Routledge/University of Tokyo Series, 3. London; New York: Routledge, 2013. x, 221 pp. (Tables, figures.) US$135.00, cloth. ISBN 978-0-415-55687-3.
This book by sociologist Takehiko Kariya on education and social inequality is a translation from its 2001 Japanese original. It is the third publication within Routledge’s new University of Tokyo Series, which features translations of Japanese works of University of Tokyo past or present faculty, and it is a particularly readable translation. It is laudable that this book features a new afterword and has added some important information to bridge the gap of 12 years between the original publication and its English translation, but it could have benefitted from updated data, as most of it is by now 15 years old.
Today not a day goes by that Japan’s unequal society (kakusa shakai) is not discussed in the press. More than 2400 Japanese books have been published on the topic, with almost 500 specifically on the topic of education and class or social stratification. Yet Kariya’s original Japanese book was published three years before the term kakusa shakai was coined (in 2004 by fellow sociologist Yamada Masahiro), making him one of the early scholars to argue for the importance of class formation and class reproduction in postwar Japanese society.
Kariya’s book, clearly written for a Japanese audience, argues repeatedly how the educational system, educational reforms and policies, as well as discursive “myths” about Japan’s education and society have contributed to social inequalities and their further increase. He blames the government for deciding quickly on new educational reforms that were poorly if at all researched and for having created a “lost decade” within the educational system.
The book was quite influential when it hit the market in 2001. Reviews at the time in Japan were mostly very positive, yet some questioned the limited scope of some of the data used. Some datasets were not nationwide and only sampled high school students, thus raising questions about generalizability.
The book is a critical account of the historical development of Japan’s postwar education system and educational policy. It is divided into eight chapters and provides in all but one chapter quantitative analyses of data on education and social class. It is a sociological study, employing methods such as cross tabulations, multiple regression, factor analysis as well as path analysis. Data comes, among other sources, from the Social Stratification and Social Mobility (SSM) surveys. The data analysis is thorough and convincing.
In the introduction and chapter 1, the author gives a historical macro-level overview of the changes in Japan’s postwar education and the employment structure. He points to the country’s unique synchronicity in the 1950s and 1960s of fundamental changes in the occupational structure, namely the severe decline in the agricultural sector and the rise in manual labour, coupled with the expansion of secondary education. Chapter 2, entitled “The age of meritocracy,” describes the growing importance over time of educational credentials and the type of high school attended, once high school entrance examinations had turned into a “mass phenomenon.”
A discourse analysis is at the heart of chapter 3 and in my view is the most fascinating part in this study. Kariya looks at longitudinal shifts in teachers’ discourse using the records of the National Education Research Conference of the Japan Teachers’ Union from the 1950s onwards. He analyzes the social construction of “educational problems” in this rich, qualitative data. He describes the discussion of students’ differential treatment based on individual ability in terms of “meritocratic discrimination.” Whereas correlating scholastic achievement and social class background was rejected as causing a “sense of discrimination” in students, only in regards to Buraku education was it acceptable to problematize social inequalities. Kariya calls this the “double standard of inequality,” showing through his data analysis that the influence of social class on scholastic ability is far more pronounced than the influence of a Buraku background.
Chapter 4 once again looks at historical changes, here in regards to Japan’s prewar educational aristocracy, finding status consciousness to have disappeared by the 1970s, despite the fact that students from prestigious universities come from well-off backgrounds and that there is a clear reproduction of social class. In chapter 5 Kariya analyzes data on study effort outside of school, what he calls “learning time,” and chapter 6 looks at data on study motivation, convincingly showing how class disparities in study effort and motivation have expanded during the 1980s and 1990s, with learning time and motivation having declined most significantly among the lower class. On the eve of the implementation of the yutori kyōiku (relaxed education) educational reform of 2002 to reduce learning time even further, Kariya criticized the reforms and predicted a further widening of disparities in scholastic ability.
The analysis of high-school student survey data from 1979 and 1997 is at the centre of chapters 7 and 8, in which the author develops his argument of the “incentive divide.” Kariya finds that in 1979 the greater the level of self-esteem, the higher the level of schooling sought and the longer the study time. In 1997, these correlations had disappeared, with students from low-class backgrounds having developed high self-esteem with decreased study effort on the one hand, and highly motivated students from high social background showing long study hours on the other hand. At this point Kariya’s analysis partially drifts into speculation about class differences in study motivation of students and thus the study would have benefitted from additional qualitative data.
Altogether, this book can be understood as a strong statement against the 2002 education reforms, drawing a bleak picture of the development of the education system in Japan. The book wraps up with a newly added afterword, in which the author describes the impact his study had, with the Ministry of Education revising its curricula for the better in 2010.
As the book was originally a collection of previously published essays and articles, it is slightly repetitive in driving home its argument. Surprisingly, supplementary cram school education is only mentioned very briefly and did not enter any analysis. As the author mentions, the growing trend towards private schools and the growing role of cram schools as shadow education have contributed to the widening of the educational gap. These issues deserved some more attention. Finally, some of the data only sampled male students; we do not learn about the effect gender had on the findings, which could have added some more diversity to this class-based view.
If one keeps in mind that the book was published in Japan a decade ago and included articles published even earlier, this English translation can nonetheless be highly recommended for a general audience as well as scholars on comparative education and Japan scholars. It provides access to a centrally important, classic study on education and social class in Japan.
Barbara G. Holthus
University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria
pp. 599-601