Hikaru Komatsu
Biographic Data
| ID | 357204 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Hikaru Komatsu |
| GIVEN NAMES | Hikaru |
| FAMILY NAME | Komatsu |
| SIGNATURE | KOMATSU H |
| AFFILIATIONS | Kyoto University |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-1195-1648 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 21 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 103 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 21 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1998 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
The OECD’s shift towards environmental sustainability: Assessing the Agency in the Anthropocene report
The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) has recently deepened its engagement with environmental issues, introducing a new vision in the Agency in the Anthropocene report. This vision underpins the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) 2025 framework. This study critically examines the new vision, identifying three key advancements: (1) the centrality of the environment, (2) a call for radical societal cha…
School food, sustainability, and interdependence: Learning from Japan’s Shokuiku
As the sustainability imperative looms, mainstream educational research in the English-speaking world continues a long tradition of failing to see food as integral to education. Japan’s tradition of Shokuiku (food education) stands in stark contrast, providing an external reference point to direct critical attention on Anglo-American school food philosophies, policy, and practice. This article analyses Shokuiku, tracing the genealogy of Japan’s 2…
From student-centred learning (SCL) to school as learning community (SLC)? Democracy, (neo)liberalism, and ‘listening’ to others
The spread of neoliberal policies across East Asia in the mid-1990s generated a counter-movement among East Asian scholars and practitioners centred on the ‘School as Learning Community’ (SLC). Today, thousands of schools across the region have joined the movement, spreading outward from Japan to Korea, China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore, Vietnam, and Indonesia. Herein we review the philosophy and practice of SLC, highlighting how it replaces th…
A radical proposal: Evidence-based SDG 4 discussions
The OECD’s ‘Well-being 2030’ agenda: How Pisa's affective turn gets lost in translation
Well-being 2030 has become the latest rationale for the OECD’s education work. This vision has given rise to new assessments of student well-being beginning with PISA 2015. The OECD, recognising the problems of PISA 2015, conceptualised a wider student well-being construct in PISA 2018, and attempted to measure ‘students’ feelings’. However, analyses of the OECD’s affective turn reveal major problems remain. Our critique is empirically underpinne…
Measuring the Transformation of University Students’ Self-Construal for Greater Environmental Sustainability
University campus sustainability projects frequently aim to promote ecological behavior of their community members. However, these projects rarely consider the level of students’ self-construal, the view of self held by members of the university community (i.e., whether the self is viewed as independent or interdependent with nature). This runs counter to the findings in psychology that people’s behavior is strongly affected by their self-constru…
Is happiness possible in a degrowth society
Degrowth, i.e., a planned reduction in environmental impacts and economic scale, is increasingly discussed as a viable option for achieving sustainability. Yet, opponents counter that degrowth entails declines in economic standards, which will, in turn, reduce individual happiness and collective wellbeing. Our study explores the existing theoretical debate empirically, examining the case of Japan. There long-term decline in economic standards has…
Student-Centered Learning and Sustainability: Solution or Problem
While discussions surrounding education for sustainable development (ESD) are diverse, most scholars and policy makers view student-centered learning (SCL) as axiomatic. In contrast, we argue that promoting SCL potentially stymies educational contributions to sustainability by extending a culturally specific belief in ontological individualism. We first highlight that countries committed to SCL tend to be dominated by ontological individualism an…
Rearticulating Pisa
The OECD’s PISA exercise has by now been widely critiqued. Whilst we agree with most concerns, we begin with the assumption that PISA will remain an enduring and powerful feature of the global educational landscape. Even if the PISA test itself were discontinued, a similar large-scale quantitative assessment exercise would soon arise to take its place. As such, we focus herein on strategies for rearticulating ILSAs such as PISA: the creative use …
Is shadow education the driver of East Asia’s high performance on comparative learning assessments
East Asian students consistently top comparative assessments of academic achievement. Yet, rather than attempting to develop more sophisticated understandings of this difference, the most common reaction is to attribute East Asian performance to longer study hours and/or the attendance at schools focused on academic skill enhancement and test preparation (i.e., juku). Herein we seek to contribute to a richer debate both by presenting new data and…
Towards (comparative) educational research for a finite future
