Divs-poole

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FOREWORD 

 

From the beginning of the 1970s, when the Japanese economy first began to take 

off, western observers became interested in those social systems in the country that 

might explain its economic growth. Education was an area on which they focused 

particular attention and, by the beginning of the 1980s, it was almost expected that 

Japan would be the first place that any new minister of education in the U.S., U.K. 

or several other European countries would visit in search of different ways of 

thinking about their own systems. 

The main focus of western observers of Japanese education was on the primary 

and secondary levels. In part, this was because children at this stage could (and 

frequently were) shown to be doing much better in international tests of 

mathematics and science than their counterparts elsewhere. In part, it was because 

government investment in education at this level was, in absolute terms, 

considerably lower than in other OECD countries but with no obvious deleterious 

effects for the nation either economically or socially. Explanations for the success 

of Japanese education ranged from cultural (that there was something in 

Confucianism that encouraged and gave high status to study that stimulated 

children, rather as in Judaism in western societies) to politico-economic (the 

educational systems were designed to meet the economic concerns of the societies 

by those who ran big business rather than simply as arenas for self-growth) to 

pedagogical (the concentration on the basics of reading, writing and arithmetic as 

well as the systematic way these were taught by well-trained teachers meant that 

all students got a good educational grounding; these systems had little truck with 

western fashions of developing individual creativity, which often serve only the 

best at the expense of the weaker student). From the mid-1980s, a large, generally 

favorable, literature written by foreign observers began to appear explaining the 

operation of a large number of East Asian education systems and not only Japan. 

Much of this literature was government-sponsored, and its findings were widely 

reported in the mass media.  

The literature on the education systems of East Asia, however, contained one 

very obvious gap. Virtually none of it referred to higher education. This was not 

because there was no higher education in these societies. Indeed, they all had well-

developed systems, and a much higher proportion of students went on to post-

compulsory and tertiary education in East Asian countries than in many European 

societies; Japanese universities for example could, and sometimes did, trace their 

histories back many centuries and, in the early 1980s, at least twice as many young 

adults in the relevant age group went on to university in Japan (which at that time 

numbered over 500 four-year and the same number of two-year institutions) than in 

 

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FOREWORD 

 

viii 

the U.K. (where there were only 44 universities and a similar number of 

polytechnics).  

For various reasons, however, Japanese higher education institutions were not 

seen as helpful in explaining Japan’s so-called economic miracle. Some indeed, 

argued the opposite—that Japanese economic growth was achieved despite its 

institutions of higher education. The negative view of Japanese higher education 

seems to have become so pervasive that it generally became accepted that there 

was virtually nothing in the system worthy of study.  

The last few years have seen a reevaluation of the importance of Japanese 

higher education and the beginnings of a new academic literature that has 

attempted to look at it in its own right and on its own terms. Most of this 

literature—and Greg Poole covers it succinctly in the analysis that follows—looks 

at why the higher education system has been reformed over the past decade and 

presents the different views of the various stakeholders in the system: the state, the 

parents, the students and the academics themselves. Poole’s own book, however, 

brings a completely new (and much needed) element to the debate in that he lays 

out in great detail how the proposed reforms have been enacted (or in many cases 

blocked) in a single Japanese private higher education institution, which he calls 

Edo University of Commerce (abbreviated to EUC), in Tokyo. In the process, he 

sheds light, in a way that has never been achieved in a monograph in English 

before, on how such universities—and it is important to remember that 75 percent 

of Japanese universities are private—actually function in practice. In particular, he 

gives us an account of the differing views of Japanese professoriate within a single 

institution, which has hitherto been almost completely missing in the academic 

literature. 

Greg Poole has been unusually well placed to piece together his account of 

EUC. As well as being an associate professor in the institution, he was also de 

facto head of the language program, head of the international program, and a 

member of the president’s “kitchen cabinet.” He managed to be both an insider and 

an outsider, and this gave him access to a huge range of both opinions and 

information. It is, however, Poole’s training as a social anthropologist that gave 

him the tools to use the data he collected in the nonjudgmental and illuminating 

fashion that follows. While some of the practices and views expressed might at 

first gloss seem puzzling to academics in other societies (although most of them 

will actually appear very familiar), Poole’s detailed ethnography allows us to see 

how they all fit together to constitute a coherent set of world views. The book will 

appeal, of course, to anyone who has ever taught or intends to teach in a Japanese 

institution and will help explain many practices that foreign professors in such 

institutions have often wondered at. Its intrinsic value, however, goes far beyond 

providing a user’s guide to such institutions, as Poole teases out the underlying 

assumptions which guide the activities of individuals and groups of actors in a 

system, which, for demographic, political and economic reasons, has been placed 

in recent years under increasing stress. We learn in the course of reading about Edo 

University of Commerce not only a great deal about the changes taking place in 

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