ABSTRACT
After the sheer madness of the Second World War, social studies has been introduced as a principal subject for promoting democratic citizenship as a new social norm in Japan. Although the goal of the school subject has remained the same, its forms, curriculum, and pedagogy have constantly changed because it has reflected diverse competing visions of the future. This chapter uses the following three tensions as a framework to successfully extract the characteristics of the Japanese social studies curriculum: flexibility and equality, rigorousness and relevance, transmitting and transforming. Compared to the past national curriculum, the current reform of Japanese social studies seems to ease the aforementioned tensions and acts as a regulator, or goes beyond the pendulum because the new national curriculum tries to integrate concepts that are regarded as opposing or conflicting. Social studies teachers in Japan have a new responsibility to coordinate diverse conflicting concepts in their own curriculum, and, thus, teacher education for both pre- and in-service teachers should change its role to encourage teachers to conduct curriculum development.
Keywords Japanese social studies, democratic citizenship, tensions, gatekeeper, curriculum development
