This paper analyzes the characteristics of the field of educational sociology in Japan as a discipline. The Japanese Society of Educational Sociology was established in 1949 before the discipline had been fairly developed and widely recognized. This premature institutionalization was a result of the postwar educational reform in Japan. The independent departments or chairs of Educational Sociology were established and the subject was taught as an essential requirement for teacher training. Those people who directly involved with the establishment of this field had a policy to make educational sociology an independent field of study institutionally separate from sociology and other educational sciences. One important merit of this policy has been the resulting interdisciplinary nature of Educational Sociology, despite its rather late development as a separate field.
As such a discipline, Japanese educational sociology is destined to have so-called academic “Gerschenkron effects”. Major efforts have been devoted to examine time and again the academic justifications of educational sociology, which studies almost all social phenomena that are related to schooling and socialization as viewed from a variety of theoretical and methodological perspectives such as those in the fields of sociology, economics, political science, psychology, and anthropology.
As an interdisciplinary field, educational sociology and its scholars, at least in Japan, seems destined to rest on the periphery of the social sciences. As educational sociologists, our most promising strategy has been and will be to take so-called “guerrila warfare” tactics against the traditional and established fields of social and human sciences and to continue to adhere to the peripheral and marginal viewpoints.