Educational scholars, particularly those working in comparative education, have largely failed to recognise, let alone discuss, the impending finite-ness of global resources. The field continues to operate on an assumption of infinite resources, an implicit cultural horizon in place since at least the Western Enlightenment. It has missed the epochal shift that is now upon us; unable to contribute to the deep transformation of research and practic…
Better policies for better lives’: Constructive critique of the OECD’s (mis)measure of student well-being
Facing increasing critique that PISA focuses too narrowly on cognitive achievement and human/knowledge capital, the OECD has recently shifted some of its focus to student happiness. The 2017 Students’ Well-Being report distinguishes between ‘happy schools’ and ‘unhappy schools’, showing that among students who combined high performance and life satisfaction, northern European countries topped the charts. Meanwhile, students in East Asian countrie…
Is bullying and suicide a problem for East Asia's schools? Evidence from TIMSS and Pisa
Herein we examine the dominant image of East Asian schools as marked by a darker side of widespread bullying, leading to high rates of youth suicide. First outlining the substantial literature on bullying in the English language, we turn to show how – paradoxically – the rates of bullying and suicide are no higher, or in nearly all cases, lower than both Anglo-American systems (Australia, England, New Zealand, United States) and high PISA perform…
Refuting the OECD-World Bank development narrative: Was East Asia’s ‘Economic Miracle’ primarily driven by education quality and cognitive skills
Founded on several highly influential quantitative studies, the past decade has witnessed the OECD and World Bank increasingly converge on the view that cognitive levels of students and education quality, as proxied by international large-scale assessments (ILSAs), are the primary determinant of national economic growth worldwide. More recent OECD and World Bank pronouncements have further suggested these dynamics are clearly illustrated in East …
Is knowledge capital theory degenerate? Piaac, Pisa, and economic growth
Extending recent analyses using PISA data, the current study utilises the OECD’s Survey of Adult Skills (PIAAC) to test the central claims of knowledge capital theory. PIAAC has a distinct advantage over PISA in that it more directly tests levels of purported ‘knowledge capital’ across an entire national workforce, rather than offering approximations based on the performance of 15-year-old students. Findings from our two original studies reported…
Culture and the Independent Self: Obstacles to environmental sustainability
Is exam hell the cause of high academic achievement in East Asia? The case of Japan and the case for transcending stereotypes
High student achievement across East Asia is often explained as an outcome of highly competitive, stress‐inducing college entrance exams across the region. This ‘exam hell’ drives students to study longer and harder than their peers worldwide, a race that leads—unsurprisingly—to higher marks in international comparisons such as the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). Yet, the race comes at a considerable cost: psychological pre…
Did the shift to computer-based testing in Pisa 2015 affect reading scores? A View from East Asia
Results of PISA 2015 released December 2016 revealed a major oddity: reading scores in several of the ‘leading’ East Asian countries had apparently plummeted (Hong Kong —18 points, South Korea —19
A new global policy regime founded on invalid statistics? Hanushek, Woessmann, Pisa, and economic growth
Several recent, highly influential comparative studies have made strong statistical claims that improvements on global learning assessments such as PISA will lead to higher GDP growth rates. These claims have provided the primary source of legitimation for policy reforms championed by leading international organisations, most notably the World Bank and OECD. To date there have been several critiques but these have been too limited to challenge th…
Living on borrowed time: Rethinking temporality, self, nihilism, and schooling
Seeking to contribute to recent attempts to rethink the deepest foundations of the field, this paper offers news ways of contemplating time, specifically its relations to self, nihilism, and schooling. We briefly review how some leading Western thinkers have contemplated time before detailing Japanese scholars who have offered divergent, original, and arguably more sophisticated, theoretical accounts. We then illustrate these ideas by sketching h…
A Normative, Community-Based Study of Mini-Mental State in Elderly Adults: The Effect of Age and Educational Level
We investigated community-based data of the Mini-Mental State Examination (MMSE) scores of elderly residents along with the effects of age and educational level. MMSE was planned for all residents over 65 years of age in a town in northern Japan. The number of elders who took the MMSE was 2,266 (90%). The score significantly declined with age and lower educational level, although no effect of sex was apparent. For the MMSE subitems, all the value…
A new global policy regime founded on invalid statistics? Hanushek, Woessmann, Pisa, and economic growth
Several recent, highly influential comparative studies have made strong statistical claims that improvements on global learning assessments such as PISA will lead to higher GDP growth rates. These claims have provided the primary source of legitimation for policy reforms championed by leading international organisations, most notably the World Bank and OECD. To date there have been several critiques but these have been too limited to challenge th…
