Divs-poole

REFORM OF JAPANESE HIGHER EDUCATION 

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with students in my freshman seminar. Marina Lee-Cunin (2004, 2005) details this 

same student concern with quality of education in her rich, detailed ethnographic 

studies of a national university in Japan. As with most of their age cohort in Japan, 

or other societies for that matter, many of the young adults in my classes did not 

necessarily have a firm idea of what they would be doing in two, three, or four 

years time. Nevertheless, though they readily admit that making friends and part-

time work is an important part of their university experience (cf., Holland & 

Eisenhart 1990; Lee-Cunin 2004; Moffatt 1989; Nathan 2005; Sacks 1996), many 

of my first-year students at EUC were initially rather keen on actually studying an 

academic subject in the faculty of commerce or management.  

Such measurement of student opinion entails the novel approach, for daigaku, 

of attempting to better understand “the customer.” In this section I have provided  

a few examples of daigaku “cultural change” in the present era of societal  

pressure.  

DISCIPLINARY REFORM: ENGLISH LANGUAGE TEACHING 

Most of the pressure on English language teaching (ELT) is from the many theories 

purporting why Japanese have great difficulty in acquiring proficiency in English 

as a second language. The blame is usually placed on either the learners themselves 

or their learning environment. After all, the argument goes, motivation for learning 

English must be low in a country where more than 95 percent of the inhabitants 

speak Japanese as their first language, though granted there is a language diversity 

within the Japanese community in Japan that is seldom acknowledged in the 

popular literature and local mindset, which usually assumes a “uniqueness” of 

Japanese, a distinctiveness that in reality “relates not only to Japanese linguistic 

experience but actually to all human language” (Miller 1982, p. 26). In any event, 

there is little immediate necessity or perceived need for English, or any foreign 

language for that matter. When explaining these difficulties of ELT and learning in 

the Japanese context, observers have rightly called for an examination of cultural 

and historical influences (Koike 1978, p. 3). Unfortunately such an examination of 

the context of ELT in Japan is sometimes distorted into historically revisionist 

statements that attribute the failure to the often heard “island nation” diatribe or 

culturalist arguments that emphasize how the unique traits of Japanese people 

present a major obstacle for ELT reform. As Aspinall (2003) has pointed out, 

although such viewpoints have been recently couched in the progressive arguments 

of “language ecology,” they in fact become a self-fulfilling prophecy and tend to 

say more about the politics of ELT in Japan than about the actual historical or 

sociocultural context.  

Failure of ELT in Japan 

On the surface, the lack of success with ELT in Japan appears discordant with the 

fact that Japanese education shows relatively good results in other areas. Japan is 

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CHAPTER 2 

famous for “borrowing” and “copying” technology, and anthropologists have noted 

that such “copying” is an important theme in Japan, in general (e.g., Cox 2007; 

Hendry 2000a), and in Japanese education in particular—“‘imitation is the highest 

form of praise’ in the Japanese cultural logic” (Rohlen & LeTendre 1996a, p. 371). 

In fact, the Japanese language itself contains fully 13 percent loan words, mostly 

from English (Honna 1995, p. 45). Why then has there been such a widespread 

failure in effectively learning to “imitate” the English language? For the past 

century lay persons and scholars alike have proposed various theories to explain 

this paradox.  

Aspinall (2003) summarizes the five major purported reasons for ELT failure in 

Japan, arguments of both why English education has “failed” and why Japanese 

speakers of English as a second language (L2) are inept. Any English teacher in 

Japan would most likely offer one or more of these as reasons if asked why 

Japanese cannot speak English well: 1) There is a great linguistic disparity between 

Indo-European languages, such as English, and Japanese, an Altaic language; 2) 

there is lack of real need for English in a monoglottal society such as Japan; 3) the 

predominant ELT methodology has been grammar/translation, which is not an 

effective way to teach communicative skills; 4) the culture of the language 

classroom in Japan precludes effective language learning; 5) there is an exotic and 

fashionable image of English, which emphasizes entertainment value rather than 

the hard work necessary for effective language learning. 

Loveday (1996, pp. 95–99) probably goes furthest in explaining the 

sociolinguistics behind language education failure by placing ELT into the context 

of language contact in Japan. Reiterating some of the reasons summarized above, 

he concludes that Japan is a case of a “non-bilingualism” in a “language contact 

setting” because of deficiencies that are related to 1) the system of education, 2) 

the teachers, 3) the institutions, and 4) the sociolinguistic environment. He argues 

that the education system has failed because of the emphasis on grammar and 

translation, the washback of entrance exams, and a history of reductionist 

concentration on receptive skills for decoding foreign texts. Teachers are at fault 

because of their too-often limited proficiency in English, lack of overseas 

experience and opportunities for practical training (faculty development, or FD as 

it is often glossed at universities), and for perpetuating large, mixed-ability classes 

with a strict syllabus and time limits using outdated, boring texts prescribed by the 

Ministry of Education. An institutional conservatism inhibits effective English-

language learning—the local classroom norm of teacher-centered lecturing, 

collective conformity, emphasis on rote-learning methods and absolute correctness, 

and students motivated only by the demands of university entrance exams. Years of 

focus on prescriptive notions of grammar in both the Japanese classroom and 

linguistic research have resulted in a widespread belief that translation is a 

mechanical process accomplished through word-for-word rendering of Japanese 

into English (or other foreign language). Finally, sociolinguistic attitudes hamper 

proper second-language learning, because of 1) the linguistic distance between 

Japanese and English, 2) culturally specific styles of expression and interaction 

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