and hence the number of applications to such institutions increased rather than decreased.29 A detailed analysis by the Sunday Mainichi calculated that the borderline point was a hensachi of 55.30 Departments with lower hensachi entrance scores in the early 1990s saw a big drop in applications; those around the 55 point saw applications remain steady; those with hensachi scores considerably higher saw rises in applications. In 2007, for example, almost half of applications to all 559 private universities (3,020,000) were to one of the 23 universities with the highest hensachi (1,440,000).31 The net effect was that the average number of applications that students made went up (from 4.56 in 2000 to 5.1 in 2007) at a time when this might have been expected to fall.32 This trend has continued until today. Yoyogi Seminar reported in 2018 that Waseda University, for example, had more applications in that year than it did in the year 2000. At the other end of the scale, the supplementary education industry created a new classification of “border free” (BF) to denote under-enrolled universities to which a meaningful pass/fail borderline hensachi could not even be assigned.

Conclusion In the early 2000s, with places at university available to all who wanted them, it was widely assumed that entrance exams would lose their relevance for all but the elite echelon, and the selectivity-driven logic of the existing hensachi-derived hierarchy would be shattered. Fine differentiations based on entrance examination results would be replaced by a more dramatic polarization (nikyokuka) of the university sector, firstly between those elite universities which had the luxury of remaining selective and those grateful to fill their classrooms with any willing applicants, and secondly between institutions with the managerial ingenuity to adjust to the zennyū era and those unable or unwilling to do so. This polarization scenario was encapsulated in the title of many popular publications around the turn of the millennium, such as Tsubureru Daigaku, Nobiru Daigaku (Universities that will go bust and those that will flourish)33 as well as the Abunai Daigaku, Kieru Daigaku series. The terms kachigumi and makegumi (winners’ circle and losers’ circle / winning team and losing team) were also widely invoked.34 It was assumed that students, parents and high school teachers would need new criteria for distinguishing between these categories. Some of the biggest ranking agencies, such as the Asahi Daigaku Ranking, proposed that it was time for universities to move away from rankings based on input factors (such as hensachi) to rankings based on experience while at university (such as student satisfaction surveys) or on output factors (such as the employment records of students on graduation). The annual Asahi Daigaku Ranking has since 1994 actually provided around 80 indicators of the comparative quality of universities from the number of overseas students to the assessments of high school teachers to patents registered to the number of references in fashion magazines.35 The annual Daigaku no Jitsuryoku (The Real Power of Universities) published since 2008 by the Yomiuri newspaper group

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focuses more on the quality of education provision, curriculum design and teaching in its rankings and has rankings of indicators such as dropout rates, remedial education programmes, job placements supported by alumni associations and class sizes for language education. The weekly business magazine Shūkan Tōyō Keizai (Weekly Far East Economy) also regularly puts out comparative data on Japanese universities, concentrating on financial indicators such as expenditure on education and research per student, research income, student-faculty ratios, annual income of alumni at age thirty as well as the ratio of increase/decrease of applications and capital adequacy ratios. Shimano Kiyoshi, who has published Abunai Daigaku, Kieru Daigaku every year, has also published another rankings book based on the employment records on graduation of university students under the title Shūshoku de Toku suru Daigaku, Son suru Daigaku Ranking (Ranking of Universities by those which Win and those which Lose in Job Placements). The Recruit employment company also supplies a ranking of universities based on its own survey of the experience of students currently at university.36 The business magazine Shūkan Tōyō Keizai produces an annual report on “truly strong universities” (hontō ni tsuyoi daigaku), which places especial emphasis to the university’s financial health and graduate employment prospects. Diamond, another business journal, ranks universities on the basis of their reputation with the human resource management divisions of Japanese major companies. Nikkei Business magazine’s University Brand Ranking was launched in 2009. In the early 2000s the National Institution for Academic Degrees (NIAD) began to publish reports which evaluated how well individual universities were meeting their own stated aims and purposes which journalists used to draw up their own ranking of institutions. Similarly, journalists made rankings out of the awarding of Centers of Excellence grants to institutions which were undertaken from 2004 onwards. World university rankings have also become highly visible, and the Times Higher Education began publishing a Japan-specific version of its rankings in 2017. All of these alternative measures are undoubtedly useful reference points for educational consumers, and for universities when conducting self-assessments and marketing their offerings to prospective students. Many of these new rankings celebrate the distinctive successes of small, non-elite universities in adapting to changing conditions. None, however, offers the same simplicity, universal coverage and statistical objectivity as hensachi, for all its faults. Nor do they have the potential to become institutionalized in the same way: they are at best supplementary material, while hensachi remains an intrinsic part of the system of university entrance.

