The Japanese university model of education is in reality more like a European model in which most of the work is focused on seminars and final projects, and where most lectures and other courses are borderline optional. However, due to post-WW2 reforms the Japanese university system is institutionally based on the American model, and therefore has a superficial structure of grades, credits, homework, etc. that is often but weakly related to the more important areas. This disconnect makes Japanese universities (which do have serious problems) look even worse than they really are, and in fact contributes to their degradation.
As a hypothesis I haven’t thought about this too hard or looked for any evidence but would like to see some discussion. Thoughts?
It’s true.
The final research essays and seminars for undergrads can really be quite rigorous. They are also the best way to do “higher education” in the humanities.
To relate this to the other topic it is also more common for Japanese students at mid-level unis to be taught by actual profs.
What problems do you see at Japanese unis that would not exist at American ones?
You are talking mostly about grad school though, right? My grad school work was extremely self-motivated, which I enjoyed. But the kids in my undergrad seminar have a normal class schedule. Most jsut don’t go to anything other than the seminar (ゼミ). And the seminars are only for the most elite students anyway.
I have met a lot of people who said, “I only showed up to campus three times during Keio.” And they work at big ad firms. I don’t know how possible this is in the US. Surely there are a lot of American students who don’t go to class in Japanese style, but I don’t think it’s seen as basically an okay way to do college.
One other thing: we read a single English-language essay on institutional economics for like three and a half months in one of my classes. This would just never happen in an American university. If you are PhD track, you would read 5 articles a week, at least. At least that’s what my undergrad Junior Tutorial was (200 pages a week at least). So much of study in Japan is basically translation practice, while helpful, bogs down getting into the meat, reading alternative voices, discussion, essay writing.
Also, I never really had to write essays other than my master’s thesis. I don’t know how normal this is.
“And the seminars are only for the most elite students anyway.”
Varies between programs. Very different in the history program that I did. I liked the fact that ALL undergrads had to turn in a graduation thesis. This is only for “honors” students stateside. Without doing a piece of original research, you don’t even see what “history” is as a discipline.
“At least that’s what my undergrad Junior Tutorial was (200 pages a week at least).”
You went to Harvard, no? When I said that top US schools are great in another thread today, I meant Harvard. We can only speculate on how you would have thought about Japanese grad school if you had done your undergrad at Florida State, but… you get the picture.
I’d say that 1500+ pages would be normal at Harvard for PhD prepping for comps. At Oxford – zero. It is all self study. I think that the UK system – that treats PhDs like mini-researchers rather than huge undergrads – is better. The Japanese system mixes good and bad points of both.
“bogs down getting into the meat, reading alternative voices, discussion, essay writing.”
I’ve mentioned a few times in these posts that I have been lucky enough to teach students from Todai and Waseda (humanities, the experience in economics or social science may be very different). Fantastic meaty essays. But if we throw out the top schools in Japan and the top schools in the USA, I think that we see different grab bags of problems at the mid-levels.
“I don’t think it’s seen as basically an okay way to do college.”
In top rated classes it is not uncommon to have half the kids missing any given day in NA. Word round the campfire is that NA undergrads are increasingly having their MOMS come and try to argue for increased grades. Some take everything but the actual academic part seriously. It certainly is not getting any better.
“This would just never happen in an American university.”
But you don’t want to start comparing the average ability of US Japanese students with Japanese English students…. In language study, an area that we can compare objective results (to some extent), I would give European students of Japanese a 9 for reading, Japanese a 6 for English, and America Japanese students a 2. There are people in the US getting a BA in Japanese who know 400 kanji at the end.
“There are people in the US getting a BA in Japanese who know 400 kanji at the end.”
My opinion of Japanese majors is the same as eikaiwa, ie the motivated can get something out of it but otherwise they seem kind of useless — and at a 30k per year private university even more expensive than private lessons.
My prescription — Obama needs to give a kick-ass speech *in Indonesian* when he visits that country.
“The Japanese university model of education is in reality more like a European model in which most of the work is focused on seminars and final projects, and where most lectures and other courses are borderline optional.”
At first I didn’t think this sounded like my experience as a European undergraduate at all but maybe it’s just because of difference in vocabulary. Lectures are of course 100% optional – if you think you can get by by self-study in the library no one will care if you don’t show up for them. Grades are set mostly based on exam performance.
I never really understood the role of the ゼミ at Japanese universities though. What are they actually for?
