Education and the Future of Japan

Having accepted that Japan is already a great power and recognizing that "our unease over them generally finds its inspiration in the fact that their moment in history has arrived", the book then sets out to explore where Japan is going and takes education as a focus within Japanese culture in an attempt to find the answer. In recent times, Japan, like the rest of the industrialized world, has been reappraising its educational structures and objectives. The need to encourage and admire individual achievement that would supposedly lead on to original thinking and "creativity" and therefore deal with the needs of the 21st century was one of the recommendations of Japan's own in-depth study in the late 1980s. Yet for all the West's creativity no country has matched the speed and quality of Japan's so-called "non-creative" economic ascendancy. At the time of the Meiji Restoration in 1868 Japan was better equipped than any other Asian nation for rapid economic expansion: she already had a primary education infrastructure in place and her subsequent rigorous reliance on the 19th century disciplines of rote learning, self-help and competition has put her at the top of the world league for numeracy and literacy as well as economically. Is such an educational and social value system still viable? And will it maintain Japan's ascendancy into the 21st century? Given certain reservations, the author believes it can and will.