Notes 1

Okamoto Masayoshi, “Kokoro no shikumi ni kizukeba hensachi ha agaru” [Notice how your mind works, and your hensachi will go up] (Tokyo: Mainichi Shimbunsha, 2008). 2 Ōtani Masaru, “Shoku to sapuri” de hensachi appu: kōkō, daigaku gōkaku mo oya shidai!! [Upping hensachi with food and supplements: for high school and university it’s up to the parents] (Tokyo: Diamond-sha, 2005). 3 (i) Miyaguchi Kimitoshi, Tōdai ni gōkaku suru kiokujutsu [Memory skills for passing Tokyo University] (Tokyo: PHP Kenkyūsho, 2011); (ii) Nakamura Takayasu, Taishūka to meritokurashī: kyōiku senbatsu wo meguru shiken to suisen no paradokusu [The masses and meritocracy: the paradox of examinations and recommendations surrounding educational selection] (Tokyo: Tokyo Daigaku Shuppan Kai, 2011). 4 (i) Ronald Dore and Mari Sako, How the Japanese Learn to Work (second edition) (New York & London: Routledge, 1999). (ii) Roger Goodman and Chinami Oka, “The Invention, Gaming, and Persistence of the  Hensachi (‘Standardised Rank Score’) in Japanese Education,” Oxford Review of Education 44, no. 5 (2018): 581–598. 5 Daigaku Mirai Mondai Kenkyūkai, Daiyosō: 10 nen go no daigaku [Grand prediction: universities 10 years on] (Tokyo: Tōyō Keizai Shimbunsha, 2001). 6 Kuwata Shōzō, Yomigaere, hensachi: imakoso hitsuyōna nyūshi no chie [Come back, hensachi: knowledge about university entry needed right now] (Tokyo: Nesuko, 1995). 7 Nakamura, 84. 8 Nakamura, 117. 9 Zeng Kangmin, Dragon Gate: Competitive Examinations and Their Consequences (London: Cassell, 1999).

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10

Dore and Sako, 21. Shoko Yoneyama, The Japanese High School: Silence and Resistance (London: Routledge, 1999) 4. 12 Kariya Takehiko, “Tozasareta shōraizō: kyōiku senbatsu no kashisei to chūgakusei no ‘jiko senbatsu’” [A closed image of the future: clarity for educational selection and “self-selection” for junior high school children], Kyōiku Shakaigaku Kenkyū 41 (1986): 95–109. 13 Yoshio Sugimoto, An Introduction to Japanese Society (3rd edition) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010) 137. 14 Yuko Kawanishi, Mental Health Challenges Facing Contemporary Japanese Society, The “Lonely People” (Leiden: Brill, 2009) 79. 15 Dore and Sako, 25. 16 Okamoto Keiroku, “Shinbun ni hōdōsareta hensachi kyōiku mondai no bunseki to kōsatsu (Sono 1)” [Analysis and thoughts on the problems of hensachi education in the press], Komyunikēshon Kiyō 3 (1985): 83–129. 17 Leonard Schoppa, Education Reform in Japan: A Case of Immobilist Politics (London & New York: Routledge, 1991). 18 Nakazawa Wataru, “Kyōiku seisaku ga zenkoku ni hakyū suru no ha nazeka: gyōsha tesuto mondai he no taishō wo jirei to shite” [Why educational policies extend to the whole country: treatment of commercial tests as a case in point], Tokyo Daigaku Daigakuin Kyōikugaku Kenkyūka Kiyō 44 (2004): 149–157. 19 Takashima Mitsuyuki, “Daigaku nyūshi to iu na no jōhō sensō” [The data war called university entrance exams] in NHK Shuzai Han ed. Nihon no Jōken [Conditions in Japan] Vol. 11: Kyōiku [Education] Part 2: Hensachi ga Nihon no mirai wo shihai suru [Hensachi rules Japan’s future] (Tokyo: Nihon Hōsō Shuppan Kyōkai, 1983), 42–75. 20 Takashima, 48. 21 Takashima, 75. 22 G. Cameron Hurst III, “Japanese Education: Trouble in Paradise?” University Field Staff International Reports, No. 40 (Asia), (1984). 23 Roger Goodman, “W(h)ither the Japanese University? An Introduction to the 2004 Higher Education Reforms in Japan,” 1–31 in The “Big Bang” in Japanese Higher Education: The 2004 Reforms and the Dynamics of Change, eds. Jerry Eades, Roger Goodman, and Yumiko Hada (Melbourne: Trans Pacific Press, 2005). 24 Nakamura, 145. 25 Kuroishi Norihiro and Takahashi Makoto, “Gakkō kyōiku to juku sangyō no renkei ni tsuite no ichikenkyū: genjō no bunseki to kongo no tenbō” [A study of relations between school and juku education: current analysis and future prospects] Kyōiku Sōgō Kenkyū 2 (2001): 1–14. 26 Kawaijuku, Zentō Moshi Annai, n.d., accessed April 7, 2018, https://www.kawai-juku.ac.jp/trial-exam/zento/. 27 Benesse, n.d., Shinken Moshi, accessed April 7, 2018, https://manabi.benesse.ne.jp/assess/moshi/what/index.html. 28 Benesse. 29 Asahi Shimbun, “Jukensei burando shikō” [University applicants incline to top brands], February 22, 2007, evening edition. 30 Sunday Mainichi, “Daigaku ‘nikyokuka’ ga shinkōchū” [University polarization in process], December 14, 2003, 151–61. 31 Obunsha Educational Information Center, 2007 nen shiritsudai nyūshi, shiganshadōkō bunseki [Private universities: analysis of application trends, 2007], accessed March 7, 2020, http://eic.obunsha.co.jp/analysis/200705/. 32 Obunsha Educational Information Center. 33 Umezu Kazuro, Tsubureru daigaku nobiru daigaku: karakuchi saiten [Universities that will go bust and those that will grow: a candid analysis] (Tokyo: Yell Books, 2001). 34 Nakai Kōichi, Kachi-gumi daigaku rankingu [A ranking of universities in the “winners’ circle”] (Tokyo: Chuo Koron Shinsha, 2002). 35 Akiyoshi Yonezawa, Izumi Nakatsui, and Tetsuo Kobayashi, “University Rankings in Japan,” Higher Education in Europe 27, no. 4 (2002): 373–382. 36 Yonezawa et al. 377–379. 11