Living on borrowed time: Rethinking temporality, self, nihilism, and schooling
Seeking to contribute to recent attempts to rethink the deepest foundations of the field, this paper offers news ways of contemplating time, specifically its relations to self, nihilism, and schooling. We briefly review how some leading Western thinkers have contemplated time before detailing Japanese scholars who have offered divergent, original, and arguably more sophisticated, theoretical accounts. We then illustrate these ideas by sketching h…
Towards (comparative) educational research for a finite future
Educational scholars, particularly those working in comparative education, have largely failed to recognise, let alone discuss, the impending finite-ness of global resources. The field continues to operate on an assumption of infinite resources, an implicit cultural horizon in place since at least the Western Enlightenment. It has missed the epochal shift that is now upon us; unable to contribute to the deep transformation of research and practic…
Better policies for better lives’: Constructive critique of the OECD’s (mis)measure of student well-being
Facing increasing critique that PISA focuses too narrowly on cognitive achievement and human/knowledge capital, the OECD has recently shifted some of its focus to student happiness. The 2017 Students’ Well-Being report distinguishes between ‘happy schools’ and ‘unhappy schools’, showing that among students who combined high performance and life satisfaction, northern European countries topped the charts. Meanwhile, students in East Asian countrie…
Culture and the Independent Self: Obstacles to environmental sustainability
Is happiness possible in a degrowth society
Degrowth, i.e., a planned reduction in environmental impacts and economic scale, is increasingly discussed as a viable option for achieving sustainability. Yet, opponents counter that degrowth entails declines in economic standards, which will, in turn, reduce individual happiness and collective wellbeing. Our study explores the existing theoretical debate empirically, examining the case of Japan. There long-term decline in economic standards has…
Is knowledge capital theory degenerate? Piaac, Pisa, and economic growth
Extending recent analyses using PISA data, the current study utilises the OECD’s Survey of Adult Skills (PIAAC) to test the central claims of knowledge capital theory. PIAAC has a distinct advantage over PISA in that it more directly tests levels of purported ‘knowledge capital’ across an entire national workforce, rather than offering approximations based on the performance of 15-year-old students. Findings from our two original studies reported…
Did the shift to computer-based testing in Pisa 2015 affect reading scores? A View from East Asia
Results of PISA 2015 released December 2016 revealed a major oddity: reading scores in several of the ‘leading’ East Asian countries had apparently plummeted (Hong Kong —18 points, South Korea —19
A radical proposal: Evidence-based SDG 4 discussions
The OECD’s ‘Well-being 2030’ agenda: How Pisa's affective turn gets lost in translation
Well-being 2030 has become the latest rationale for the OECD’s education work. This vision has given rise to new assessments of student well-being beginning with PISA 2015. The OECD, recognising the problems of PISA 2015, conceptualised a wider student well-being construct in PISA 2018, and attempted to measure ‘students’ feelings’. However, analyses of the OECD’s affective turn reveal major problems remain. Our critique is empirically underpinne…
Rearticulating Pisa
The OECD’s PISA exercise has by now been widely critiqued. Whilst we agree with most concerns, we begin with the assumption that PISA will remain an enduring and powerful feature of the global educational landscape. Even if the PISA test itself were discontinued, a similar large-scale quantitative assessment exercise would soon arise to take its place. As such, we focus herein on strategies for rearticulating ILSAs such as PISA: the creative use …
Is bullying and suicide a problem for East Asia's schools? Evidence from TIMSS and Pisa
Herein we examine the dominant image of East Asian schools as marked by a darker side of widespread bullying, leading to high rates of youth suicide. First outlining the substantial literature on bullying in the English language, we turn to show how – paradoxically – the rates of bullying and suicide are no higher, or in nearly all cases, lower than both Anglo-American systems (Australia, England, New Zealand, United States) and high PISA perform…
Refuting the OECD-World Bank development narrative: Was East Asia’s ‘Economic Miracle’ primarily driven by education quality and cognitive skills
Founded on several highly influential quantitative studies, the past decade has witnessed the OECD and World Bank increasingly converge on the view that cognitive levels of students and education quality, as proxied by international large-scale assessments (ILSAs), are the primary determinant of national economic growth worldwide. More recent OECD and World Bank pronouncements have further suggested these dynamics are clearly illustrated in East …
Is exam hell the cause of high academic achievement in East Asia? The case of Japan and the case for transcending stereotypes
