A survey by the Japanese Ministry of Education reported that more than 50% of all middle school students received private tuition in after school "cram schools" or juku in 1993. No book or even article on Japanese education is complete without a reference to this "shadow education" or the "examination hell" that it forms a part of. Yet, the English-language and, more surprisingly, the Japanese-language literature on the subject includes few social-scientific examinations of extra-school, private tuition.
I'm investigating this role of shadow education in Japanese socialization in relation to the school-based curriculum. How does for-profit education fit into policy-making regarding the education system and the economy? Does the teaching content in cram school courses merely reflect a market-driven response to state-prescriptions to "teach to the test", as such prescriptions are spreading throughout the world? Are there differences between commercial, largely metropolitan cram school chains and small "neighborhood juku" in terms of their role in the socialization of youth? How do parents' expectations of official education and of shadow education differ and does this difference vary by rural vs. urban locations?
Over the past five years I've visited over 40 juku in the Kanto (Tokyo and surrounding prefectures) and Kansai (Kobe, Kyoto, Osaka and surrounding prefectures) areas as well as in Hiroshima and Shimane Prefecture. During these visits I have conducted numerous interviews with the owner-operators of small juku and have observed classroom instruction in all the juku. In the eyes of some of my interlocutors in the juku world, this makes me the person in the world who has seen the most juku from the inside. This project ( English/Japanese) is funded as a Standard Research Grant by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC).
I am beginning to draw a number of conclusions from this research. One of the fundamental dynamics that is leading to the on-going growth of supplementary education in Japan, and the apparent rapid growth of suppleentary education around the world, is a lack of confidence in public education. I am now beginning to wonder to what extent public policy and especially the "small government" credo that emanated from the Reagan/Thatcher years is implicated in this. I am also beginning to wonder what the consequences of such a decline of confidence (not trust) may be in Japan and elsewhere.
One of the very interesting versions of that question about confidence and its links with policy has led me to think about a comparison between Japan, South Korea and Taiwan, all three countries with highly-institutionalized supplementary education sectors. While supplementary education looks quite similar across these three countries, their policies vis-a-vis juku, hakwon, and buxiban, vary from willful ignorance (Japan), to aggressive counter measures (South Korea), via mild observation (Taiwan). This is one of the immediate extensions I'm considering for my on-going research on supplementary education, esp. given the growing interest in this area world-wide, a topic that a workshop I'm co-organizing with Janice Aurini and Scott Davies at the University of Waterloo in June 2010 will address.
An alternative direction for developing this research agenda would be to swtich from a supply-side to a demand-side focus on supplementary education. Currently, I have looked exclusively at supplementary education providers, not at consumers, i.e. students and parents. Clearly, my sense that a lack of confidence in public education is implicated in the growth of supplementary education is best studied by looking at these consumers. Here, comparisons of parental expectations of students between Japan and Canada might be instructive and very interesting, particularly because there are a lot of changes in this regard in Canada, in part linked to immigrant populations importing supplementary education, especially from East Asia.
For a long time I have harboured a fleeting interest in things Mongolian. Given Canadian companies' involvement in the resource sector in the Mongolian economy, Mongolia has become an area of intesified interested in Canada broadly and in Vancouver especially. I am planning to develop my fleeting interest into a research project that would examine aspects of Mongolian educational policy-making. Building on my prior work on educational policy in Japan, I am interested in examining Mongolian educational policy focusing esp. on textbooks, secondary and higher education reform, as well as the impact of the deregulation of higher education. On my somewhat frequent visits to Ulaanbaatar I continue to be amazed at the number of "universities" in the capital and at the number of paying students these "universities" have.
Through teaching a course on mining regulation in Mongolia as part of our MA in Asia Pacific Policy Studies, I have also become very interested in the area of mining regulation and natural resource regulation in Asia more broadly. The challenges posed by the very large number of small-scale (artisinal) gold miners in Mongolia is of particular interest in this regard. Together with Charles Krusekopf (RoyalRoads University) I am specifically looking at options for an expansion and tigher specification of the Mongolian Development Fund. In the Spring of 2010 I am supervising a graduate project that is focused on mine closure policy recommendations for Mongolia.
As the co-ordinator of the IAR's Program on Inner Asia, I convene the Mongolia Lecture Series. Together with Tsering Shakya (IAR) and Craig Janes (Health Sciences, SFU) I organized a lecture series on "Tibet-Mongolia Links in Religion and Medicine" for the academic year 2007-08.
On the 35th anniversary of diplomatic relations between Mongolian and Canada in November 2008, we hosted a conference on "Contemporary Mongolia - Transitions, Development and Social Transformations".
