Popular Democracy in Japan: How Gender and Community Are Changing Modern Electoral Politics

5. Gender and “Communities of Practice”: Escaping the Regulatory Boundaries of Formal Education

5 Gender and “Communities of Practice” Escaping the Regulatory Boundaries of Formal Education For my entire education, from elementary school through college, I was never interested in things that I was forced to study....I began to enjoy studying only after I had made it through the educational system and became a so-called “member of society.” If something interested me, and I could study it at my own pace, I was reasonably efficient at acquiring knowledge. Author Haruki Murakami (2008, 74)1 The women in my focus groups provide a glimpse of the wide range of activities available to women that are fundamental to building the types of social capital that “make democracy work.” Some of the women who participated in my focus groups belonged to explicitly political groups. Others belonged to groups that fulfilled a range of social functions, from consumer protection to eldercare. But many were involved in study and hobby groups that had the potential to become politicized. At the very least, these groups constitute a dense social network that can be used to mobilize voters during elections. The state recognizes the potential of these groups and 1. Murakami, the highly celebrated author of Norwegian Wood, among others, is not a woman. But, lifelong learning is not an exclusively female domain, even though I maintain that women are overrepresented among those who are self-consciously augmenting their study over the life course. Gender and “Communities of Practice” 131 has expanded its definition of lifelong learning in an effort to bring these groups under its umbrella. The Japanese state has tried, at various points along its developmental trajectory and with varying degrees of success, to harness women’s knowledge and skills to achieve its own developmental goals. But many women have used their educational resources to render their own interpretation of the state’s goals and to pave their own paths to empowerment. This work has been done in their own separate sphere, at their own pace, and on their own terms (Thomas 1985). Understanding study groups as a pedagogical space produced through exchanges between women and the state is crucial to understanding why and how my focus group participants developed a common narrative about education and improvement of self and community . Study groups are sites where female citizens disrupt established norms about what is knowledge, how it is created and transmitted, and who can legitimately claim expertise. The women in my focus groups expressed a clear discontent with the conventional life course that starts with formal education to a short stint in the workforce and ends with the advent of marriage and childbirth. They wanted to expand their range of activities in political and social life and return to the workforce. Lifelong learning, discussed in this chapter, is one venue that enables women to return to society, intellectual life, and political discussion. Arguably, there is a groundswell of demand for opportunities to extend the learning process over the life course because formal education in Japan concludes in one’s mid-twenties in the case of an advanced degree, earlier otherwise. There are no opportunities for Japanese to return to a formal school setting later in life, whether for enrichment purposes or to attain more skills for upward mobility. Accreditation matters. Whereas Americans can return to night school to complete their high school educations or attend accredited institutions—as full- or parttime students—to earn higher degrees later in life, the Japanese adult education system traditionally has not provided learning opportunities at degree-granting institutions. As the Japanese government revamps its lifelong learning infrastructure, it is creating space for new constituencies to emerge. Equipping citizens with knowledge-production resources over the life course may produce successive waves of unforeseen activism. This chapter examines Japanese women’s political participation at the site where women’s educational trajectories and state goals meet. I use the 132 Chapter 5 new directions that lifelong learning policy took in the late 1980s as a point of entry to a longer history of state interest in women’s education. Lifelong learning is one of many wide-ranging reforms adopted by the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science, and Technology over the past two decades.2 It is the only education reform policy that directly affects an older learning population. Contemporary lifelong learning builds on formal learning experiences earlier in life that can lead to new feelings of purpose in the minds...