Since 2019, the national competition rate of the elementary school teacher examination has begun to decrease dramatically, falling to 3.2 applicants for every position in 2018, 2.8 in 2019, and 2.3 in 2023. In 19 out of 47 prefectures, the competition rate was less than two. In 2023, about half of all prefectures could not fill the desired number of positions for public elementary school teachers. Currently, many elementary schools lack a regular classroom teacher. In addition, many young teachers who have been employed for several years are having children, and the number of those taking childcare leave is rapidly increasing. Moreover, boards of education are having difficulty recruiting full-time substitute teachers. This paper investigates the current situation and the factors behind the recent decline in the competition ratio of teacher employment examinations and examines the problem of the insufficient placement of teachers in schools based on empirical data. Finally, it considers ways to solve the teacher shortage in Japan.

This paper examines the choice of the teaching profession in contemporary Japan based on the theory of anticipatory socialization. The study relies on Bourdieu's habitus theory to examine the choice of the teaching profession from a social background perspective, because the rational career choice model, which focuses on working conditions and environment, cannot adequately explain this choice. The results suggest that the opportunity to enter the teaching profession is embedded in school experience, in particular the “apprenticeship of observation,” which influences the strength of the desire to become a teacher and the attrition rate in training programs. Finally, given the contemporary educational issue of the decline in the number of aspiring teachers, this paper discusses the relationship between the study results, educational policy, and teacher culture.

This study explores the conditions under which graduates of Japanese teacher-training universities who are not currently working as teachers may become teachers in the future. A questionnaire survey was conducted with individuals who graduated from a teacher-training university five years prior. Text mining was performed on the collected data to determine the changes required in the Japanese education field in order to encourage these individuals to become teachers. An analysis of open-ended responses from 209 individuals indicated that the main conditions for non-teachers to become teachers were “optimized work” and “improved treatment.” The former included “reducing workload,” “reducing overtime,” “reducing the burden of extracurricular activities,” “reducing the burden of parent-teacher communication,” and “reducing administrative work.” The latter included “paying overtime,” “increasing salary,” “ensuring holidays,” “improving teachers’ support system,” and “considering the location of work.” These findings are significant because they could inform policies addressing Japan’s teacher shortage.

This study examines the historical and long-term recurrence of teacher shortages in modern and contemporary Japan and explores why this problem has not been fundamentally solved. Although research has provided a detailed and complicated background for the recent teacher shortage in Japan, few studies have examined this issue as a historical and continuous problem.

The analysis results found four periods when teacher shortage problems occurred. For each period, the study identified three common causes (increasing demand for teachers, economic fluctuations, and reduced incentives) and four common measures (improving incentives, expanding teacher supply routes, deregulation, and improving teacher salaries).

In conclusion, this study argues that the teacher shortage problem in modern and contemporary Japan has always been caused by exogenous factors, such as population dynamics and economic changes, because the financial basis for teacher salaries has been too unstable and insufficient to retain teachers and continuously attract teacher candidates.

The analysis also suggests that high competition rates for teacher hiring masked the teacher shortage problem, as shown in the reduction in teachers' salaries and incentives. This reduction has also contributed to recent teacher shortages by restricting the number of hires, increasing “non-regular teachers,” and decreasing the number of teacher candidates.

In Japan before World War II, multiple pathways existed for the supply of secondary school teachers. Each pathway had distinct characteristics and played a complementary role. Among them, the temporary teacher training schools were the only route that functioned as a regulatory mechanism for balancing teacher supply and demand, as they enabled the systematic and expedited training of secondary school teachers. This study focuses on the role of these institutes in “supply-demand adjustment” and aims to clarify the characteristics of Japan's secondary school teacher supply-demand adjustment policies before the war. Furthermore, it examines whether such temporary training institutions could serve as an effective measure to address the current shortage of secondary school teachers in Japan.

This paper clarifies the commonality and variety of educational strategies used within groups of South American territorial immigrant communities in Japan. There is a lack of studies examining the relationships between social structures and individual educational strategies and between territorial immigrant communities and educational strategies. Therefore, this study analyzes the ways in which communities affect the educational strategies of individual immigrants, based on a survey undertaken in the W Complex, one of the largest immigrant population centers in Japan.

All the participants had high educational awareness compared with other South American immigrants, and many prioritized studying. Propelling this commonality is a stigmatized view of the W Complex. All survey subjects who had internalized this stigma sought to differentiate themselves from “South American immigrants who do not fit into Japanese society” via educational diligence.

Variations in educational strategies are influenced by the institutional completeness of immigrant communities. When immigrants are few and institutions in their location are insufficiently equipped, they are motivated to rely on ethnic ties with their countryfolk and cooperatively adopt similar educational strategies. However, in a community such as the W Complex, which has a variety of institutional arrangements, parents were able to take advantage of these facilities to adopt individualized educational strategies.

Schools face a range of complex and diverse challenges that are difficult for teachers to address on their own. In response, since 2015, there has been growing demand to promote the concept of the “school as a team,”whereby teachers and other professionals actively collaborate to support students. However, concrete strategies for building shared cognition, making decisions, and incorporating the opinions of various professionals in schools have not been adequately proposed. To address this problem, this paper proposes a method introducing the ordinal priority approach methodology in multi-criteria decision-making. Furthermore, to discuss how and in what cases the proposed method contributes to interprofessional collaboration in schools, simulations were conducted with two different groups of staff members, using hypothetical cases of students not attending school. In addition, questionnaires were administered to school staff. The results demonstrated that the proposed method has three advantages: 1) it promotes fair decision-making, regardless of status or influence in the team; 2) it helps to visualize the results of the decision-making; and 3) it facilitates shared cognition among professionals through the process of listing and ranking criteria and alternatives. This study’ s results contribute to the establishment of a concrete strategy for interprofessional collaboration in schools.

This study examined the effect of class sizes on differences in the trajectories of elementary school students' long-term Japanese language achievement by analyzing panel data composed of standardized achievement test scores at five points from around the end of first grade to around the end of fifth grade. The data for 103 schools, 162 classes, and 3,460 students were analyzed. Multilevel analysis with a model postulating three levels (student and time, student, and school) was conducted. The results suggested that smaller classes are advantageous for students' Japanese language achievement trajectories.

The proportion of women in Japanese higher education has gradually increased, but men still dominate in majors such as science and engineering. As a background to this gender segregation, some survey results show that even before entering high school, there is a tendency for boys to evaluate themselves as the “science type” and girls as the “humanities type.” Based on these findings, this study focused on the humanities and science self-concepts of junior high school students and examined the mechanism of gender differentiation.

Based on the multivariate analysis of the questionnaire survey, it was found that the extent to which gender differences in self-recognition of scientific ability and preference for science subjects explain gender differences in humanities and science self-concepts was limited, and it was confirmed that when students themselves or their parents believed gender stereotypes, girls were less likely to evaluate themselves as the “science type.” These results indicate that factors other than students’ academic abilities influence the reluctance of girls to evaluate themselves as the “science type.” The findings of this study suggest the importance of neutralizing gender stereotypes present in Japanese society.