ABSTRACT
Education is always one of the hottest social topics in Japan, and it mostly refers to the school system that developed human resources for Japanese modernization and the country’s economic growth. Parents want their children to go to better schools so that they can find better jobs. Businesses expect schools to produce highly skilled but amenable corporate workers. The government responds to the expectations of the parents and corporations. School education has been highlighted as the central pillar of education in Japan’s modernization process and has always been funded by the central government to support Japan’s development plans. Japanese schools successfully produced qualified labor, especially during the period of rapid economic growth from the late 1960s to the mid-1980s. The importance of private educational services was acknowledged by the Lifelong Learning Council Report in 1999, and its social significance was recognized as the number of children not attending schools increased rapidly in the 1990s.