While I have not much experience at top-ranked Western universities, I do have a ton of experience at all levels of a (top 20) Japanese university, so for what it’s worth I can offer a few comments.
Undergrad: There is a HUGE difference between the core curriculum and the major. The core curriculum, where even Arts majors like myself had to take a couple of science classes, were the typical stereotype of a Japanese university – an academic cruise. If some profs did not make attendance compulsory then the classrooms would have been empty. Exams were a joke – one hour, one page of writing, and often little more that “Discuss something you learned in this class.” Yet it was not a total soft-cock – I managed to fail pyschology, and I think one term of Chinese (translating Chinese into Japanese is not the easiest of tasks…. And the level was far higher than what I had done back home: stuff like excepts from Aisin Goro Pu Yi’s autobiography, for example. I think this was because we had to spend almost no time at all on kanji, whereas when I took it back home about a third was just learning to write). And in one term the exam results for our Korean class were so uniformly poor the teacher made us all take extra lessons and resit it. So it’s not a total cruise by any means, and the closer you are to your major, the harder it is.
It is slightly difficult to truly assess the level, however, as at that stage my Japanese was not really totally up to it – in classes like history I was totally lost save when the prof wrote something on the blackboard, and so despite the lower general standards, it was nevertheless not a cruise for me.
Exams for your major were also a bit of a joke, but the classwork was much more demanding. We were tossed right into reading period materials (my major was history) and analyzing them, as well as classes on deciphering handwritten documents. Like M-Bone, all students had to submit a thesis. Mine was a steaming pile of crap, incidentally, but it passed. In fact I heard that only one undergrad had ever not passed the thesis. However there was a fair amount of pressure and guidance, and thesis topics were in many cases the kind of detailed analysis you only see at higher levels in The West, as far as I know.
Grad school for the MA was, as far as I can recall, not notably different from the major – specialist lectures and seminars, but with higher standards demanded.
The biggest jump, I found, was from the MA to the PhD. As M-Bone notes, I was told on more than one occasion that I was now essentially a ‘researcher,’ and needed to be able to run with the big boys. There was absolutely no required reading whatsoever – they gave you enough rope, and watched to see if you hung yourself. By this stage you are expected to be able to formulate your own research plans, find your own source documents, and collect your own secondary literature. The prof might ask you if you had read such-and-such, and suggest you should, but that was about it. You were also required to publish, and urged strongly to attend and participate if possible in symposiums – usually present at the smaller ones, but attend the major national ones. It was a very rigourous programme, and definitely not one you can sleepwalk through.
The grades thing is interesting, however. Grades were given even for the PhD course, but the class names and grades were totally fictitious. Even if I enrolled for a class in “Advanced Blog Commenting,” no such class existed, and I was given an automatic A simply for enrolling. This is because the grades had absolutely no bearing whatsoever on the award of the degree, save for fulfilling some silly bureaucratic function. And allowing people in the past, when the PhD was harder to get, to basically drop out and still put 単位取得後退学 on their CVs. This does seem like the most notable example of European styles clashing with US styles. Even in the BA, as far as I can recall, we only needed to maintain a pass average. Didn’t matter if we got a 優 or a 可. The thesis was the goal. And with far far greater emphasis on analysis of the documents – really fine-grained, detailed stuff. The biggest single lacuna was the almost total lack of any classes on what history as a discipline actually was. No comparative history, and very little reading of “the classics” (and in any case that was only for classics of Japanese history, and I mean modern historiography, not stuff like the Kojiki or the Dai Nihon-shi). This, I gather, is a huge difference with the good Western universities.
However my department at my university was not typical of the humanities. Not all departments required a BA thesis. Economics, from memory, did not.
“So much of study in Japan is basically translation practice”
This is very dependent on major of course. In mine, any ‘translation’ was part and parcel of acquiring the skills to do the work, and only as a means to an end. And aside from the special classes in reading documents, we were expected to do it in our own time. Stumbing over some obscure kanji reading in a seminar was strongly frowned upon.
“There are people in the US getting a BA in Japanese who know 400 kanji at the end.”
Ouch. And yet not remotely surprising.
You went to Harvard, no?
I think Harvard and Keio are good comparisons, and the “classes” at Keio just did not really require any serious reading investment. Maybe it was my department, but there was no reading list, no topics, no syllabus, etc. This would never ever fly in most top-schools in NA. Sometimes the professor would come in and just kinda chat with us for an hour about something. This may happen elsewhere, but it’s clearly not supposed to.
