ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews the evidence on contemporary Japanese educational performance and the history of Japanese schooling, showing the uniquely important contribution of Japanese cultural premises to educational processes in schools, families, and other settings. Japan was an agrarian society that mobilized itself on a national basis in the late nineteenth century for industrial production and educational achievement, without serious social dislocation and without wholesale adoption of the Western organizational and cultural modes which had accompanied these changes elsewhere. The effects of Japan's 'natural' mobilization have encouraged a hindsight observation that Japan was an 'advantaged agrarian society', that in spite of limited natural resources and lack of continental or colonial influences there existed some preconditions for development which did not exist elsewhere. The changes in the power structure and social organization which were created in the Meiji Restoration were effected with little social upheaval, and were accompanied by a series of sweeping reforms, aimed at modernizing and centralizing Japan.
