ABSTRACT
Higher education has always been an important and frequently a political issue in modern Japan. To understand the nature of the policy issues in their contemporary context, it is important to highlight certain historical antecedents. From the perspective of the rest of the educational system, higher educational institutions were comparatively free from government supervision. At the lower educational levels, conscious and conscientious control over the schools was maintained through government control over teacher training, textbook supervision, and syllabus monitoring. One feature of the pre-war educational system was its high degree of institutional and occupational specificity. Elitism in the pre-war system took two forms: that which arose as a function of the limited number of individuals continuing on to the highest levels of education, and that which resulted from the sharp prestige gradations among higher educational institutions.
