Educational Progress and Social Problems in Japan

In hardly any year since the foundation of modern Japan has there been such a positive and confident stocktaking. There have been much greater reversals of policy, to be sure. The most disastrous of these was when popular dreams of empire and ultimate victory were atom-bombed out of existence-a searing scar still tormenting any Japanese mind after twenty years; but there has never been a time when so much of the making of the future has so clearly been in Japanese hands, to be determined by Japanese interpretation of all-human opportunities, and to be based upon Japanese modification of the school traditions of Europe and the United States. In the immediately post-war period the American dispensation was paramount-inevitably. The American image is still supreme in every bit of advertising, especially for the Japanese woman. To be a pale foreigner means to be taken for an American, not with hostility but with the sort of shy welcome that makes hospitality delightful, or prompts gaily clad children to share with you their candies packaged American-style. The difference is, of course, that almost everything you are offered is 'Made in Japan '. Increasingly, despite the obvious American externals of the 6-3-3 school system followed by 4 years of college, and despite all the genuine talk about democracy or equality of the sexes or dedication to peaceful pursuits, the school system's adaptation to the future of Japan is also being made in Japan. Wholesale copying has gone for good, as it has from industry. One does not copy an article when one thinks an improvement has been made upon it. The modern Japan of transistors and servo-mechanisms, of super-express trains running steadily at Ioo m.p.h. on a brand-new track, of monorails and super-highways on a post-Detroit and post-Los Angeles pattern, has passed well beyond the stage of copying. Some less concrete advances, as in television for amusement or educational purposes, can claim to lead the world. Currently, surveys are being undertaken for a five-mile bridge across Tokyo Bay and a 4265 ft suspension bridge near Kobe. There seems no end to the brave new world's ambitions in Japan. Ship-building, textiles, chemicals, cars, manufactured goods and processed foods, the highest-ever bumper crops of rice put Japan so far forward that it is hard to remember we are in Asia and in a country disastrously defeated in 1945

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• Zengakuren

  Michiya Shimbori•Sociology of Education•1964

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