1. Today, arguments continue regarding the reciprocal influences between the Japanese educational system and Japanese society. This article looks at this relationship in terms of the long-term changes that can be seen in household expenditures for education. 2. The educational finance systm of Japan was established according to administrative and financial reformation which occurred in the 1940's. After the Second World War, the rate of entrance into high schools and universities increased under this financial structure. Through the revision of the Gakko Kyoikuho and the Shigaku Shinko Joseiho of 1975, this financial structure was revised. This revision created subsidies to private universities as well as Sensyu Gakko as part of the system of post secondary education. These laws gave a new systematic structure to the financial balance of household and public expenditures for education. 3. These revisions had a large influence upon Japanese families, which had already undergone the process nuclearization. Because students began to stay in school to a more advanced age, the amount of each family's educational expenditures, including foregone earnings, increased. As the term of their child's education lengthened, the long-term perspectives of the family lengthened along with it Nuclear families were thus forced to forsake many of their short-term desires as they felt the continuing pressure to maintain these long-term plans. 4. Today, household educational expenditures are taking on new cultural and political meanings. One of these is that such long-term expenditures are coupled with the vigorous competition that accompanies the cause of much anxiety and melancholy within the family. Also, the expenditures necessary for the procurement of higher education raises issues concerning the equity of local educational administration. Alongside research into the efficiency and equity of educational finance, people in positions related to educational finance are hereafter likely to begin ethnological research as well.

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