The State Bearing Gifts: Deception and Disaffection in Japanese Higher Education (review)

This book has an unusual organization, so unusual that the author expends a number of pages explaining the structure. The first third of the book is a highly discursive series of chapters dealing with the author’s theoretical framework centered on gift giving and exchange dynamics. This section is heavy on jargon and peppered with examples drawn from around the world. A few come from Japan but the Enron debacle, the U.S. invasion of Iraq, theatricals for foreign visitors in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, British pedophiles, Russian journalism, communist party politics in Hubei, and a host of other vignettes come in rapid-fire succession. Those interested in what the author has to say about Japan may well wish to skip the first six chapters.

The remaining two-thirds of the book, beginning with chapter 7, deals primarily with one segment of Japanese higher or postsecondary education— daigaku. Only a narration of the abortive efforts to reform and “internationalize” a daigaku where the author himself taught differentiates the treatment of daigaku in this work from that in his Japanese Higher Education as Myth (M. E. Sharpe, 2002). As in his previous writing, McVeigh totally ignores one major segment of Japanese higher or postsecondary education, the senmon gakkō (vocational schools) that are increasingly popular with students and that supplement and augment daigaku. This is not a trivial omission given the increasingly common pattern of concurrent enrollment in senmon gakkō (“double schooling”), often with the explicit encouragement or cooperation of the student’s daigaku, or study at senmon gakkō for one or two years after graduation before going into the job market.

Even without this omission, this work has serious limitations. Here as in Japanese Higher Education as Myth, McVeigh uses the Japanese term daigaku rather than the English word “university.” This is to be applauded because daigaku is a broad administrative category in which only a small number of institutions would be recognized as universities based on their scale and breadth. Most Japanese daigaku are not universities covering all major fields at the graduate and undergraduate levels including medicine, engineering, agriculture, law, the hard sciences, arts, the humanities, and the social sciences. In numerical terms, most daigaku are small-scale operations, often family-run enterprises, that offer two- or four-year programs in the arts and humanities, the social sciences, home economics, or business administration with some concentrating on vocational subjects such as childcare, hotel management and catering, and even golf course management.

Unfortunately, McVeigh never really explains what his usage of the term daigaku covers, what type of institution he is familiar with, or what type of institution his sources are talking about. Particularly because he draws so heavily on his own experiences and those of peripatetic English teachers in Japan, this is a serious omission. Despite his use of the term daigaku, most readers will almost certainly assume he is writing about “universities” as these are known in the United States or the United Kingdom and contrast what McVeigh writes with their personal image of or experience with “universities” in these countries. But, while some of what McVeigh has to say may apply to daigaku as a whole, for the most part his generalizations and evidence come from small-scale liberal arts and business colleges well down on the Japanese prestige scale. He has virtually nothing to say about medical education (an undergraduate subject in Japan as in Britain), engineering, agriculture, the hard sciences, mathematics, etc. Based on the dismal picture he paints of Japanese daigaku, especially that their teaching is essentially a charade, one would not expect Japanese doctors or engineers to be even minimally competent, let alone capable of the standards that prevail in Japan.

As with his earlier book, McVeigh relies almost entirely on four types of sources to paint his picture of Japanese daigaku: his personal work experience at 10 different institutions, primarily as an English conversation...