Bibliography For a more in-depth account of the hensachi, see especially Breaden and Goodman, 2020 and Goodman and Oka 2018, since those are the two places from which much of the material for this chapter has been brought together. Asahi Shimbun. “Jukensei burando shikō” [University applicants incline to top brands]. Evening edition, February 22, 2007. Benesse. (n.d.), Shinken Moshi. Accessed April 7, 2018, from https://manabi.benesse.ne.jp/assess/moshi/what/index .html

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Breaden, Jeremy and Roger Goodman. Family-Run Universities in Japan: Sources of Inbuilt Resilience in the Face of Demographic Pressure, 1992–2030. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020. Daigaku Mirai Mondai Kenkyūkai. Daiyosō: 10 nen go no daigaku. [Grand prediction: universities 10 years on]. Tokyo: Tōyō Keizai Shimbunsha, 2001. Dore, Ronald and Mari Sako. How the Japanese Learn to Work (second edition). New York and London: Routledge, 1999. Goodman, Roger. “W(h)ither the Japanese University? An Introduction to the 2004 Higher Education Reforms in Japan.” In The “Big Bang” in Japanese Higher Education: The 2004 Reforms and the Dynamics of Change, edited by Jerry Eades, Roger Goodman, and Yumiko Hada, 1–31. Melbourne: Transpacific Press, 2005. Goodman, Roger and Chinami Oka. “The Invention, Gaming, and Persistence of the Hensachi (‘Standardised Rank Score’) in Japanese Education.” Oxford Review of Education 44 no. 5 (2018): 581–598. Hurst, G. Cameron III. “Japanese Education: Trouble in Paradise?” University Field Staff International Reports, No. 40 (Asia), 1984. Kariya, Takehiko. “Tozasareta Shōraizō: Kyōiku Senbatsu no Kashisei to Chūgakusei no ‘Jiko Senbatsu.’” [A closed image of the future: clarity for educational selection and “self-selection” for junior high school children]. Kyōiku Shakaigaku Kenkyū 41 (1986): 95–109. Kawaijuku. Zentō Moshi Annai, n.d., https://www.kawai-juku.ac.jp/trial-exam/zento/, accessed 7 April 2018. Kawanishi, Yuko. Mental Health Challenges Facing Contemporary Japanese Society, The ‘Lonely People’. Leiden: Brill, 2009. Kuroishi, Norihiro and Takahashi Makoto. “Gakkō kyōiku to juku sangyō no renkei ni tsuite no ichikenkyū: genjō no bunseki to kongo no tenbō” [A study of relations between school and juku education: current analysis and future prospects]. Kyōiku Sōgō Kenkyū 2 (2009): 1–14. Kuwata, Shōzō. Yomigaere, hensachi: imakoso hitsuyōna nyūshi no chie, [Come back, hensachi: knowledge about university entry needed right now]. Tokyo: Nesuko, 1995. Miyaguchi, Kimitoshi. Tōdai ni gōkaku suru kiokujutsu, [Memory skills for passing Tokyo University]. Tokyo: PHP Kenkyūsho, 2011. Nakamura, Takayasu. Taishūka to meritokurashī: kyōiku senbatsu wo meguru shiken to suisen no paradokusu, [The masses and meritocracy: the paradox of examinations and recommendations surrounding educational selection]. Tokyo: Tokyo Daigaku Shuppan Kai, 2011. Nakai, Kōichi. Kachi-gumi daigaku rankingu [A ranking of universities in the ‘winners’ circle’]. Tokyo: Chuo Koron Shinsha, 2002. Nakazawa, Wataru. “Kyōiku seisaku ga zenkoku ni hakyū suru noha nazeka: gyōsha tesuto mondai heno taisho wo jirei to shite” [Why educational policies extend to the whole country: treatment of commercial tests as a case in point]. Tokyo Daigaku Daigakuin Kyōikugaku Kenkūka Kiyō 44 (2004): 149–157. Obunsha Educational Information Center. 