ABSTRACT
This chapter presents an overview of progressive struggle and critical scholarship in Japanese education. In so doing, I focus on the Western influence in the development of Japanese critical education and practice. This focus on the transnational flow of influence in progressive politics and theory is important to recognize but has been understudied in critical education scholarship. Progressive activists in different parts of the world are in constant dialogue with each other in developing their practice and scholarship. This deserves serious attention, particularly when remarkably similar conservative political movements attempt to fundamentally alter the nature of public education in many parts of the world (Apple, 2006a; Takayama & Apple, 2008; Whitty, Power, & Halpin, 1998), and thus when global progressive coalitions against the rightist restructuring of public education are needed more than ever. Recognizing transnational exchanges of progressive ideas and theories, or “borrowing from below” (Coates in Lipman, 2004, p. 183), is one way to explore developing international coalitions of progressive movements in education. Furthermore, a focus on the international flow of ideas is particularly important to the discussion of Japanese critical education. Japanese education scholars, the media, state officials, and progressive educators have relied on the West in intellectual development in general as well as in educational policy in particular (Cummings, 1986; Ichikawa, 1984).2 Hence, an attempt to review the development of Japanese critical education necessarily demands a close examination of the role of transnational borrowing in their development. Central to this examination is the process of local mediation and recontextualization (Ball, 1998; Hashimoto, 2003). This is important in order not to simplistically endorse the theories of global homogenization of critical education discourse which reinforce the problematic notion of globalization as “a process without a subject” (Dale & Robertson, 2002, p. 11). As the subsequent review shall demonstrate, Japanese critical educators and scholars as active agents sought practices and theories primarily from the West and reinterpreted (sometimes misinterpreted) and recontextualized them to make them suit the specific domestic contexts and their particular needs.
