Divs-poole

JAPANESE TERTIARY EDUCATION 

This second period of university development was certainly successful in terms 

of growth, however. A veritable boom in Japanese higher education furthered the 

heterogeneity of the institutions. At the end of the Second World War, Japan had 48 

universities (both state and private) and approximately 100,000 college students 

total. In 1969, barely twenty years later, those numbers had risen to 1.6 million 

students enrolled in 852 universities, state and private. Twenty percent of the 

college-age group was enrolled in higher education institutions (Nagai 1971, p. 

45). By 2003 the official Ministry of Education numbers had climbed to 4,729 

tertiary institutions enrolling 1.14 million students with 75 percent of these 

students enrolled in private institutions, for an 87 percent participation rate of 18-

year-olds. This participation rate is for entrants into tertiary institutions, not 

graduates, and assumes the historical average of nearly 100 percent of entrants 

being in the 18-year-old age bracket. This present rate is one of true “universal 

access” to higher education (Trow 2005), not even equaled by the United States 

amongst OECD nations, and probably impacting the “Japanese imagination” in 

ways that have not yet been fully explored by researchers as it has in other 

societies. Eickelman (1992) keenly observes the impact of mass higher education 

on the interplay of religion, politics, and national identity in Arab societies. I know 

of no such anthropological study of the connections between universal access to 

HE and Japanese sociocultural concerns, though McVeigh (1997) deftly explores 

the impact of college socialization on issues of gender and “internationalization.”  

Despite the incredible diversity evident in the sheer numbers of institutions and 

students, explanations of university governance in Japan (Arimoto 1997; Kuroha 

1993; Maruyama 2002; McVeigh 2001; 2002b; Okushima 2002b; Ushiogi 2002) 

invariably paint a picture of government bureaucratization. Indeed, all higher 

educational institutions are subject to careful state scrutiny at the time of their 

establishment and when adding new faculties. When EUC went through a three-

year process of accreditation from the Japanese Ministry of Education, Culture, 

Sports, Science, and Technology (MEXT) to establish a new faculty, the procedure 

was quite costly, and the paperwork time-consuming. This is the mechanism that 

MEXT uses to assess new faculties and universities, both state and private, under 

the “Standards for the Establishment of Universities,” keeping a relatively tight 

grip on the reigns of university expansion and assessment (Hosoi et al. 1998; 

Kitamura 1996).  

This MEXT grip on HE might not be as totalitarian as first appearances would 

have one believe, however (Kaneko 1998). Since until recently there had been 

virtually no horizontal self-inspection on behalf of universities through external 

accreditation agencies (as in the United States’ regional, independent accreditation 

system), the MEXT authority was perhaps a necessary evil. At least it afforded 

some semblance of assessment in a top-down fashion, from the government 

perspective of auditing from above. In spite of the centralized bureaucracy, the 

laissez-faire nature of this university governance means that the overall autonomy 

of HE institutions in Japan is equivalent to that of European, if not American, 

universities, and the overall assessment and regulation is probably less. Indeed, 

17

 

---

CHAPTER 1 

with the new semiprivatization of national universities (dokuritsu gyōsei hōjinka) 

stance of MEXT, not only state and public but private universities as well have 

been afforded even more freedom in both their day-to-day affairs as well as long-

term funding, though this approach is not without ulterior motives (Hatakenaka 

2005). 

Management and administration at the state universities, national and local, 

have the European traits of strong faculty autonomy and committee structure—

bottom-up governance (kyōjukai shihai) (Egnor 2001, Goodman 2009). The major 

responsibility for university administration matters and academic affairs lies with 

the faculty senate; historically the executive powers of deans and the president are 

relatively weak. MEXT privatization reforms have affected an increase in 

executive style management (rijikai shihai), embracing a managerialism that 

follows closely the recent U.K. model of HE governance.  

Private universities also place much of the responsibility for governance in the 

hands of the professors, though this is usually limited to mostly academic matters, 

while the business side of the school is run in a more top-down fashion with the 

chairman of the board of trustees representing the corporation of the private school. 

As with state institutions, government reform and other pressures for change have 

infused even more top-down power structures in the privates as well, (Eades, 

personal communication). In my experience there is a diversity of approach of 

school governance in the private sector, and the generalizations made by some 

authors do not necessarily apply to all cases. For example, Arimoto (1997, p. 202) 

discusses how in the state sector the president is elected by the vote of the 

kyōjukai, “but in the private sector it is a committee of the trustees that selects the 

president.” However, at EUC I have observed and participated in the selection of 

two presidents by vote at the faculty senate, totally independent of the board of 

trustees.  

JUKEN: EXAM PRESSURES 

The phenomenon of daigaku entrance exam pressures is infamous in the west, a 

defining image of the cut-throat competition among high school students for places 

at the most prestigious HE institutions. Based on my experience at EUC and my 

observations in Japanese society, I believe the reality today is different from what 

is, or what has been, portrayed in Japanese and western media.  

As mentioned above, Japan has one of the highest rates of university attendance 

among all industrialized nations, with 51 percent of all 18-year-olds (almost 1 

percent of the entire population) enrolling as undergraduates at over 700 national, 

public, and private four-year universities (Hirowatari 2000). If one considers 

participation in all tertiary institutions, not just universities, the U.K. figure for the 

Higher Education Initial Participation Rate (HEIPR) was 44 percent in 2002/3, 

while in Japan the rate was nearly twice that—51 percent for universities and 

junior colleges and 36 percent for “specialized training” and “miscellaneous” 

colleges, according to the 2003 figures on the MEXT website. Over half of all 

18

 

---