ABSTRACT
Intercultural communication (ICC) in Japan has a very interesting history, since communication has never been recognized as a full-fledged academic discipline, such as psychology and sociology. While progress has been made to separate ICC from language education, modern globalization has brought back the perception that ICC is indeed competence in communicating in the English language. The 1980s heyday of ICC has also seen a barrage of cross -cultural communication studies, mainly by W. B. Gudykunst and his associates, who based their studies on cross-cultural theories, such as individualism–collectivism, comparing the Japanese against the American. Also, pressures toward globalization have warranted research in "global competence" of the Japanese, and schools and universities have launched education programs geared toward self-assertion and argumentation. Many universities had a separate College of General Education, with a full set of faculty in Languages, Arts, Humanities, and Sciences, and with the amendment, these Colleges were to be dissolved, or restructured into new Schools.
