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Reviewed by:
  • The Politics of Structural Education Reform
  • Mark Lincicome (bio)
The Politics of Structural Education Reform. By Keith A. Nitta. Routledge, New York, 2008. xiv, 235 pages. $95.00.

The topic of education reform has suffered a curious fate in the annals of English-language scholarship on contemporary Japan over the last 20 years. The unusual attention that Nakasone Yasuhiro devoted to education reform during his tenure as prime minister (1982–87) sparked considerable interest among American and European scholars, journalists, and other observers, resulting in a series of publications over the following decade or so that are [End Page 475] still cited today. Perhaps the best-known example is Leonard Schoppa’s 1991 book,1 which analyzed that campaign as a case study of the policymaking process in Japan. Schoppa pronounced it a failure: a victim of “immobilist politics” that pitted a well-entrenched “education subgovernment”—composed of veteran officials in the Ministry of Education (MOE) and certain politicians in Nakasone’s own Liberal Democratic Party (LDP)—against Nakasone’s own ineffective coalition of “outside forces” drawn from the business community and from rival ministries.

Subsequent books, adopting a longer time frame and a different analytical model, took issue with Schoppa’s verdict. Marie Roesgaard argued in 1998 that the dearth of new education laws passed by the Diet during and after Nakasone’s term in office was not an accurate measure of the impact of the reform campaign. Her study of changes to the school curriculum that were introduced through the mid-1990s led her to conclude that the main components of Nakasone’s reform agenda had been embraced by his nemesis, the MOE, and effectively implemented through its issuance of “administrative guidelines.”2 Roesgaard’s study of educational content was followed in 2001 by another, in which author Christopher Hood sought to rehabilitate Nakasone’s legacy by rooting those curricular reforms in the distinctive “policies and ideologies” espoused by Nakasone himself.3

For reasons that are difficult to fathom, this lively debate over education reform in late twentieth-century Japan has had no counterpart in the twenty-first century among scholars writing in English, a fact that is both ironic and unfortunate. It is ironic because the most common refrain uttered by Japanese reformers throughout the 1980s and 1990s was that reform of education was vital to the country’s future competitiveness and global standing in the twenty-first century. It is unfortunate because English-language scholarship on this topic has been stuck in something of a time warp ever since.

All of this makes Keith Nitta’s The Politics of Structural Education Reform a timely addition to the English-language corpus on education in contemporary Japan. As the title suggests, it simultaneously builds upon and transcends the aforementioned works that preceded it. Like fellow political scientist Schoppa, Nitta approaches educational reform as a case study of how policy is made and of the consequences of structural reform for the distribution and exercise of authority in the policy sphere. There is no discussion of curriculum content à la Roesgaard and Hood. On the other hand, his assessment of the significance of Nakasone’s campaign is closer [End Page 476] to Roesgaard and Hood than it is to Schoppa. While agreeing with Schoppa that Nakasone “failed” to enact most of his reform proposals during his tenure as prime minister, Nitta credits Nakasone with paving the way for the eventual success of future prime ministers. By devoting much of his study to the machinations of these men and their political allies during the 1990s and 2000s, he not only dispels any misplaced notion that Japanese interest in education reform has somehow faltered in the new millennium; he also places the Nakasone era in a broader historical context.

The title of Nitta’s book hints at another distinctive feature of this study by omitting any reference to the signifiers “Japan” and “Japanese.” This is a thoroughgoing comparative study of “structural education reform” focused mainly, though not exclusively, on the United States and Japan. To be sure, earlier scholars of Japanese education, among them Benjamin Duke and Harry Wray, also employed a comparative approach, not merely as students of education reform...

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