Also, is there an idea of “generals” at Japanese universities? At Keio, I did not see anyone ever have to do the massive reading required for this in the US. In the old system, you did not even have to write your dissertation until YEARS AFTER you graduated.
I think you are fair to say, don’t compare Harvard to mid-level Japanese colleges; or, don’t compare Harvard to Florida State. But look, a lot of the elite Japanese colleges: you can literally graduate without doing anything. In fact, that was the entire idea for most of the post-war.
You don’t have to go as extreme as Brian McVeigh does in saying that tertiary education is a “myth,” but Occam’s razor: Japanese universities have had the systematic and structural role of not being places where students are filled with knowledge and skills. That’s what companies were for. Things have changed in the last decade, but there is a difference at the top elite level of schools and you can’t fully deny that. Not to say that the students are “worse,” but clearly the expectations are lower.
Florida State is an unfair point of discussion. The most difficult part of getting a degree there is keeping inside the lines with those fat crayons.
PhD:
Or let’s say it this way: does someone come out more educated by having to master a huge reading list and do generals, or, having all the freedom to read whatever they want at an undefined pace with no serious guidance?
Undergrad:
Something that kind of irked me in my zemi was that all the students would divide up the English reading, have the kikokushijo do all the major translation, pass it out to everyone before class, and then everyone would read it line by line as if they did it themselves. And this act of doing line-by-line translation was basically 75% of the classwork.
This kind of academic translation is very useful, I agree, but the time spent on it and the slow pace basically means the amount of content you can cover in a semester is super low.
Marxy: Well, I can’t honestly say whether your zemi experience or mine is more typical, but they have absolutely nothing in common. Both of the graduate student zemi by professors in my section (i.e. each for Komagome Takeshi and Tsujimoto Masahi) follow more or less the same format, which is basically for each student to get one full period per semester to do a presentation related to their own ongoing research. The presenter distributes a レジュメ of either exact text or a detailed outline including all citations, as per personal preference, does about a 45 minute presentation, and then there’s another 45+ minutes (the latter part of Komagome’s zemi tends to run long, since it’s final period Friday) of Q&A from professor and students, and general discussion on the topic. In Komagome’s zemi (at least this past year) the presentations are supposed to relate to a very general theme, such as “post-war” or “history of an debate” (論争) and he also required everyone giving a presentation to distribute the week before a packet of ~20 of the primary sources used, which everyone is supposed to read every week.
Although I haven’t been, I hear that the undergrad zemi in the department are basically the same, except not as high level, and with the professors not asking nearly as critical questions.
Also, graduate students here (MA and PhD) are supposed to write one substantial paper per year, in addition to specifically enumerated requirements or coursework. I should also note that there is no English or translation of any kind, except for optional courses specifically devoted to such matters.
But it may be that the difference between top schools and pretty good schools is extreme. I went to Rutgers, by all accounts a good but not top school (undergrad anyway, I think some of the grad departments are considered top notch) and honestly never had to do all that much work to pass.
“I think Harvard and Keio are good comparisons, and the “classes” at Keio just did not really require any serious reading investment.”
I think that you are being really, really, really generous to Keio. My impression is that Harvard, as a site of undergraduate education, is head and shoulders above everywhere else in the world. Even in the US, there is Harvard and there is everywhere else.
It all comes down to resources. Now, in some humanities programs, they are doing freshman seminars with 5 or 6 students and an often world famous prof. You can’t beat that. At best, it is like having a coffee with Socrates.
Hard to say what is going to happen now that the endowment has done to &#^$ but I’m not that worried.
“you can literally graduate without doing anything. In fact, that was the entire idea for most of the post-war.”
But is that more true of economics or an elite track area or history / Japanese literature or Oe and Endo’s French lit? I like to look at the results. In areas of consumer product creativity, popular culture, pure literature, engineering and applied science, pure humanities scholarship, etc. the Japanese university system has not been an impediment to success at the very highest levels.
The Japanese public seems interested in continuing to read history and lliterature, etc. after graduation at levels not seen in NA. I also see a high level of general knowledge about history and geography (although that may be due more to juken).
“Japanese universities have had the systematic and structural role of not being places where students are filled with knowledge and skills.”
In the economics kaishain track, maybe. But in history or Jlit or an area where you will see more engagement by both profs and students? This is not a Japanese thing either – I think that your average history MA would be more interested in what they are doing now while an average MBA will be more interested in what they will be doing when they start pulling in those fat paychecks.
