Divs-poole

INTRODUCTION 

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Liberal Arts, of which the author was a member, plays strictly a supportive role to 

the other two faculties, and while there are numerous classes offered in the 

humanities and sciences, students can only read for a degree in one of the business 

faculties.  As elaborated below in Chapter 1, this faculty configuration is a vestige 

of the “general education” (kyōyō) curriculum in many Japanese universities that 

resulted from the prewar post-secondary prep schools (yoka) and secondary schools 

(kōtōgakkō) merging with the specialized HE programs (senmon) after WWII. 

There is also a small graduate program, which offers a masters and Ph.D. degree in 

business management on a full- or part-time (nights and weekends) basis, normally 

enrolling working adults from the Tokyo business community rather than students 

directly from undergraduate programs. 

For the most part, since there is no student representation at a departmental or 

institutional level, the community is dichotomized into student (gakusei) and 

professor (sensei) groups, both having a contrasting cosmology (see also Lee-

Cunin 2004). This is unlike British and American universities, which tend to have 

much stronger student representation, at least on paper. That being said, 

anthropologists going “undercover” to examine the social worlds of the American 

undergraduate student (Moffatt 1989; Nathan 2005) have shown in their 

ethnographic accounts that there is a similar “gap” in the U.S. (even with student 

representation), and faculty are certainly not very aware of the realities of student 

college life. 

Many of the students are graduates of commercial high schools, certainly not 

“college material” in the days before the massification of HE in Japan, and even 

today there is a decidedly “vocational” stigma attached to these schools. In what is 

one of the finest educational ethnographies of its kind, Japan’s High Schools, 

Rohlen (1983) convincingly demonstrated how Japanese education, although 

arguably egalitarian and meritocratic through the compulsory levels of primary and 

lower secondary school, has a well-developed system of academic stratification at 

the upper secondary school level. “High school entrance exams then sort each age 

cohort into what amounts to an eight- to ten-tier high school ranking system” 

(Rohlen 1983, p. 308). Compared to countries like Germany, for example, 

commercial and vocational high schools have a rather low status in this strict 

hierarchy; most are probably in the lower percentiles of this high school ranking 

system in Japan. Since EUC is a commercial college, many of the students come 

from commercial high schools. 

 Some students have spent a year, occasionally more, as a “lordless samurai” 

(rōnin) after failing in their first attempt, cramming to sit the entrance exams at a 

more elite university before “giving up” and accepting a place at EUC. This is not 

often the first choice for many students. Because of its long history and highly 

acclaimed (but now defunct) upper secondary school (i.e., high school), 

historically Edo Gakuen has had quite a few rather illustrious graduates in the 

business world. However, presently EUC is definitely well down on the hierarchy 

of Japanese higher education institutions, usually ranked as a third- or fourth-tier 

university. Because of the common belief that Japanese society is a gakureki 

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INTRODUCTION 

shakai

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 (credentialized society), many students are hesitant to lower their 

standards and apply to a third- or fourth-rate university. There are, however, a 

small number of academically oriented students that find themselves at EUC 

because they either decided not to attend a larger, more prestigious institution for a 

number of reasons, or, more likely, they did not do well on their entrance exams 

and were forced to apply to and choose a less-competitive institution. There is also 

a group of international students (ryūgakusei), mostly from ASEAN countries. 

Some of these students are successful at the school despite the fact they are in a 

second language (L2) environment, while others struggle for lack of institutional 

support. 

There are no dormitory accommodations at EUC, so it is, like most such 

institutions in Japan, a commuting school. The majority of the students live with 

their families and commute by train every day. Although a few students grew up 

nearby and can therefore travel by bicycle or short train ride, EUC students often 

end up traveling an hour or two from the more affordable “bed towns” surrounding 

the Tokyo metropolis. Students whose families are from distant prefectures must 

rent apartments nearby and live alone. This accounts for a fair proportion of the 

students. Even the simplest, tiny one-room flats begin at ¥40,000 to ¥50,000 a 

month,

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 so this is not a preferable option for most students, at least economically, 

even though the tuition fees are about ¥700,000 per year, fairly average for a 

private institution. 

EUC PROFESSORS 

A salient feature of the EUC “professoriate culture” is that there is a very striking, 

and important, distinction between “core” and “periphery” faculty at the university. 

EUC employs 50–60 “full-time” (i.e., tenured)

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 and over 100 “part-time” (i.e., 

adjunct) faculty. Full-time staff teach between three and eight (more for a few 

professors with responsibilities in the graduate program) 90-minute classes (koma) 

per week in addition to various committee and departmental responsibilities. The 

Foreign Language Department (FLG, as it is often referred to by its faculty 

members),

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 of which the author was a member, comprises six full-time and nearly 

30 part-time professors. The six full-time members of the FLG have between 7 to 

20 years experience at the university. In addition to teaching between five and 

seven classes per week, all six professors are responsible for committee work, 

including the chairing of campus-wide committees. There is some resentment with 

the committee work. It is not always taken seriously. One full-time professor 

commented to me that “X-sensei is hardly involved in the committee he chairs so 

does he really deserve to be collecting the extra allowance?!”

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The adjunct, part-time faculty at EUC can be divided into two groups: those 

with full-time positions at other schools (the minority), and professors who have a 

full schedule of entirely adjunct work (the majority). Most part-timers have as 

much experience teaching at universities as the full-time faculty. In the case of the 

FLG, the resources that 25 part-time professionals might bring to the department 

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