ABSTRACT
Moral education in Japan has a long history, which continues to inform debate. During the rebuilding of the education system after the Pacific War, moral education became associated with the statist ambitions of culturally conservative and militaristic politicians. Whilst this association stretches back to the Meiji period of modernization, the horrors of the Pacific War provided a rallying cry for ideological commitment against state control. This way of framing the debate mirrored the Left-Right debate institutionalized in politics through the post-War decades. From the early 1960s, education policymaking was largely immobile, and developments in moral education were incremental. Later, in the new millennium, the Abe administration succeeded in leveraging recently strengthened institutions to realize a significant degree of ‘prime ministerial leadership’ over policy. This was deployed to initiate policy reform in a wide range of sectors. One important strand was the reform of moral education. Whilst ideological opposition to moral education amongst teachers was in decline, the culturally conservative prime minister presented the reforms in ideological terms, against a backdrop of statements on national pride, war history revisionism, and the valourization of ‘traditional’ values and culture. For these reasons the political history remains important background to the study of current moral education policymaking, whilst there is concurrently a case for re-evaluating the extent of its contemporary relevance to the majority of teachers. This chapter discusses the history, politics, and changing policymaking processes which serve as background for the study of contemporary moral education in Japan.