Roy’s experience in Japan was similar to mine. It is also quite similar to the way that MA / honors programs in NA that I am familiar with are run. In history, there tends to be a big focus on having the students actually do research. Bringing this in at the undergrad level is a huge advantage in Japan.
No matter how much more demanding a history test/exam may be in the US, that is still an extension of high school testing. Research is where it is at.
“honestly never had to do all that much work to pass.”
The dirty secret in higher education in NA is that C+ is the new F. In terms of the demand placed on students in some areas that we can measure, I think that Adamu’s Japan major / eikaiwa student comparison is a fair one. Let’s face it, all of the regulars here and Neojaponisme badasses like the two Matts paid dues in Japan to build our reading skills. NA classes, even at Harvard, won’t do much because they are not demanding enough.
“But look, a lot of the elite Japanese colleges: you can literally graduate without doing anything.”
In the last few years Todai changed their undergrad program and seemingly shifted the dynamics around a bit. At the end of the first two general ed years everyone basically competes based on their GPA to get into their desired specialty. This means if you aim low, ie skim by with 可, which isn’t that hard even for a non-native speaker like myself, you might be able to graduate but you’ll do it from an unpopular major (インド哲学 seems to be the running joke of where all the real slackers or crazy 部活 kids’ll end up).
So people who want international relations for example have to maintain an extremely high GPA, almost completely 優, which is pretty hard since the teachers are restricted to giving 優 to only 30% of the class. Seems like this has brought a lot of competition and motivation into the pre-major undergrad realm, at least at Todai.
Yawn. You academics take yourselves way too seriously. Undergraduate education in the humanities, as I remember it, is mainly a mechanism for positioning yourself to get into a good grad school, and/or to get drunk with people whose parents own Fortune 500 companies. Harvard is certainly great for those purposes, but so is Keio (at least within the Japanese and Asian universes). In either event, the undergrad classes are just there to legitimize the whole exercise and fund the professors’ research binges. Who cares about bachelor’s degrees any more, really? They don’t signify any particular achievement in any school. They’re a hiring cutoff to separate room-temperature IQs from the unwashed, drooling masses who are obviously unworthy to mooch off the voluptuous bosoms of university donors and institutional shareholders.
You’d think インド哲学 would be one of the most difficult departments…
That actually is very interesting; I hadn’t heard about any of those reforms at Todai. Are you involved with that school somehow?
“In either event, the undergrad classes are just there to legitimize the whole exercise and fund the professors’ research binges.”
Partly, but good undergrad experience does help people to become better authors, journalists, and… academics. As well as better voters or potential politicians. Look at the stats that break down Obama and McCain votes by education level.
Now if history books aren’t your cup of tea, fair enough, but they work on a number of levels – partly as a “product” – and hey, Bush and company thought that they were useful for justifying the Iraq War. Obama will start using them to justify this and that – they should mean something, even for the cynical.
“Who cares about bachelor’s degrees any more, really?”
There is a weeding out process as well as a gradual improvement of writing skills – if you had to read the essays that first year students turn in and could compare them to fourth year, you might think differently.
There is a quality of life / engagement with culture issue as well. Where do we draw the line? Everyone seems to agree that high school is useless and undergrad equally foul. But what would a country of people who never go past 8th grade (or just party after a point) look like?
“But what would a country of people who never go past 8th grade (or just party after a point) look like?”
Certain areas of any of our countries, I think….
“Certain areas of any of our countries, I think….”
Yeah, the parts we don’t like.
Anyway Joe, wouldn’t you rather hear me pretend that I get through to young people rather than talk about how sweet my research deal is? Everybody, in and out, is supposed to make like universities are important!
OK, sorry for interrupting your fantasies. Please continue.
“The dirty secret in higher education in NA is that C+ is the new F. ”
I’m not sure it’s much of a “secret” anymore. Grade inflation got quite a bit of press a few years ago, with at least one study showing 8 of 10 Harvard undergrads receiving honors of some sort (I believe Harvard radically changed their grading policies since then).
An article from one of my alma mater’s school paper describing grade inflation there and at other institutions:
http://www.chicagomaroon.com/2005/1/18/gpas-get-a-76-boost-from-grade-inflation
And apparently Princeton is adopting a grading system similar to the type described by Josh Rogers mentioned above:
http://www.usatoday.com/news/education/2007-03-27-princeton-grades_N.htm
I think that you are being really, really, really generous to Keio. My impression is that Harvard, as a site of undergraduate education, is head and shoulders above everywhere else in the world. Even in the US, there is Harvard and there is everywhere else.
