Today, teaching literature has an established place within the school and university curricula in Western and East Asian countries. This seems so natural that we take the educational role of literature for granted. However, history teaches us that elevating literature to an academic subject required a defense of literature against the critical voices raised by philosophy and religion. This criticism was centered on the moral value of literature. This paper explores two prominent defenders of literature in the West and the East: Coluccio Salutati (1332-1406) and Motoori Norinaga (1730-1801). Salutati defended the educational significance of ancient poetry against the criticism from Scholasticism, while Norinaga defended The Tale of Genji against the criticism from Buddhism and Confucianism. The paper consists of two parts. The first part is dedicated to the analysis of the arguments deployed by Salutati and Norinaga in defense of literature. Whereas Salutati insists on the philosophical nature of poetry as allegory, Norinaga sees the educational significance of The Tale of Genji in teaching of mono no aware. The second part digs deeper and reveals the respective horizon of each position as the tradition of philosophy and the tradition of waka poetry.

One of the most challenging questions in philosophical and anthropological inquiries on skill learning is how skills can be shared and acquired among people, especially when they cannot be easily verbalized or written. This paper examines the process of skill learning among Western and Eastern artists of puppetry. They learn the skill generally by observation and imitation, typical of “informal” education. However, most of the highly developed contemporary arts have their own educational formats in which skills are shared and learnt systematically, albeit flexibly, through interactions between instructors and learners, comprising not only verbal instruction but also gestures and facial expressions. These interactions are considered a dialogue, which underpins and complements the learning by imitation. Going beyond the traditional pedagogical view, in which knowledge is assumed to be ready-made and translatable into words, this paper sheds light on how the instructor and the learner interact and influence each other and how the skill itself emerges afresh in the dialogue. The challenge also lies in rethinking education in the global age from the local and microscopic learning involved in dealing with the individual concrete body.

Both education for democratic citizenship and human rights education tend to emphasise political and legal learning. In both human rights education and moral education in Japan, however, there has been a tendency to give particular attention to interpersonal elements of learning such as kindness and sympathy. This article draws on feminist thinking and on Nel Noddings' concept of the ethics of care to propose a learning framework that combines emotional and socio-political elements, arguing that since motivation is an important element in acting for social justice, learning for social justice must be cognisant of emotional learning. The authors then present the case of a university teacher in a gender studies classroom to consider how these two elements, the emotional and the political, might be combined to enhance students' commitment to social justice when the topic under consideration is LGTBQ+ rights.

This paper investigates how Japanese lesson study has been modified in the context of the U.S., and how this modification has affected teacher agency based on the framework of the ecological approach proposed by Priestley et al. (2016). There are two major findings. First, Japanese lesson study has been adapted and modified in the U.S. as an effective form of professional development which tends to focus on a single subject, primarily mathematics. Math-focused lesson study has significantly contributed to the development of U.S. lesson study and promoted agency of math teachers, but may have hindered the expansion of lesson study into whole-school professional development, involving all subject teachers. Second, Japanese lesson study is inherently inseparable from the whole-school professional development called kounaikenshu, but, in the U.S., seems to have been adapted as a stand-alone activity. Consequently, the crucial role of long-term goals in lesson study has tended to be overlooked. The study concludes that lesson study disconnected from whole-school professional development may limit achievement of teacher agency, and in turn, professional identity.

Service learning (SL) in higher education has been developed in various forms, mainly in the US, with an emphasis on linking services and learning, universities and communities. Many people view higher education as a means to a career which, in turn, renders education a subject of private interest. Owing to this, SL is expected to encourage civic engagement, and the value of SL as a practice of public interest has been garnering attention. In Japan, SL is seen in some advanced SL programs as education for democracy. But what about the general trend? This study aims to identify the general characteristics of SL in Japanese higher education, rather than highlighting the characteristics of advanced cases. For this purpose, a comparative study between Japan and the US was conducted using syllabus data available on the Internet. The results were as follows. Compared to the US, in Japanese SL, students were more likely to be involved in volunteer activities, in which case they were expected to adapt to existing society as an individual citizen, separated from other students. Meanwhile, SL that did not include volunteer activities emphasized developing students' skills. In both cases, political interest was low and there was no mention of (re)constructing students' values and philosophies. The word “democracy” was almost completely absent from the SL syllabus in Japan. These results suggest two possibilities in different directions. One is that Japanese SL may have been reduced to a superficial teaching method used only for skill development and “not for democracy.” The other is that Japanese SL teachers try to lead students toward democracy by equipping them with democratic skills that overlap with skills required in the workforce, without indicating that they are “for democracy.” From the latter standpoint, especially for passive Japanese students, SL for democracy could only be based on a delicate and dangerous balance between public and private goods.