High student achievement across East Asia is often explained as an outcome of highly competitive, stress‐inducing college entrance exams across the region. This ‘exam hell’ drives students to study longer and harder than their peers worldwide, a race that leads—unsurprisingly—to higher marks in international comparisons such as the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). Yet, the race comes at a considerable cost: psychological pre…
A Normative, Community-Based Study of Mini-Mental State in Elderly Adults: The Effect of Age and Educational Level
We investigated community-based data of the Mini-Mental State Examination (MMSE) scores of elderly residents along with the effects of age and educational level. MMSE was planned for all residents over 65 years of age in a town in northern Japan. The number of elders who took the MMSE was 2,266 (90%). The score significantly declined with age and lower educational level, although no effect of sex was apparent. For the MMSE subitems, all the value…
A Normative, Community-Based Study of Mini-Mental State in Elderly Adults: The Effect of Age and Educational Level
We investigated community-based data of the Mini-Mental State Examination (MMSE) scores of elderly residents along with the effects of age and educational level. MMSE was planned for all residents over 65 years of age in a town in northern Japan. The number of elders who took the MMSE was 2,266 (90%). The score significantly declined with age and lower educational level, although no effect of sex was apparent. For the MMSE subitems, all the value…
Living on borrowed time: Rethinking temporality, self, nihilism, and schooling
Seeking to contribute to recent attempts to rethink the deepest foundations of the field, this paper offers news ways of contemplating time, specifically its relations to self, nihilism, and schooling. We briefly review how some leading Western thinkers have contemplated time before detailing Japanese scholars who have offered divergent, original, and arguably more sophisticated, theoretical accounts. We then illustrate these ideas by sketching h…
Did the shift to computer-based testing in Pisa 2015 affect reading scores? A View from East Asia
Results of PISA 2015 released December 2016 revealed a major oddity: reading scores in several of the ‘leading’ East Asian countries had apparently plummeted (Hong Kong —18 points, South Korea —19
A new global policy regime founded on invalid statistics? Hanushek, Woessmann, Pisa, and economic growth
Several recent, highly influential comparative studies have made strong statistical claims that improvements on global learning assessments such as PISA will lead to higher GDP growth rates. These claims have provided the primary source of legitimation for policy reforms championed by leading international organisations, most notably the World Bank and OECD. To date there have been several critiques but these have been too limited to challenge th…
Is exam hell the cause of high academic achievement in East Asia? The case of Japan and the case for transcending stereotypes
High student achievement across East Asia is often explained as an outcome of highly competitive, stress‐inducing college entrance exams across the region. This ‘exam hell’ drives students to study longer and harder than their peers worldwide, a race that leads—unsurprisingly—to higher marks in international comparisons such as the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). Yet, the race comes at a considerable cost: psychological pre…
Refuting the OECD-World Bank development narrative: Was East Asia’s ‘Economic Miracle’ primarily driven by education quality and cognitive skills
Founded on several highly influential quantitative studies, the past decade has witnessed the OECD and World Bank increasingly converge on the view that cognitive levels of students and education quality, as proxied by international large-scale assessments (ILSAs), are the primary determinant of national economic growth worldwide. More recent OECD and World Bank pronouncements have further suggested these dynamics are clearly illustrated in East …
Is knowledge capital theory degenerate? Piaac, Pisa, and economic growth
Extending recent analyses using PISA data, the current study utilises the OECD’s Survey of Adult Skills (PIAAC) to test the central claims of knowledge capital theory. PIAAC has a distinct advantage over PISA in that it more directly tests levels of purported ‘knowledge capital’ across an entire national workforce, rather than offering approximations based on the performance of 15-year-old students. Findings from our two original studies reported…
Culture and the Independent Self: Obstacles to environmental sustainability
Is shadow education the driver of East Asia’s high performance on comparative learning assessments
East Asian students consistently top comparative assessments of academic achievement. Yet, rather than attempting to develop more sophisticated understandings of this difference, the most common reaction is to attribute East Asian performance to longer study hours and/or the attendance at schools focused on academic skill enhancement and test preparation (i.e., juku). Herein we seek to contribute to a richer debate both by presenting new data and…
Towards (comparative) educational research for a finite future
Educational scholars, particularly those working in comparative education, have largely failed to recognise, let alone discuss, the impending finite-ness of global resources. The field continues to operate on an assumption of infinite resources, an implicit cultural horizon in place since at least the Western Enlightenment. It has missed the epochal shift that is now upon us; unable to contribute to the deep transformation of research and practic…
