Japan’s Post-Catch-up Modernity

Japanese education has undergone a great transformation since the late 1980s. This chapter pays attention to those transformations in education over the last three decades, as illustrations of a ‘post-catch-up’ modernity currently evolving in Japan. Locating education within a theoretical framework of modernity provides new angles from which to understand recent evolutions of Japan’s modernity and the role education plays within it. How and why did the transformations come about and what consequences, intended or unintended, did they induce within Japanese society? In answering these questions, this chapter uncovers the nature of the transformation within contemporary Japanese society in relation to a larger process of the evolution of modernity.