ABSTRACT
As with anywhere else, education policies and practices in Japan are shaped by powerful politico-economic interests. In the case of Japan, many modem assumptions about teaching and leaming are rooted in the idea that Japan is a poor country surrounded by enemies and Meiji-era attempts at "catching up and surpassing the West" and becoming a "rich nation with a strong army." Schooling became part of the arsenal in Japan's particular version of economic national statism, or more specifically, it became part of the "capitalist developmental state" mode of political economy and is part and parcel of "reactive nationalism," "an intensive desire to stand on an equal psychological footing with the advanced nations 01' the West" (Amdt 1987:14-15).1 The developmental orientation assumes that the state is more involved in the market, conceming itself with plans, goals, and specific outcomes, whereas regulatory orientation assumes that the state's laissez-faire approach to the
market is ideally impartial and coneerned with procedural maUers (Johnson 1982:18-19). As an arsenal in Japan's economies of defense, edueation may be described as "strategie schooling" (Mc Veigh 1 998b--inspired by Huber's "strategic economy" [l994]). The Japanese educational system had "been designed for the cateh up phase of Japan's development-structured to produce a large number of workers of a standard quality and to emphasize the selective function ofexaminations" (Schoppa 1991a:2). Some ob servers go even further about the goals of schooling in Japan:
There is no real Japanese educational system, nor Japanese university .... There is only the Japanese system of which education, from kindergarten to graduate school, is one c10sely calibrated component. There are good teachers here and there; stimulating c1asses and a genuine love of learning in corners and seminar rooms scattered all throughout this vast conglomerated set of institutions, of course. But all the training, knowledge, self-discipline, and obedience, in the end, are there only to support the ever-growing glory and power ofthe nation. (Cutts 1997:xiv-xv, original emphasis)
What is the relation between nation, state, capital, knowledge, examinations, and "reform" in Japan as they pertain to higher edueation? And how did these interact to evolve into modem Japan's higher education system? Instead of presenting a chronological view of the development of Japan's higher education, I analyze its politico-economic foundations by examining it from various angles in order to highlight their interlinkages: nationalism (sense of belonging to a particular ethnos); statism (political structures that eonfigure educational policies, programs, and projects); and capitalism (rationalized production of wealth). In the next chapter I continue my investigation by examining the formation of knowledge (know-how and science required for rationalized production); and examinations (practices associated with suceessful soeialization); and "reform" (elite attempts to reinforce the status quo-a theme I return to in Chapter 10).2
