In Japan the academic profession is very highly regarded and is central to the nation's intellectual life. Indeed, the professors in the prestige sectors of the academic system are veritable intellectual mandarins who are arbiters of the nation's intellectual life. The Japanese academic profession is highly differentiated, however. with the bulk of the professoriate in private universities and smaller, less well-established, public institutions that have a significantly lower status than the top universities. 59 The academic system is less competitive and there is very little professorial mobility. Many professors teach at the university from which they graduated, contributing to a problem of "inbreeding.''60 The profession is organized hierarchically, according to the traditional German-style "chair" system, which permits only one full professor per academic department or discipline. It also gives the full professors tremendous power over the rest of the staff assigned to the chair. There has been immense pressure in recent years for reform in Japanese higher education and for a democratization of the academic profession. However, there has been very little change in either the organizational structure or the orientation of the professoriate and the universities.61