Challenges and hopes of decolonizing research imaginations: lessons from Japanese sociologists of education

• In Event: Undoing and revisioning educational research, policy, and reform

Proposal

With the rise of Japan as one of the most powerful economies in the world in the late 1980s and the early 1990s, there was a pervasive sense of national pride in Japan. Emerging out of this particular moment was a critical discussion of Japan’s intellectual dependency on Western thoughts and views in popular cultural as well as social scientific discourses. In this nationalistic discourse, those features of Japanese society that had been considered ‘deviant’ and ‘backward’ were now rendered the sources of ‘uniqueness’ and hence the ‘secrets’ of Japanese success.

Partly reflecting this broader intellectual atmosphere of the time, there was much discussion among Japanese educational sociologists about the possibilities of creating their own, ‘original’ theories. Many recognised the epistemic problem of intellectual dependency among Japanese sociologists and called for a major shift from being a consumer of Western theoretical insights to a producer of such knowledge. Published in the leading journal of educational sociology, Hidehiro Sonoda’s (1991) Reverse Deficit Theory was particularly influential in igniting such an intellectual shift in Japanese sociology of education. Sonoda (1991) proposed that Japanese scholars reverse the Eurocentric Orientalist gaze whereby the ‘local’ theories of Western countries are often uncritically applied to Japan. He suggested that ‘original’ theories be developed from the insights gained from the particularities of Japanese education and used to understand education elsewhere. By attempting to understand other societies through the lens that are reflective of unique Japanese features, a renewed understanding of Japanese society can be achieved, argued Sonoda (1991).

At around the same time, other noted educational sociologists, such as Joji Kikuchi (1991), Takehiko Kariya (1991), Yo Takeuchi (1991) and later Kokichi Shimizu (2010), drawing partially upon Sonoda’s critical insights, attempted to create sociological insights and categories more relevant to the empirical realities of Japanese education. In the first move, they used Japan as a contrasting point of reference to show that the theoretical insights of US/UK-based scholars reflected the particular empirical realities of their education systems, which were not necessarily observable in Japanese education. They then developed new analytical categories that would speak directly to the particular features of Japanese education, which were not accountable by the existing theoretical tools and frameworks. To put it differently, they located UK/US-based theories back in the particularities of their creation and then used the ‘dissonance’ between theories and Japanese empirical realities as a point of departure for new theory development (Shibano, Kikuchi and Takeuchi 1992, p. 13 and 22).

The particular articulation of Japanese uniqueness—always via a binary contrasting with what is putatively understood as Western—is problematic, however. What underpins it is the very binary logic of coloniality that Edward Said problematized in the landmark publication, Orientalism (Said 1978). As Naoki Sakai (1997) suggests, the articulation of Eastern particularism is in a complicit relationship with Western universalism; it reifies the very colonial construct—the essential difference between Eastern (Japanese) particularity and Western universal—as the ontological fixity. No doubt that many, otherwise exceptional scholarships of education have been produced by Japanese sociologists and yet a large majority of them continue to engage in the same binary discursive practice, reinforcing the tradition of West as method (Takayama 2016).

Largely overlooked here is that the ‘uniquely Japanese’ features of schooling thus uncovered are nothing but a particular discursive construction of Japanese self, premised upon the comparative dualism of things Japanese and Western. This suggests that the supposedly ‘uniquely Japanese’ pedagogical and institutional features are not distinctively Japanese at all when the point of comparative reference shifts. That is, while these studies certainly ‘make Japanese schooling more understandable to Anglo-American readers and those who are faimilar with their theoretical frameworks, whether they help, say, Brazilians and Pakistanis to understand Japanese schooling is totally a different question.

As a way to move beyond the problem of West as method, this paper concludes by drawing on Chen’s (2010) notion of ‘Asia as method.’ To imagine a different way of producing social and educational knowledges that are more useful and relevant, Chen proposes the notion of ‘Asia as method,’ taking cues from Yoshimi Takeuchi and Yuzo Mizoguchi. Here, Chen proposes Asia as an imaginary anchoring point where researchers, based in different parts of the geographical space known as Asia, begin to see each other as a source of knowledge. It is a way of decentering the West as a single source of theoretical knowledge and shifting the point of reference to Asia in the production of sociological knowledge. As Chen argues, more useful and relevant knowledge is generated among those who share similar historical experiences and cultural contexts in East Asia, and Asia can serve as an imaginary space where Asian scholars exchange each other’s notes in developing their understanding of self and locality, or what he calls “inter-referencing mode of analysis” (250).

References
Chen, K. (2010). Asia as method: Toward de-imperialization. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Connell, R. (2007). Southern theory: The global dynamics of knowledge in social science. Crow’s Nest, NSW: Allen & Unwin.

Kariya, T. (1991) Kyoikuno keizaigaku kara keizaino kyoikugakuhe [from educational economics to educational studies of economics]. Kyoikushakiagakukenkyu (Educational Sociology) 49: 57-78.

Kikuchi, J. (1991) Joron: riron wo tsukuru [Preface: to create theory]. Kyoikushakiagakukenkyu (Educational Sociology) 49: 5-8.

Said, E. (1978) Orientalism. New York: Pantheon Books.

Sakai, N. (1997). Translation and subjectivity: On ‘Japan’ and cultural nationalism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Shimizu, K. 2010. Gakkoni dekirukoto: Ichininshono kyoikushakaigaku [What schools can do: First person sociology of education. Tokyo: Kadokawa gakugei shuppan.

Sonoda, H. (1991) Gyakuketsujoriron [Reverse deficit theory]. Kyoikushakiagakukenkyu (Educational Sociology) 49: 9-33.
Sugimoto, Y. (2014). Japanese society: Inside out and outside. International Sociology 29: 191-208.

Takayama, K. (2016). Beyond ‘the West as method’: Repositioning the Japanese education research communities in/against the global structure of academic knowledge. Japanese Educational Research Association Educational Studies in Japan: International Yearbook 10: 19‐31.

Takayama, K. Sriprakash, A. and Connell, R. (2017). Towards a postcolonial comparative and international education. Comparative Education Review 61 (S1): 1–24.

Takeuchi, Y. (1991) Nihongatasenbatsu no kenkyu [A study of Japanese selection]. Kyoikushakiagakukenkyu (Educational Sociology) 49: 34-56.

Author

• Keita Takayama, University of New England