This paper begins by revisiting my earlier critical review of the international scholarship on Japanese schooling (Takayama, 2011). In this work, I critiqued three books on Japanese schooling, by Ryoko Tsuneyoshi (2001), Nancy Sato (2004), and Peter Cave (2007), along with other English-language scholarships on Japanese education. Drawing on a postcolonial critique of culture and difference, my work identified the underlying culturalist logic of the existing literature, where the cultural binary of Japan (East) vs West was unproblematically accepted and reinforced, the homogeneity of Japan was assumed, and culture was conceptualized as the predominant force shaping Japanese pedagogic practices. Erased from the discussion of Japanese education, it was suggested, were power and domination and the role of culture in perpetuating the ideology of cultural homogeneity and uneven relations in/through Japanese schooling. More than ten years later, this paper reassesses this critique in light of the emerging scholarship of Hikaru Komatsu and Jeremy Rappleye. who draw on a similar culturalist discourse of Japanese pedagogy and explicitly mobilize the ‘Japanese difference’ thus generated to peculiarize and parochialize the Western cultural premises of ‘best practices’ promoted by international organizations. Through critical engagement with their research, I identify five themes/challenges around which the broader implications of their research are explored, while demonstrating how doing so has also forced me to rethink my earlier critique.

After the Second World War, philosophers from former colonies began to work on a hermeneutic better suited to the postcolonial context, as the frameworks adopted in conventional academic philosophy were considered to be inadequate in this regard. This position had already been taken during the colonial period by thinkers like Rabindranath Tagore. Today, current work on world philosophies seems to be informed by similar concerns. This paper will first focus on the common ground between these positions by delineating reasons for closely attending to the context in which philosophy is carried out as well as to the impact that this practice could, and does, have on the lives of those it affects. The paper will then revisit Tagore's spirited appeal to reappropriate and recontextualise the aspects of Asian traditions that undergird common humanity in a world dominated by imperialism and colonialism, before briefly dwelling on current work on world philosophies.

This paper extracts the characteristics of the view of ability in educational practices during the period of rapid growth in Japan, focusing on the influence of these perceptions on the Ministry of Education's educational policies. The analysis draws on the debate about “vocational aptitude tests” and “observation guidance.” Teachers' critical perceptions of “vocational aptitude tests” and “observation guidance” depend on their views of desirable ability.

The main findings obtained are as follows. Since the 1990s, attention has been focused on non-cognitive ability; a similar view of ability (expansion of the view of ability) can be seen in educational practices in the 1960s. However, this expansion of the view of ability does not only appear in educational practices. According to the analysis of “ability and aptitude, etc.” included in a reference document on observation guidance (presented by MoE, based on the French observation curriculum), an expansion of the view of ability can also be confirmed to be present in educational policy. The view of ability in educational practices may even coincide with that in educational policies.

In recent years, interest in studying at Japanese universities or studying abroad in a third country has increased among students enrolled in Brazilian high schools in Japan. However, although the career options of Brazilian school students have expanded, their parents' perceptions of this situation and the ways in which these perceptions are reflected in their transnational educational strategies have not yet been clarified. Therefore, this study sets forth the following research questions to clarify how the parents of Brazilian school students reconstruct their transnational educational strategies as they interact with their children in the face of socioeconomic changes in Japan.

This study examined the following research questions based on interviews with Brazilian high school students and their parents: (1) What educational strategies did these parents originally employ? (2) What factors affected changes in these strategies? (3) What strategies emerged through negotiations between these parents and their children? (4) What difficulties do Brazilian families face in implementing these new strategies?

The results of this research revealed that the educational strategies of Japanese-Brazilian families are no longer premised on returning to Brazil, contrary to the findings of previous studies. Instead, both the parents and the children of these families now envision the children's futures in Japan or a third country. In other words, transnational education strategies are fluid. In the process of family adaptation to Japanese society, these strategies are transformed by macro and micro factors, including parent-child interactions in the home.

Education in Japan has drawn attention widely from overseas, including a quantity of research pointing out that the context of Japan's modernization and its present-day advanced science and technology can be found in the high literacy rates and prevalent education of Japanese society. However, there has been insufficient examination of the effect of high literacy rates in early modern society on everyday life. Pointing out that at the beginning of the early modern period, character formats, grammar, writing styles et cetera became used in common throughout the country, while the use of written text became compulsory as well, this paper asserts that the establishment of this lettered society was deeply involved with Japan's modernization.

As arguments for the liberalization of education grow more heated, how are we to approach Japanese schools as a community? This paper clarifies the basic concept of the “small schools” theory typified by the METI “Future Classrooms” (functionalist and individualist reorganizations), and organizes the relevant points of debate. In particular, the paper examines the issues of individuation and personalization represented by individual optimization of learning, promotionism (an attendance-based credit acquisition) and retentionism (an achievement-based credit acquisition), merit promotion and social promotion, and grade and class systems. Based thereon, the paper presents a perspective on the reconstruction of the communality and publicness of Japanese schools.