In Japan, the textbooks used in compulsory education are selected regionally, which means that the same textbooks are used in all the compulsory education schools in the same area. This rule was established in the Act on Free Distribution of Textbooks for Compulsory Education Schools (Act No. 182 of 1963) in order to reduce the price of the textbooks and to reduce the strain on public finance, but when this Act was enacted, the regional selection had been a fait accompli. Before then, it is clear that the regional selection in compulsory education became a policy of the Ministry of Education by a report from the Central Council for Education (the CCE) on December 5, 1955,“Kyokasho-seido-no-kaizen-ni-kansuru-tosin (Report on reforming the textbook system)”. However, the report does not clarify why the regional selection became a policy or a means to reduce the strain on public finance at a later time. Based on the above, we need to assess the policy-making process of the regional selection in 1955, taking into account the relationship between textbook selection and public finance, especially the free distribution of textbooks. Therefore, this paper clarifies the decision-making process of trying to enact the regional selection in compulsory education, through analyzing the background of submitting questions to the CCE, deliberations at the CCE in 1955, and the adoption or rejection of the bills at the 24th session of the National Diet in 1956, in terms of the relationships between the regional selection and a financial problem.

The conclusion of this paper is as follows. There were some reasons for adopting the regional selection in 1955, and two of them were important. From the educational point of view, in addition to the pretext to promote studying textbooks jointly, it was a fact that schools in the countryside did not have enough teachers to select textbooks separately. On the other hand, from the economic and financial point of view, there was an intention to reduce the educational expense of parents through lowering the cost of textbooks by means of selecting them regionally. Especially in this regard, the Ministry of Education had to take action on higher textbook price by some means. However, the Ministry of Finance opposed completely free distribution of textbooks for compulsory education, but approved free distribution to those in financial difficulties. Then, at the CCE, the administrators of the local board of education also required the free distribution to those in financial difficulties, and this suggestion appeared to be critical for the decision making. Consequently, the Ministry of Education had no choice but to adopt the limited free distribution and the regional selection in order to cope with the problem of textbook prices. In this way, following the report, the bill on textbooks, which included the regional selection, and the bill on the free distribution of textbooks for needy students in elementary school, which became the current act on the financial assistance for the encouragement of the attendance at school of the needy students in compulsory education (Act No.40 of 1956), were made and presented to the 24th session of the National Diet. Paying attention to this fact, adopting the regional selection system in compulsory education in the policy package at this point was more significant for reducing parents’ burdens than controlling educational contents. In that sense, the CCE’s decision in 1955 was a critical juncture in defining the free distribution policy of textbooks as the policy of making parents’ burden less. Namely, it could be regarded as not only the beginning of the free distribution of textbooks up to the present but also the point of fixing the course of the policy on the encouragement of attendance at school.