I have I examined portrayals of the nation in education in Japan and the Germanys. The dissertation was based on data drawn from history curricula and textbooks in the three countries from 1945 to 2005. I found that the substantive orientation of portrayals of the nation with its implications for the construction of national identity is determined by three factors at ascending levels of institutional analysis: (1) the construction and perception of collective interests of actors involved in educational policy-making, (2) the institutional form of the policy-making regime, and (3) global trends in history curricula.
Whereas (West) German teachers transmitted world polity precepts on the "rationalization" of history education and East German cadres implemented "Second World polity" trends toward a re-nationalization of historiography, Japanese bureaucrats effectively blocked any change of the institutionalized empiricist historiography. These findings counter prevailing notions in the national identity literature which assume that modern constructions of national identity are based on cultural or even ethnic peculiarities. At the same time, my contribution extends theories which have tried to account for the increasing similarity of the structure and content of education around the world by specifying the institutional conditions under which global trends are transmitted to the national policy-making level.
I have published the results from this research as a monograph, Guilty Lessons? Postwar History Education in Japan and the Germanysand in various papers (see my CV).
Anecdotal evidence suggests that a large proportion of students in North American social science and humanities graduate programs who are conducting research related to Japan are alumni of the JET-Program. It would be useful to conduct a blanket survey to find out how high this proportion really is and what this implies for the future role and funding of the JET-Program by MEXT, the Japanese Ministry of Education.
Visits to Alaska, Mongolia and China have sparked my interest in a comparison of the policies that regulate access to collective goods. Grasslands management for mobile animal husbandry in Mongolia and China, and fisheries management in Alaska and B.C. might be particularly interesting comparisons in this context. While the natural resources seen as a collective good in both pairs of jurisdictions are quite similar (grasslands in Mongolia and China, especially Inner Mongolia, and the Pacific in Alaska and B.C.), there are significant differences in the management of these resources and in attempts to incentivize the maintenance of the environment as a collective good. While Mongolian policies thus continue to promote some nomadic animal husbandry, Chinese policies seem to be aiming at seetling nomadic herders, partly in the interest of establishing more centralized management structures that would facilitate preservation efforts during the development of more "industrialized" agricultural production. Likewise, similar fisheries in Alaska and B.C. are managed through different approaches to fishing quotas and support of wild vs. farmed fisheries. Within the larger issues of policy-making on collective natural resources, I am particularly interested in the impact this policy-making has on producers' views of incentives and ownership issues vis-a-vis a collective natural resources. Cross-border regions in SE Asia would also lend themselves particularly well to research on the link between environmental policy and producers' attitudes toward the commons.
Building on my prior research on the Japanese educational system, I would like to examine how well and to what extent teachers', parents' and students' expectations travel within immigrant communities in Canada and the U.S. Are attitudes toward education transmitted inter-continentally and inter-generationally as so much conventional wisdom on the education attainment of Asian-Americans and Asian-Canadians suggests? Are there particular features or elements of expectations that travel well and widely? To answer some of these questions, I envision qualitative research in a small number of centres of Japanese immigration in North America (Vancouver, the San Francisco Bay Area, and Honolulu would be somehwat obvious locations).
Another idea for the dissertation was to compare the organizational structure of family businesses in luxury item industries. This would be a great excuse to visit cigar factories and sample their wares all over the world, but it might actually also be very informative research. I would be interested in finding out whether the same processes that drive organizational isomorphism in large corporations would be at work among a network of smaller firms which probably observe each other very closely. Are such small firms equally subject to the "management-fad of the day"? Does their inherently long-term orientation insulate them form some of the vagaries of the business world? If anyone has suggestions for a theoretical need for such research or knows who I should write to at the American Tobacco Institute for funding, please let me know!!!
In the even longer term, I would really like to combine my interest in philosophy with some sociological research. It seems to me that it would be extremely interesting to compare the currency of philosophical concepts across cultures and nations. In short interviews on ethics, would Germans be more likely to cite some form of the categorical imperative than, say, Canadians? Would Japanese respondents make reference to confucian ethics? Such a project would give me great excuse to study some more philosophy, so that I could code responses as to what philosophical view they reflect.
I'm involved in some attempts to catalogue sociology resources on the internet:
In August 2002 I received the Graduate Student Prize of the ASA's Section on Communication and Information Technologies for my work on The SocioLog.
The prize committee wrote that,
The website SocioLog.com reflects a tremendous amount of thought about both how to organize material about sociology and what not to include in such a compilation. It is not simply a collection of various links about sociology but a very carefully thought-through assemblage of what is important to include, why, and what represents the best of the available materials. The committee feels that the section's graduate student award should encourage innovative projects with technology, particularly things that can be used by others to pursue knowledge more effectively.
If I find aliens, you can bet that I will research them sociologically!
March 2010