In the 1990s, Japanese higher education underwent the largest structural changes since the 1940s, when it was forced to carry out drastic reform under the American occupation. In spite of the post-war reforms modeled after the US, Japanese higher education maintained its traditionally rigid, uniform, and hierarchical structure for more than half a century. In the beginning of the 1970s, there was a major rise in the movement to reform higher education, with the aim to shake and change its long established structure. However, because of the strong resistance from universities and professors, the Ministry of Education failed to carry out its reform plan.
At the end of 1980s, there was another big surge in the movement reform Japanese higher education. And this time, the universities and professors criticized as conservative for a long time, started positively to tackle the difficult tasks.
Behind these changing attitudes, we can point to several important factors compelling reform. First, there were three international “megatrends” : i.e.(1) massification, (2) marketization, and (3) globalization. Secondly, there were three national factors:(1) demographic, (2) economic, (3) policy-related factors.
Under the pressure of these forces and quickened by the policies of the Education Ministry based on reports of the University Council, reforms and changes were carried out, ranging from the structure of the total system to the inside of the individual universities. Reforms at the institutional level started from undergraduate education, and various “tools” developed by American universities to improve education for massified students were introduced.
Nearing the end of the 1990s, the universities began to be asked to drastically change their organizational structure, including the traditional chair-faculty system. This system, modeled after the German university, had long been considered the stronghold of academic freedom and autonomy by Japanese professors. The structural changes in Japanese higher education will reach their final phase when the universities succeed in obtaining professors' approval to replace the long established chairfaculty system with the American department-college system, and in creating new independent administration systems.