Undergrad-wise, I would argue that Princeton, Amherst, and Swarthmore may be even more intensive in terms of student demands for liberal arts. Cal Tech and MIT are unparalleled in the science fields. Yes, most students everywhere slack off, but the elite tier of colleges and the general PhD programs have no parallel in Japan, I would argue.
Also, in terms of total social impact of higher education, Japan is still very low in terms of students working for a few years and then going back to school, right? How could you possibly get ahead in the business world by taking a few years off to get a Masters???
The last point is pretty key. Regardless of how the actual quality of Japanese higher education stacks up compared with other countries, the perceived social function and value is just different and arguably inferior. There is basically no equivalent to the Community College, or really any form of higher education for adults who didn’t go to college as quickly as possible. A 30 year old in Japan in a dead-end job is pretty unlikely to go back to school for a change of careers. Or are there senmongakkou that fill this role, entirely separate from the liberal arts institution?
What about graduate school? Aren’t MBA and similar credentials getting more status in Japan? Certainly the introduction of the law school requirement for becoming a proper lawyer institutes at least one significant case where adults might want to go back to school for a few years to get a valuable credential, although I guess it remains to be seen how the system plays out in reality.
Interestingly, there are several people in my department who came in later in life. There’s an Okinawan guy who was a high school history teacher for 10 years before he decided he wanted to go to graduate school, a middle aged Korean woman finishing her PhD, and most interestingly a 63-ish retired man, who taught for 30 years in a public school in Kyoto with a high Zainichi Korean population, who decided he wanted to go to grad school and do research on the history of Korean ethnic education in Kyoto.
Roy Berman:
I agree about the インド哲学! Apparently though the only employment possibility with that degree in your pocket is monk, which doesn’t sit to well with the youngsters these days.
I’m a first year undergrad student at Todai on the Monbukagakusho scholarship. It seems like they’ve opened up their undergrad scholarships to the west in the last few years (for 40 or so years before the undergrad scholarships were only available to people from developing countries). Right now there are three Americans studying under this scholarship and we all ended up at Todai luckily after the year of language included in the program.
Just as a little more info on the Todai system for anyone who’s interested – the sciences and humanities are both separated into three categories: in the humanities its divided into law/politics, economics/business, and everything else (lit, history, education, etc). When the Japanese students take the tests to get in to Todai they’re actually applying directly to one of these categories, so of course the medicine division (理科３類）and the law/politics division (文科１類) have the highest competition rates among the high school applicants.
Once you’re in, it’s theoretically possible to enter a specialty within a different division, but there’s only one or two kids who are able to do it every year. Generally though you’re stuck and have to compete within your division for the specialty you want. The government scholarship kids have it really easy though – we don’t take the regular tests to get in to our universities, and at least at Todai as long as we pass we can go to the specialty we want.
Also, in terms of total social impact of higher education, Japan is still very low in terms of students working for a few years and then going back to school, right? How could you possibly get ahead in the business world by taking a few years off to get a Masters???
It’s very common among lawyers, who routinely take a couple of years off early in their career to study in the US (just check the profiles section of any big Japanese law firm’s web site and you can verify this). It isn’t uncommon in the financial sector, either. Mid-career MBAs in particular are getting popular among big Japanese companies as a means of training middle managers — this is how Temple, McGill, Hitotsubashi, Tsukuba et al. maintain their programs in Tokyo.
As far as more “academic” MAs go, these seem to be less common as a mid-career measure, although it does happen. One of my [former] co-workers got a master’s in psychology while working at LTCB in the mid-90s (don’t recall whether any leave was involved). The low incidence may have more to do with the fact that the US simply has a more fluid labor market, and it’s easier to find one or two years of free time between jobs there. I’m sure that other countries with tight labor regulations are pretty similar to Japan in this regard–France and Germany don’t seem to be noted for mid-career education either.
“It seems like they’ve opened up their undergrad scholarships to the west in the last few years”
When I started it way back in 1991 (ouch) there were Aussies, NZers, and even a Canadian. I hope we’re not considered “developing” countries. True, there were no Americans, no Africans, and no Europeans. Or Chinese. Or Koreans.
I noticed no ‘adult’ students at the BA or MA level, but there were some in the PhD level, though with different majors.
“Undergrad-wise, I would argue that Princeton, Amherst, and Swarthmore may be even more intensive in terms of student demands for liberal arts.”