2007 nen shiritsudai nyūshi, shiganshadōkō bunseki [Private universities: analysis of application trends, 2007]. Accessed March 7, 2020. http://eic.obunsha.co.jp/analysis/200705/. Okamoto, Keiroku. “Shinbun ni hōdōsareta hensachi kyōiku mondai no bunseki to kōsatsu (Sono 1)” [Analysis and thoughts on the problems of hensachi education in the press]. Komyunikēshon Kiyō 3 (1985): 83–129. Okamoto, Masayoshi. “Kokoro no shikumi ni kizukeba hensachi ha agaru” [Notice how your mind works, and your hensachi will go up]. Tokyo: Mainichi Shimbunsha, 2008. Okayasu, Shōhei. “Gyōsha tesuto ‘tsuihō’ go no dōkō to sono eikyōryoku (daiichiji hōkoku).” [Direction and influence after the “banning” of commercial testing (First report)]. Tsukuba Daigaku Kyaria Kyōikugaku Kenkyū 1 (2016): 1–12. Ōtani, Masaru. “Shoku to sapuri” de hensachi appu: kōkō, daigaku gōkaku mo oya shidai!!, [Upping hensachi with food and supplements: for high school and university it’s up to the parents!]. Tokyo: Diamond-sha, 2005. Schoppa, Leonard. Education Reform in Japan: A Case of Immobilist Politics. London and New York: Routledge, 1991. Shimano, Kiyoshi. Abunai daigaku, kieru daigaku, [Universities at risk and those that will disappear]. Tokyo: Yell Books, annual. ———. Shūshoku de toku suru daigaku, make suru daigaku ranking, [Ranking of universities by those which win and those which lose in job placements]. Published annually. Tokyo: Yell Books, annual. Sugimoto, Yoshio. An Introduction to Japanese Society (3rd edition). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Sunday Mainichi. “Daigaku ‘nikyokuka’ ga shinkōchū” [University polarization in process]. 151–61. 14 December 2003. Takashima, Mitsuyuki. “Daigaku nyūshi to iu na no jōhō sensō” [The data war called university entrance exams]. In Nihon no Jōken [Conditions in Japan] Vol. 11: Kyōiku [Education] NHK Shuzai Han ed., Part 2: Hensachi ga nihon no mirai wo shihai suru [Hensachi rules Japan’s future]. Tokyo: Nihon Hōsō Shuppan Kyōkai, 1983. Umezu, Kazuro. Tsubureru daigaku nobiru daigaku: karakuchi saiten [Universities that will go bust and those that will grow: a candid analysis]. Tokyo: Yell Books, 2001. Yoneyama, Shoko. The Japanese High School: Silence and Resistance. London: Routledge, 1999.

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Yonezawa, Akiyoshi, Izumi Nakatsui and Tetsuo Kobayashi. “University Rankings in Japan.” Higher Education in Europe, 27/4: 373–82. Yoyogi Seminar. Nyūshi jōhō: waseda daigaku [Admissions information: Waseda University]. Accessed December 10, 2018. https://www.yozemi.ac.jp/nyushi/data/waseda/. Zeng, Kangmin. Dragon Gate: Competitive Examinations and Their Consequences. London: Cassell, 1999.

