ABSTRACT
The idiosyncrasies of the Japanese system of education generate specific trends in the development of Japanese students’ motivation. From the perspective of modern engagement and motivation theories, every level of Japanese schooling differs in its degree of institutional and societal focus on externally and internally controlled sources of motivation. Using running metaphors taken from Japanese gardening and aesthetics, we explore an insider-outsider perspective on the different phases of the educational system across anecdotal commentary, empirical research, and future policy directions. Primary schooling, in addition to its strong role in the enculturation process, is humanistic, with special support for students’ competence and relatedness. Primary school students develop identities as individuals situated within hierarchical local and national groups. In secondary schools, teaching is much more rigid and mechanistic, focused on regular high-stakes, criterion-referenced examinations in order to progress to the next level of schooling. Academic-track secondary school students are pressured to perform through numerous carrot-and-stick practices aimed at placing students in the most prestigious post-graduation situation possible. Tertiary education offers an unusual balance of the two, with large amounts of free time, but nearly no choice within the highly crowded core curricula in the first years. The latter half of tertiary education involves strong external pressures during the high-stakes hiring examinations of the last two years. These differing levels of control and autonomy interact with students’ individual motives in different ways at each developmental phase. In this chapter, we summarize the issues involved in students’ motivation and engagement at each phase of the Japanese educational system. We review both empirical research and social commentaries on the state of theory and practice within Japanese society to this end. Based on work from both the academic and lay press, we propose a hypothetical model of the interplay between this learning environment and students’ individual growth over time at each phase.