To clarify my position on higher ed a bit – you don’t get “learned” by osmosis just by going although you can make many great contacts that way. The real point is to create an environment where the best students have access to mentoring and to people who are at the top of the world in their fields. Even if there are other schools that are demanding, Harvard has a much better chance of putting you in a group of 6 or 7 undergrads who end up with dozens of hours of face time with someone like Umberto Eco or Slavoj Zizek, Sidney Lumet, Ursula Le Guinn, or a famous judge or CEO for that matter. I like to see things done right and this commitment small group access to people at the top of their fields does make Harvard different. You see it at public schools like UC Berkely and others to some extent, but with Harvard it is far more common. This is simply a matter of resources. (Why am I sticking up for Harvard?!)
In the end, the whole thing is like eikaiwa. A rubber stamp for students who just want to show up and what can be a great opportunity for the motivated.
“Or are there senmongakkou that fill this role, entirely separate from the liberal arts institution?”
Yes, it is getting more common for people to go back to do cooking or hair styling or massage (men or women) after being out in the world for a while. These are, however, the types of schools that foreigners seldom see or hear about.
“general PhD programs have no parallel in Japan”
What’s wrong with Japanese PhD programs now? The way that they are done in the US is – lots of free time, few meetings with advisor, a handful of classes before (mostly useless, lots of universities are thinking of cutting them and if you really need them, you probably shouldn’t be in a PhD program) comps, and an overlong thesis writing process (average time to completion is over 7 years in English) – is generally similar to the way that they are done in Japan. The Japanese programs do produce better results (thesis) in some cases.
“people at the top of their fields”
BTW, I’m not fooling myself into thinking that this group includes me or that this is what I do. I do okay recommending Japanese books and stuff….
“I noticed no ‘adult’ students at the BA or MA level, but there were some in the PhD level, though with different majors.”
I did a foreign policy major for my graduate degree in Japan, which would have been considered an MA at home. There were plenty of mature students in my classes. Usually the reason that they were there was fairly obvious (a few journalists looking for a bit more insight into what they wrote about, “independent businessmen”, embassy staff, somebody who – if memory serves – worked for an NGO) but there were also a few from business as well.
So is this just a reformulation of received wisdom, then?
http://search.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/eo20090205a1.html
That sounds more like an thinly veiled ad for Temple’s Japan campus than a developed argument.
Why not compare Dujarric’s record of scholarship with Japanese PhDs in his area?
He is knocking Japanese English ability, but as an American academic writing about Japan…. one has to wonder why this article is in the Japan Times rather than Bungei or the Nikkei or a place where it would really reach some of those elites that he thinks that he is talking to? Or why he’s writing articles about East Asian international relations with only English sources.
Now, I said in my above posts that Harvard is great and all, but there is zero reason to move half way around the world to go there. It may be a better undergrad education package, but there are things that are far more important that students could be doing in their home environment and motivated students are going to get a lot out of any serious university experience.
“Japan’s underrepresentation in Ivy League institutions is indicative of Japan’s growing insularity.”
Nonsense, this isn’t Major League Baseball that we’re talking about here. Or maybe it is – the US Ivy League and Oxbridge are filled with Japanese profs teaching Japanese subjects. Looking at top journals in Japanese Studies, Japanese academics (or other Japan based foreigners) are also publishing more and more in English as well.
Of course, this is also the guy who published a book arguing this in 2004 –
“Odom and Dujarric conclude that the current position of the United States could last for decades — if not longer. Their basic argument is that the United States is strong because it has a depth and breadth of liberal practices and institutions that other societies cannot match — and that because liberal institutions generally reflect long-term cultural habits and trends, they will not soon catch up.”
After the Iraq War turned into a disaster (this book, I imagine, was written with a sense of triumph in 2003) and the economy tanked, can anyone read something like this without going slackjawed?
One of the reasons Koreans prefer foreign graduate schools is because they don’t trust their own institutions,for bribery to the professor is pretty common at campus.
And there are at least three center of excellence in domestic institution in liberal arts,while Korea only has Seoul National University.
Anyway,it takes more than just sending another dozen of kids to Harvard to save Japan from steadily decline,me think.
I was freshman at Keio back in ’89,ending the academic year by remain in the same grade.I was a typical “Ghost” student.(and for that I failed in English and French course.)But if I couldn’t fool around in college years.when can a Japanese youth be?
