Divs-poole

JAPANESE TERTIARY EDUCATION 

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graduate and former top executive at Kirin Beer (former president of the Shakey’s 

Pizza restaurant subsidiary of Kirin). He has a desk both in this administration 

office and in the office of the chairman of the board of trustees. Chairman 

Kawaguchi, himself a former Kirin executive, personally recruited Mr. Mori to this 

amakudari (see footnote below) position after his retirement from the corporate 

world. 

The Academic Affairs Department, also with a staff of eleven, is divided into 

two sections. The first section is responsible for the registration of students, 

scheduling of classes and professors, and coordinating the curriculum and 

syllabuses for both faculties. The second section handles the extracurricular classes 

for certification, the study abroad and international programs, and the grant 

applications for academic funding, both internal and external. There are also one 

staff member who handles the secretarial work for the graduate school, and another 

who is responsible for the licensing program for student teachers. 

The Student Affairs Office has a staff of nine and is divided into two sections: 

student affairs and careers. The student affairs section focuses on all aspects of the 

students’ affairs, including clubs and circles, university cards, and scholarships and 

fees. The careers section busies itself providing information for and counseling 

students to find work and placement in jobs after graduation.  

The Library Office consists of five full-time staff members and numerous part-

time circulation desk employees. The majority of these “librarians” do not have 

specialist qualifications in the library sciences but, rather, are regular members of 

staff who are rotated between departments like everyone else. The Admissions 

Center has three staff members as well as a former high school teacher who has 

been hired as an assistant. 

There is a nurse in the nurse’s office, a professional counselor in the student 

counselor’s office, a groundskeeper employed for the sports ground located just 

west of Tokyo in Kawasaki, a cadre of campus security guards working for an 

outside agency contracted by the university, cheerfully manning the guard house 

24/7, and a live-in caretaker family at the EUC seminar house, a facility rebuilt in 

the late nineties and located in the mountains of Gunma Prefecture, four hours 

north of the EUC campus. The seminar house can accommodate more than fifty 

guests. It is mostly used as a retreat for seminar classes, as well as student-run 

clubs and circles, but any member of the EUC community, including alumni, is 

entitled to stay at the facility at a subsidized rate. 

Last in this description of the administrative departments is the IT/Media 

Center,

 

which controls the largest administrative budget at EUC. The “medeia 

sentaa,” as it is usually called, employs a modest full-time staff of only two 

(originally three), one of whom is an IT specialist hired specifically for the position 

in addition to hiring an outside private computer consulting firm, which has 

assigned a few consultants to work at EUC on a semipermanent basis. 

Perhaps because of the lack of transparency in the use of their budget, which 

includes huge grants from the Ministry of Education, there exists a jealous 

perception that this administrative department has somehow achieved a 

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CHAPTER 1 

semiautonomous status outside the informal organizational structure of the 

university. An entire conference and edited volume has been devoted to the 

analysis and discussion of the many sociocultural conflicts that plague IT centers at 

Japanese HEIs (Bachnik 2003). Not surprisingly, the EUC Media Center was at the 

center of controversy at the university on a number of occasions. 

The first move by the head of the administration offices was to deny the recently 

married computer specialist at the center, Ms. Ōta, the right to continue using her 

maiden name at her professional workplace, EUC. This decision was viewed as 

rather draconian by more than a few in the EUC community and strongly criticized 

by many faculty members. The EUC labor union, consisting of both faculty and 

administrative staff members, submitted a formal protest to the board of trustees on 

behalf of Ms. Ōta. Though the head administrator did not budge in his conservative 

policy, this incident paved the way for a compromise with new women faculty 

members a year later. By opposing a change in the national law that would allow 

married couples to keep separate surnames, conservative members of the Japanese 

Diet are even now fighting this battle against popular opinion in their effort to 

“protect” the “traditional Japanese household” (ie). 

A second major conflict erupted when a computer security breach forced the 

head administrator and the Media Center committee to play a heavy hand in their 

personnel decisions. In an intriguing case of alleged sabotage, Mr. Sekiguchi, the 

network specialist at the EUC Media Center, was suspected of hacking into the 

university administration offices server from outside the university firewall. 

Though this suspicion was at first largely kept secret by the president and his inner 

circle on the one hand, and Mr. Mori, the head administrator, on the other, with the 

support of the board of trustees, the president, the Media Center committee, and 

the evidence provided by the outside experts at the consulting firm, the head 

administrator openly accused Mr. Sekiguchi of shirking his responsibility as 

university network and security specialist. Though he was neither fired nor 

demoted in terms of pay scale, Mr. Sekiguchi was subsequently ostracized to a 

clerical position in the library with strict orders not to touch any of the university 

computers. Villages in Edo Japan were known to have used the weapon of social 

ostracism (murahachibu) to punish individuals and their families. Although 

allowed to remain in the village, the victims and their families were given the 

silence treatment and forbidden to participate in village activities. The “curse” was 

only ignored in the case of fire or death. Though officially still members of the 

village, they were no longer part of the community. The way of dealing with Mr. 

Sekiguchi was reminiscent of this custom—he was not fired by the university, but 

his silent penance in the library, where few people spoke to him, effectively forbid 

his participation in the EUC community. 

Mr. Sekiguchi attempted to appeal his case to the university community by 

posting a letter of petition and “supporting documents” to the home of every 

faculty and staff member. He did not do much for his own cause, however, when 

he accused the EUC labor union  of not properly coming to his defense, when in 

fact the elected board of the labor union, three faculty members, had spent hours 

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