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Chapter 11 Self-Assessment: How Japanese University Students Assess Their Learning Outcomes Yamada Reiko The purpose of this study is to investigate whether there is any correlation between students’ self-reported (indirect) assessment and an objective disciplinary knowledge test (direct assessment). A survey including a self-reported assessment and an Economics knowledge test were conducted through the Web for Japanese students. The findings show that the higher a student’s self-reported academic progress, the higher the probability that the student will give correct answers to questions on the Economics knowledge test. This result is consistent with the theory that subjective and objective assessments positively correlate, as other writers have claimed.

Introduction Higher education students are expected to develop 21st century generic and disciplinary skills such as critical thinking and problem-solving to make professional and everyday judgments and decisions; to deal with challenges; to be engaged, globally oriented citizens, and to ensure lifelong learning.1 There is a growing demand for objective, reliable, and valid assessments for this purpose.2 This question has been a central inquiry in higher education. Hence, the demonstration of learning outcomes as an ultimate goal of university education has been strongly emphasized in higher education policies, as well as demanded by society in general. Higher education institutions are facing this new reality. This perception is shared not only in higher education institutions but also in various academic disciplines in Japan. Higher education institutions have held countless discussions and taken several initiatives on measures to help students achieve the necessary learning outcomes and thus improve education. The report Towards a Qualitative Transformation of University Education for Building a New Future announced in 2012 by the Central Council for Education newly introduced the need to establish an assessment policy.3 In the report, “assessment policy” is defined as policies adopted by higher education institutions regarding the goals, qualitative levels of achievement, and specific methods for assessing students’ learning outcomes. It is expected that assessment policies will make explicit the specific measurement methods (e.g., self-reported student survey, assessment tests to evaluate academic achievement, or learning rubrics) that will be used to assess students’ learning outcomes. Further, quality assurance has become a national topic in Japan. Since the School Education Law was revised in 2017, each university has been required to publish three policies, namely its admissions

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policy, curriculum policy, and diploma policy. Thus, the teaching and learning issue is a major concern for Japanese higher education today. Consequently, in 2019 it was decided that a student survey for higher education institutions would be conducted by MEXT. The survey data were to be officially announced, and each institution could utilize the benchmarking function. It was expected that the majority of higher education institutions would participate in the student self-reported online survey, and its results would be used to improve education. The purposes of this study were to investigate (1) how Japanese students assess their acquisition of learning outcomes through higher education, and (2) whether there is any significant correlation between self-reported knowledge and skills (indirect assessment), and an objective disciplinary knowledge test (direct assessment). The specific objectives of the study were to explore the following: (1) How do students’ study progress and academic achievement differ according to their personal characteristics (e.g., previous schooling, gender, etc.)? (2) What is the relevance between experiences at university and learning outcomes? (3) On the basis of the results of the disciplinary knowledge test, is self-assessment of students’ learning outcomes reliable?

Literature review Learning outcomes Learning outcomes can be measured based on external effects—that is, efficacy outside the formal educational system—or by internal effects, also called “college impact,” showing the learning outcomes of students as a result of the quality of pedagogy and student experiences. The theory of college impact does not concentrate on any individual process of students’ growth; rather, it focuses on the contexts in which a student acts and thinks. Institutional structures, policies, programs, and services, as well as attitudes, values, and the behaviors of others in institutional environments, are all aspects of student growth.4 Pascarella and Terenzini have suggested that the institutional structure has both an indirect and direct influence on student development; it includes the college environment, the quality of student effort, and students’ interactions with other students and the faculty. Several Japanese studies focus on learning outcomes of college students in Japan. Murasawa, Kuzuki, and Ogata asked what kinds of knowledge and skills college students obtain through college life.5 They found that obtained knowledge and skills differ depending on academic fields or disciplines. Furuta confirmed that there were clear differences in knowledge and skills attainment, depending on academic fields or disciplines.6 He further suggested that students in the arts (the humanities and the social sciences) tended to self-evaluate higher than students in the sciences in terms of obtained knowledge and skills. However, these studies did not delineate how the different student experiences among academic fields contribute to the degree of perceived obtained knowledge and skills. Yamada found that upper division students (junior and senior years of undergraduate education) had acquired more knowledge, both generally and in their academic fields, than lower division students (first-year students).7 Further, the degree of satisfaction with the college experience of upper division students was found to be higher than that of lower division students. This study showed that by the time students are promoted to the upper division, differences grow between the sciences and the arts fields. While students in the arts acquire more general knowledge associated with global and cultural knowledge, students in the sciences acquire more knowledge of their specific fields. The findings of Yamada demonstrated that some differences in obtained learning outcomes are due to the curriculum structure and the pedagogical approach used in each academic field and institutional