“Anyway,it takes more than just sending another dozen of kids to Harvard to save Japan from steadily decline,me think.”
And that’s another thing. You can’t really draw much of a conclusion from a statistical sample of 34 individuals. And anyway, doesn’t even just having attended an institution like, say, Columbia give you a certain amount of prestige in certain circles in Japan? So what is this nonsense about not being accepted when you get back?
“Anyway,it takes more than just sending another dozen of kids to Harvard to save Japan from steadily decline,me think.”
That, and the fact that the next generation of Japanese elites should be learning Chinese. Not because China will become more important than America, but simply because it will become more and more important for Japan to have good relations with both and more work needs to be done in the China area. From the Japanese POV, Americans are always going to want to buy certain things and political relations, even in “sour” periods are still going to be stable, so why worry?
“I was a typical “Ghost” student”
Yeah, Aceface may have been a typical Japanese Ghost student, but I’d still rather take a seminar from him than Dujarric.
“You can’t really draw much of a conclusion from a statistical sample of 34 individuals.”
No, and while I have no way of checking quickly, I would not be surprised if there are more Japanese at the College of France, ANU, Oxbridge, University of Bonn, Utrecht University, etc.
BTW, I am not sure how widely known this is in the English speaking world, but French unis have a reputation identical to that of Japan – no demands placed on students, ghost students, etc. I think that both definitions come, to a certain degree, from Anglocentrism.
I’ve seen Dujarric speak on TV a few times and while he hasn’t articulated anything new when I saw him, I think his commentary is usually okay, so I don’t like to criticise…
…but I sense there might be a bit of numerical legerdemain going on:
“Yet, there are 39 Koreans studying at Harvard College, compared with only five Japanese (excluding immigrants). Overall, Harvard University has nearly three times as many Koreans as Japanese.”
Harvard College is the “undergraduate section” of Harvard. There are almost eight times as many Korean citizens as Japanese citizens there. So if there are three times as many Koreans as Japanese at Harvard *overall*, then the proportion of Koreans to Japanese in postgraduate study there is *much less* than 3:1, particularly if there are fewer graduates than postgrads overall. And postgrad is where it counts, particularly in the States, right?
Anyway, as I said, I don’t want to be to hard on Dujarric. I think his university should take a good look at itself, though. I think it is a little odd that a university with a Japan studies program in Japan doesn’t require that the director of said program has a Ph.D. in Japan studies or a similar field (like history, politics or economics with an emphasis on Japan). At the very least the university should probably require that he write extensively on Japan in fora other than the JT or DY. Most of his books don’t seem to have a Japan focus, which in itself is of course not a bad thing, but strange considering his position.
http://www.tuj.ac.jp/newsite/main/community/icjs_staff.html
“I would not be surprised if there are more Japanese at the College of France, ANU, Oxbridge, University of Bonn, Utrecht University, etc.”
While I said earlier that I don’t like to do these comparisons, I also wonder what the proportion of American students abroad is. I know that in my three years of university teaching that I taught about ten or twelve Japanese and only two Americans at an institution that was foreign to both. At a guess I would say that was reflective of the general proportion enrolled. The Americans also tended to do “semester abroad” programs, whereas the Japanese I met stayed for a whole year or their entire degree. While it was no Harvard, I certainly wouldn’t run around asserting that this meant that Japanese are more “international” than Americans.
And anyway, doesn’t even just having attended an institution like, say, Columbia give you a certain amount of prestige in certain circles in Japan? So what is this nonsense about not being accepted when you get back?
It depends on what you want to do with your life. Japan’s salarymen and bureaucrats are, by and large, recruited right out of the major universities in a very formalized process, even at many gaishikei companies. So if you do undergraduate study abroad, you miss out on this entire process and have to approach the Japanese business world as a lateral hire, which is a difficult proposition when you have no work experience. As an academic or an entrepreneur, sure, it probably doesn’t matter. The only thing you miss in that case is the domestic networking provided by going to a big Japanese school (which is not to be underestimated).
A word on Temple: its undergrad program in Tokyo is a joke, combining the sloth of Japanese university with the resources of an underfunded American high school, but its graduate programs here are really, really good–if not prestigious, they at least have an excellent faculty and curriculum. I can’t say much about Dujarric because I don’t know what his “institute” does, other than supporting a couple of researchers and organizing speaking engagements with unknown academics. It doesn’t seem to be a “program” as much as a tiny think tank.
