Japan and Germany under the U.S. Occupation: A Comparative Analysis of Post-War Education Reform (review)

During the debates about how Iraqis might be assisted in designing policymaking structures and constitutional safeguards that would promote democratic development, observers repeatedly pointed to reconstructions of Germany and Japan after World War II and the Asia Pacific War as possible examples of such a process. Well-known pundit James Fallows writing in The Atlantic in November 2002 prominently pointed to this comparison. No less eminent a Japan scholar than John Dower subsequently questioned such comparisons in various popular and academic publications. While these debates have focused on the (dis)similarities between postwar Japan and Germany and postwar Iraq, most commentators have assumed that the success of the occupations of Germany and Japan was due to the foresight of policymakers and the diligent implementation of policies designed to reintegrate these defeated countries into the "family of nations" as nonthreatening and peaceful members. To any scholar of policymaking, such an assumption appears quite naive. Masako Shibata sets out to examine what exactly occurred in terms of educational policymaking during the brief U.S. occupations of Japan and Germany.

The postwar trajectory of education in Japan and Germany raises a number of important questions about the efficacy of reforms, whether they are externally imposed or homegrown. In many aspects and often paradoxically, Japanese and German education took opposite routes of development from the end of the Allied occupation onward. Both systems of education have come to be seen as playing an important role in establishing and enacting democratic principles in the postwar nation-states. To varying degrees, these democratic principles have also made access to higher education much more widespread in both countries.

Shibata emphasizes the political and historical context in which the occupation governments operated to reach her conclusion that education reforms in Japan were successful while they were less successful in Germany. Her yardstick for success is primarily whether Japanese and German education looked different after the end of the occupation periods compared to wartime educational systems. In this comparison, Shibata is almost entirely interested in structural differences, i.e., the organizational charts that describe a system of education. Although structural reforms are interwoven with substantive aims at several points during the occupation and discussed as such by Shibata, her ultimate judgment of success in Japan and lack of success in Germany rests on a survey of the structure of the educational system.

When Shibata introduces the main questions that motivated her study in the introductory chapter, she does not explicitly address the question of what "success" is for educational reforms and how one might measure this empirically. Instead, she asks what impact the reactions of Japanese and German elites to reform proposals had and what the roots of such reactions in the educational and political history of the two nations might be.

Having framed her study by these questions about the opinions of elites and their historical background, Shibata quite naturally organizes her study around a historical account of the development of state-supported education in Japan and Germany in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Her choice to present this history by alternating a discussion of the two countries over distinct periods probably serves to overemphasize some of the similarities between the two trajectories. However, given the very real broad similarities (late developing nations, state involvement in education, some shared pedagogical models), this approach seems justified. The two chapters of Part II thus discuss the roots of occupation-era Japanese reactions in educational policy of the Meiji period and the parallel roots of German educators and policymakers in Imperial Germany. As these chapters are only a slim 20 pages, these accounts hold few surprises.

Part III forms the empirical core with a chapter each on educational policies under the Allied occupations of Japan and Germany. These chapters are much more substantial than those of Part II, yet, they also hold relatively few surprises...