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types.8 More specialized as well as systematic programs in the natural sciences and in engineering require intensive learning, and hence faculty members tend to be more engaged in helping students’ achievement. In a study examining the effect of academic fields, Pascarella & Terenzini found that a person’s major course of study had a selective influence on the development of general cognitive skills. A student’s cognitive growth was greatest on measures where the content was most consistent with that student’s academic field. Other studies affirm the significance of the academic field for the student.9 Although these studies outside Japan have clarified that the association of various student experiences in and outside the classroom have positive effects on learning outcomes, it is questionable whether the findings obtained can be applied to Japanese students studying in specific academic fields. The studies carried out by Furuta, Murasawa, Kuzuki, Ogata, and Yamada did not show how different pedagogies and student experiences in different academic fields affect their learning outcomes. Tanimura focused on how differences of pedagogy and class structure in three academic fields influence learning hours and learning outcomes.10 The studies showed that the health science field, which is tightly coupled with the qualification system in Japan, is distinctive.

Direct and indirect assessments Banta proposes that methods for assessing learning outcomes can be divided into direct assessment methods, such as subject tests, reports, projects, graduation exams, graduation research, graduation theses, or standardized tests, and indirect assessment methods, such as surveys to evaluate students’ learning behaviors and daily behaviors, students’ perceptions, and students’ satisfaction with their university’s academic programs.11 The various assessment methods used by instructors to certify credits, including end-of-term exams, evaluations of reports, projects, portfolios, graduation research, gradation theses, along with graduation exams conducted by the universities, also fall under these categories. The question of whether direct measures of students’ learning outcomes are correlated with indirect measures—i.e., whether students showing high learning outcomes based on direct measures also have higher assessments based on indirect measures—is one of the main points of discussion of this paper. In previous research, this question has been addressed not only in terms of “direct measures vs. indirect measures” but also in terms of “tests vs. surveys,” “objective measures vs. subjective measures,” and “tested knowledge vs. self-reported knowledge.” Direct assessments directly measure students’ learning outcomes and are thus well-suited as assessment methods. Based on a comprehensive review of standardized test results between 1931 and 1984, Pascarella & Terenzini concluded that students’ scores in language, math and science, and knowledge and skills in specialized areas at graduation, improved by 21, 9.5, and 30.8 percentage points, respectively, over the same students’ scores at entry. At the same time, however, the authors also strongly emphasize that there is no agreement on when students’ knowledge and skills improved. A review of research on the results of direct assessments beyond 1984 by the same authors yielded the same conclusions for the 1990s and later as for the earlier period. In addition, the authors verified that standardized test results for general education studied in the first half of undergraduate studies were substantially higher for fourth-year students than for first-year students. However, direct assessments are limited in terms of understanding students’ learning processes and behaviors. This is because these assessments are based on test results, which may reflect the students’ learning outcomes to a certain degree if it is assumed that the students spent sufficient time studying, preparing, and reviewing the material but, especially in the case of standardized tests, may be inflated by student use of exam-prep materials, which is quite common. In the latter case, there is only a weak relation between students’ learning outcomes in terms of test results and the learning process. This is where indirect assessments can be used to measure aspects of the learning process—including

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students’ learning behaviors, daily behaviors, self-perception, and satisfaction with their university’s academic programs—that cannot be assessed using direct measures. One of the most common forms of indirect assessment is the student self-reported survey. Pascarella & Terenzini argue that the results of direct assessments and those of students’ selfevaluations, which are indirect assessments, are consistent. There is a growing number of studies demonstrating the effectiveness of indirect assessments. Anaya showed that students’ self-evaluations of their own development are consistent with direct assessments in the form of GPAs and Graduate Record Examination (GRE) scores.12 Pike argues that, although a justification can be made for using students’ self-reports as a general measure of student achievement, a justification cannot be made for using any one specific self-report as a replacement for test scores.13 In addition, DiRamio & Shannon reported that they could not find any correlation between students’ level of engagement as measured by the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE) and graduation within six years or GPA at graduation.14 As can be seen from the above, varying views continue to exist regarding the correlation (or lack of correlation) between the results of direct and indirect assessments. At the same time, although indirect assessments such as the NSSE and the Cooperative Institutional Research Program (CIRP) are being conducted by numerous universities in the United States, it cannot be ignored that the debate regarding the questionable nature of indirect assessments has become normalized. Among the various indirect measures available, much of the discussion has focused on the NSSE due to its sizable influence. Porter questions the validity of the NSSE, criticizing the fact that the participants’ responses do not accurately reflect their engagement, and recommends that the NSSE and other indirect assessments not be used by themselves but, rather, in combination with standardized multiple-choice tests such as the Collegiate Assessment of Academic Proficiency (CAAP) or the Measure of Academic Proficiency and Progress (MAPP, now known by the name ETS Proficiency Profile). As a matter of fact, the majority of universities that have introduced standardized tests, such as the newly-developed Collegiate Learning Assessment (CLA) for evaluating outcomes of undergraduate education, also use student surveys such as the NSSE and CIRP while positioning these as a way to assess the educational process. In other words, presently in the United States, there is a consensus that student surveys should be used in combination with direct assessments rather than as stand-alone measures.15

