Education, Equality, and Meritocracy in a Global Age: The Japanese Approach by Takehiko Kariya and Jeremy Rappleye (review)

As Takehiko Kariya and Jeremy Rappleye note at the start of their important book, Japan was formerly at the center of debates about educational equality and meritocracy but has attracted less attention in recent years. Kariya and Rappleye aim to reassess educational equality in Japan and to contribute to global debates by their re-evaluation of the significance of the Japanese case. Their book contains fascinating revelations that should prompt careful thought about forms of equality and the mechanisms behind them. It also makes a provocative assessment of educational reforms in contemporary Japan, which raises many questions.

The authors state that they aim to challenge what they describe as two "entrenched myths" about Japan: first, that "Japan represents an 'equal' society," and second, "that this equality arises out of specific, unique cultural configurations" (p. 12). The bulk of the book goes on to explain the processes that led to the particular form of educational "equality" that prevailed in Japan from the 1970s onward and attracted such wide international interest. This form of equality is termed by the authors "spatial equality," and they argue that it arose "not from culture, but from a very specific, relatively recent historical milieu and the financial resource allocation scheme to compulsory education that emerged out of it" (p. 12).

In chapters 2 to 6, Kariya and Rappleye give a detailed account of the educational resource allocation and standardization reforms that took place in Japan during the 1950s and explain their consequences. To contextualize the reforms, they describe the contrasting state of affairs before 1945. As they point out, until 1918 localities (shichōson) provided almost 90 per cent of funding for public education, resulting in large regional disparities. From 1918, central government began to subsidize teacher salaries. Even so, through the 1920s there remained large prefectural differences in expenditure per elementary school pupil: in 1928, for example, the national average was ¥32, but this ranged from ¥66 in Tokyo to ¥17 in Okinawa (p. 53). Efforts to improve this situation continued during the 1930s, culminating in the 1940 Law Concerning Central Government Subsidy to Compulsory Education, whereby half of the salaries of teachers in compulsory education were paid by the central government and half by the prefectural government. This fundamental approach was continued by the 1952 Law Concerning the Central Government's Share of Compulsory Education Expenses.

However, large inequalities remained, especially in class sizes. Neither before nor after 1945 was there a maximum class size, meaning that up to a third of children were being taught in classes of more than 50 pupils. In order to tackle such inequalities, an educational standardization law setting a maximum class size (as well as other maximum and minimum standards) was passed in 1958.

For Kariya and Rappleye, the subsidy and standardization laws of the 1950s constituted a particular approach to "equality" that was to have farreaching effects. They point out that the form of "equality" sought by means of maximum class size was significantly different from the approach taken in the United States. There, equality of educational opportunity was sought by means of funding per pupil. Japanese educationalists and Ministry of Education bureaucrats were well aware of this approach and indeed expressed preference for it in principle; however, it was rejected in practice because of the financial outlays it involved.

As the authors show, the results of the reforms of the 1950s were startling. The pupil-teacher ratio in public compulsory education fell consistently, from over 30 pupils per teacher in 1955, to around 15 in 2015 (pp. 94–95). Even more remarkable was the relationship between prefectures' financial strength and their educational outlays. In 1955, financially stronger prefectures spent more per pupil on education, a situation which quite quickly reversed after the 1958 standardization law. In 2005, the prefectures that spent most per elementary school pupil (Shimane...