Better policies for better lives’: Constructive critique of the OECD’s (mis)measure of student well-being
Facing increasing critique that PISA focuses too narrowly on cognitive achievement and human/knowledge capital, the OECD has recently shifted some of its focus to student happiness. The 2017 Students’ Well-Being report distinguishes between ‘happy schools’ and ‘unhappy schools’, showing that among students who combined high performance and life satisfaction, northern European countries topped the charts. Meanwhile, students in East Asian countrie…
Is bullying and suicide a problem for East Asia's schools? Evidence from TIMSS and Pisa
Herein we examine the dominant image of East Asian schools as marked by a darker side of widespread bullying, leading to high rates of youth suicide. First outlining the substantial literature on bullying in the English language, we turn to show how – paradoxically – the rates of bullying and suicide are no higher, or in nearly all cases, lower than both Anglo-American systems (Australia, England, New Zealand, United States) and high PISA perform…
Student-Centered Learning and Sustainability: Solution or Problem
While discussions surrounding education for sustainable development (ESD) are diverse, most scholars and policy makers view student-centered learning (SCL) as axiomatic. In contrast, we argue that promoting SCL potentially stymies educational contributions to sustainability by extending a culturally specific belief in ontological individualism. We first highlight that countries committed to SCL tend to be dominated by ontological individualism an…
Rearticulating Pisa
The OECD’s PISA exercise has by now been widely critiqued. Whilst we agree with most concerns, we begin with the assumption that PISA will remain an enduring and powerful feature of the global educational landscape. Even if the PISA test itself were discontinued, a similar large-scale quantitative assessment exercise would soon arise to take its place. As such, we focus herein on strategies for rearticulating ILSAs such as PISA: the creative use …
Measuring the Transformation of University Students’ Self-Construal for Greater Environmental Sustainability
University campus sustainability projects frequently aim to promote ecological behavior of their community members. However, these projects rarely consider the level of students’ self-construal, the view of self held by members of the university community (i.e., whether the self is viewed as independent or interdependent with nature). This runs counter to the findings in psychology that people’s behavior is strongly affected by their self-constru…
Is happiness possible in a degrowth society
Degrowth, i.e., a planned reduction in environmental impacts and economic scale, is increasingly discussed as a viable option for achieving sustainability. Yet, opponents counter that degrowth entails declines in economic standards, which will, in turn, reduce individual happiness and collective wellbeing. Our study explores the existing theoretical debate empirically, examining the case of Japan. There long-term decline in economic standards has…
A radical proposal: Evidence-based SDG 4 discussions
The OECD’s ‘Well-being 2030’ agenda: How Pisa's affective turn gets lost in translation
Well-being 2030 has become the latest rationale for the OECD’s education work. This vision has given rise to new assessments of student well-being beginning with PISA 2015. The OECD, recognising the problems of PISA 2015, conceptualised a wider student well-being construct in PISA 2018, and attempted to measure ‘students’ feelings’. However, analyses of the OECD’s affective turn reveal major problems remain. Our critique is empirically underpinne…
From student-centred learning (SCL) to school as learning community (SLC)? Democracy, (neo)liberalism, and ‘listening’ to others
The spread of neoliberal policies across East Asia in the mid-1990s generated a counter-movement among East Asian scholars and practitioners centred on the ‘School as Learning Community’ (SLC). Today, thousands of schools across the region have joined the movement, spreading outward from Japan to Korea, China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore, Vietnam, and Indonesia. Herein we review the philosophy and practice of SLC, highlighting how it replaces th…
School food, sustainability, and interdependence: Learning from Japan’s Shokuiku
As the sustainability imperative looms, mainstream educational research in the English-speaking world continues a long tradition of failing to see food as integral to education. Japan’s tradition of Shokuiku (food education) stands in stark contrast, providing an external reference point to direct critical attention on Anglo-American school food philosophies, policy, and practice. This article analyses Shokuiku, tracing the genealogy of Japan’s 2…
The OECD’s shift towards environmental sustainability: Assessing the Agency in the Anthropocene report
The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) has recently deepened its engagement with environmental issues, introducing a new vision in the Agency in the Anthropocene report. This vision underpins the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) 2025 framework. This study critically examines the new vision, identifying three key advancements: (1) the centrality of the environment, (2) a call for radical societal cha…
Political science (17 works) · Sociology (13 works) · Psychology (11 works) · Economics (7 works) · Global Educational Policies and Reforms (7 works) · Law (7 works) · Law (6 works) · China (5 works) · East Asia (5 works) · Mathematics education (5 works)