Experience of integrating direct and indirect assessment in Japan Meanwhile, in Japan, there has been little research and meager progress in the development of standardized tests to assess the learning outcomes of general education. It is in this context that efforts were made to develop an objective test combined with students’ self-evaluations to assess learning outcomes in Japanese general education. The first step entailed identifying the nature of learning outcomes for general education. To this end, paper-based questionnaires focused on learning outcomes used in Japan and abroad were collected and an original questionnaire with items related to relevant outcomes was formulated. This questionnaire was tested in a pilot study at a university. To create a method for assessing learning outcomes that integrates direct and indirect assessments, the second step involved the development of a short, objective test to be combined with the abovementioned questionnaire. In general, the goal of general education is to provide students with a comprehensive education covering a diverse and wide range of topics. For this reason, to assess learning outcomes in general education areas, in addition to measuring achievement in individual courses, students need to be asked about their overall university experiences, as well as their perception regarding the development of their own skills in accomplishing what is expected at university. Thus, the investigation was conducted by developing a method to indirectly assess learning outcomes and combining this indirect method

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with direct assessments as subthemes in 2013. The short objective test for direct measures comprised 12 questions, consisting of six questions in English, including five questions to assess reading comprehension and one question to assess knowledge of current affairs; three questions in Japanese to assess student ability in logical thinking and reading comprehension, and three math and sciences questions to assess student ability in logical thinking. As a result of the integration of the survey, the findings obtained were that (1) students’ confidence level in English proficiency was correlated to some degree with the number of correct answers in the English questions on the objective test; (2) students’ perceptions on their ability or inability were largely accurate; (3) students’ study hours spent in or out of class were not correlated with the results of the general-content short objective test. The survey results are meaningful since they provide evidence to respond to criticism regarding the significance of indirect assessments.16 As evidenced by Porter’s skepticism regarding the efficacy of indirect assessments, there is substantial debate on the reliability and validity of indirect assessments. Similarly, in Japan, skepticism is frequently expressed in relation to the validity of students’ subjective self-evaluations. That said, certain correlation between indirect and direct assessments was observed in this research, i.e., between students’ self-evaluations of their acquisition of knowledge and skills, and objective measures of learning outcomes. In this sense, our results are in agreement with those of Pascarella and Terenzini, who argue that the results of students’ self-evaluations of their own learning outcomes, which constitute indirect assessments, are consistent with the results of direct assessments. Based on the results of this experience, it was assumed that results of students’ self-reports and objective tests are comparable and consistent.

Methods The online survey The online survey was implemented in Japan as part of a larger cooperation project between Japan and Germany conducted between 2016 and 2018. Original questionnaires were developed in German, and after several discussions between Japanese and German researchers, some items were eliminated and added. Final questionnaires were translated into Japanese. The original purpose of the joint study was to compare the results of self-reported surveys of Japanese and German students. However, some items were not asked for German students. This chapter will use the Japanese version of the questionnaires, which includes question items only for Japanese; the comparative data between Japan and Germany will not be used. A validated test version was already available in Japan to measure economics knowledge.17 The Japanese version of the questionnaire was implemented using the online tool “Unipark.” To draw the attention of Japanese students to the survey, the Japanese cooperation partner produced an information flyer inviting students to participate in the online study. The flyers were sent to 14 universities throughout Japan. The survey was aimed at students, especially first- or second-year students, each participant being offered ¥1,000 as a fee for participation. Data collection took place from 15 May 2018 to 30 June 2018. Regarding the disciplinary knowledge test, the domain of Economics was focused on exclusively.

Data analysis and preliminary findings Data used in this paper consists of two sets. First is the entire Japanese students’ data through an online survey. A total of 328 Japanese students are included in the first data set. The second data set

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is for students who answered the self-reported questionnaires as well as an objective Economics test through the online survey. Sixty Japanese students are included in the second data set. Descriptive information on Japanese students is shown in Table 11.1, where the profile of the second data set (only focused on students of Economics) is shown for reference. The explanation of the descriptive statistics in Table 11.1 is only for the first data set. Regarding gender, the male population is smaller than the female. In terms of field of study, most students belong to the field of social sciences. The majority of students are in the 17–19 age group, indicating that most are first-and second-year students. Regarding academic performance, the majority of students answered that they were above the middle third in class performance. Also, 67% of students answered that they had acquired all or almost all credit points at the time of the survey. Over 80% of the students were engaged in paid jobs during the semester. Table 11.1 Descriptive statistics of Japanese students First data set N % Gender

Male

140

42.7

38

63.3

Female

188

57.3

22

36.7

60

100

60

100

Total

Field of Study

328

100

Sociology

82

25.0

Political science

15

4.6

Economics

60

18.3

Law Education Other

7.6 100.0

60

100

17–19

184

56.1

41

68.3

20–22

137

41.8

19

31.7

Over 23

0

0

60

100

73

22.3

9

15

197

60.1

38

63.3

Lower third

58

17.7

13

21.7

328

100.0

60

100

All credit points

71

21.6

10

16.7

Almost all credit points

149

45.4

21

35

Somewhat fewer credit points

69

21.0

16

26.7

Far fewer credit points

39

11.9

13

21.7

328

100.0

60

100

277

84.5

49

81.7

Total No Total

148

2.1 100

Middle third

Yes Paid job during semester

7 328

Upper third

Total

Study progress

2.4 42.1

25

Total

Academic performance

8 138 328

Total

Age group

Second data set N %

51

15.5

11

18.3

328

100.0

60

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Overall Analysis In Japan, the issue of entrance examinations receives great attention in society. In fact, high school students are forced to memorize and acquire a great deal of knowledge in order to deal with their entrance examinations. On the other hand, after entering university, students have difficulty in adjusting to university teaching and learning, which focuses more on independent learning and critical and logical thinking. For 2021, a new entrance examination system was introduced. In the new system, for example, examinations in mathematics and Japanese will eventually include descriptive answers in addition to mark-type answers. The aim of entrance examination reform is to promote greater articulation between secondary schooling and university education. Based on the above background, the survey includes items in relation to articulation between high schools and universities. Figure 11.1 Degree of preparation before entering university

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As explained above, items are created with university learning in mind. The descriptive graph shows that high school students tend to prepare more language skills in Japanese and acquire self-organizing skills. On the other hand, compared with other items, high school students tend to prepare less to acquire competences in quantitative methods, dealing with digital media and working scientifically. Regarding the decision to study in a certain program, the average score for the item “Interested in specific knowledge in this field” is 4.7, while for “Degree course always wanted to pursue” it is 4.4. On the other hand, an item such as “Great prospects on the career market” shows 3.9. (Numbering from 1 to 6, where 1 means, “Does not apply at all,” and 6, “Applies fully”). This result indicates that many students tend to select their majors based on awareness of learning the field rather than considering future marketability.

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Figure 11.2 To what extent important elements for study success are taught 4.5 4.0 3.5 3.0 2.5 2.0 1.5 1.0 0.5

Important element for study success

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Figure 11.2 shows the relationship between how students rate important elements for study success at university and to what extent such important elements are taught in their degree programs. Although there are no big differences among question items, students’ self-evaluation scores on important elements tend to be higher than actual elements taught in their degree courses except for one item: “discipline-specific knowledge.” It can be assumed that Japanese universities tend to emphasize discipline knowledge. Figure 11.3 indicates the result of students’ self-evaluation on their competences acquired through university education. Overall, the result does not show that students highly evaluate their competences acquired through university education. All items are less than 4.0 (rather high). The lowest item is quantitative reasoning skills. It seems that there are few opportunities for students to study quantitative reasoning skills through university education. This section has shown the overall picture of students from the data; in the next section, more detailed analysis will be delineated.

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Figure 11.3 Self-evaluation on competences through university education

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Detailed analysis In this section, the data will be analyzed based on various aspects of the relevance among gender, academic progress, academic performance, discipline and other self-reported evaluations on several questions. First, I create a new variable which I call the “level of preparation for university education at high school” by adding all items concerning students’ preparation level before entering university. That score is divided into three levels. Figures 11.4 and 11.5 show its relationship with gender and academic performance at university respectively. Figure 11.4 indicates that there is a statistical difference in level of preparation for university education at high school by gender at a 5% level of significance. While 37.1% of male students are in the higher group, 25% of female students are in the higher group. Male students tend to prepare several elements articulated toward university education when they are still at high school. Statistical differences were not observed between academic performance, academic progress and gender. Regarding the relevance between self-rated competencies and gender, there were statistical differences for three questions. While the average score for male students is 4.0 (maximum 6.0), the average score for female students is 3.6 for the item “viewing information critically” at a 1% level of significance. The average score for male students on the question “self-organize” is 4.0 and that for female students is 3.7 (p