I agree that Dujarric made a major mistake in looking only at undergrad–“serious” Japanese do go to the US for grad school, in large numbers. Jun Okumura is a good example, and he isn’t atypical among the higher strata of business and government society here–just look at the resumes of recent prime ministers. At my own undergrad school, an enormous university in Florida which is definitely not Florida State, there were practically no Japanese in undergrad, but the medical programs had sizable colonies of Japanese students. I would go as far as to say that those Japanese who go to the US for undergrad are generally interested in learning English and partying, not necessarily in that order, which is why almost all of them are in “fun” places like New York or California, not in the Harvard library.
“It depends on what you want to do with your life. Japan’s salarymen and bureaucrats are, by and large, recruited right out of the major universities in a very formalized process, even at many gaishikei companies.”
Sure, but aren’t we out of the mindset these days that Japanese worker = salaryman? It seems to me that if we are looking at “Japan” writ large as Dujarric seems to be we should be thinking outside of that particular box anyway.
I’ve heard good things about Temple Tokyo’s grad programs too. Do they have a different Japan studies section? It seems to me that their position in Tokyo could be something they could capitalise on in this area. And they do seem to offer a lot of overseas “commentary” about things in Japan.
(although some of it might be stretching things a little far, methinks
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qRETEjWjYlY)
Well, yes, there are lots of ways to work, but salaryman and bureaucrat still seem to be the jobs that educated people want in this country, along with old standbys like lawyer and doctor. You always have the option to open a bagel shop in Kyoto, but I don’t think the sort of person who’s interested in that is the sort of person who would be interested in undergrad at an Ivy.
Temple doesn’t have graduate programs in the humanities — just law, business and education (TESOL), which make sense given the market that they’re operating in. I’m not really sure how an American university could capitalize on serious Japan studies when it’s surrounded by serious Japanese universities (Temple’s Japan campus is literally a block away from the main gate of Keio).
There’s a reason to keep Japanese from doing undergrad study abroad that noone has yet specifically mentioned on the thread, which is that you miss out on the entire shukatsu period. Sure, you can participate when you get home after graduation, but then you miss all the benefits of university arranged events, alumni connections, and maybe most of all, of being able to do it during your senior year instead of having to spend a year working in 7/11 while you look for a real job. I’m sure this is slightly less of an issue than it was not too long ago, with the general (but very slow) trend towards a more fluid employment system, but it definitely enters the calculation.
But I think that essay really does overestimate how important undergrad study abroad is. After all, America is so important to Korea (and Taiwan) for two major reasons that aren’t (as) relevant to Japan.
First, huge Korean and Taiwanese immigrant communities in America. Incidentally, this is also a reason that you see more of them IN colleges. There were a huge number of Koreans studying undergrad at Rutgers when I was there (I’m sure it’s not changed) and a very large portion of them had lived in New Jersey for high school, or at least the second half of it, either with their entire family or some relative who had previously immigrated to the state. This both gave them time to learn English well enough, and to qualify as an in-state student instead of an international one. These immigrant communities have also had huge amounts of back and forth travel for decades, leading to a significant sub-population among the Korean and Taiwanese elites who are bi-cultural with America. Since there has been virtually no immigration from Japan post-war, this simply hasn’t been relevant.
Second, since Korea and Taiwan are both much, much smaller than Japan, they do not have as full a complement of industries as Japan and are far more dependent on both the export market and the import market for certain kinds of manufactured goods. While Japan has to import raw materials and has quite a lot of export-oriented manufacturing, they aren’t AS dependent on it. This higher level of dependence on international trade arguably leads to a more internationalist outlook among the business and political classes.
And last, it probably is true that you see a lot more Japanese grad students and researchers going to the US than undergrads. Also, most of the Japanese undergrads who go to study in the US go to the west coast, not the east. I wouldn’t be surprised if some major universities actually have more Post-docs from Japan than undergrads.
There are basically entire undergrad schools in California whose business model is to give Japanese and other Asian students an excuse to live in the US. “Stan Ford College” is one infamous example. (Although it seems to be google-proof… when I search for “Stan Ford” I just get links to the real Stanford.)
”I wouldn’t be surprised if some major universities actually have more Post-docs from Japan than undergrads.”
That I’m skeptic.For most of Japanese student goes to the U.S to have “English speaking experience” and not the degree,thus many are undergrads.
Since Dujarric has a French citizenship along with the American one,so he should have brought up French institution like ENA as the comparison,instead of being so “Anglocentric”.Majority of French elites in the bureaucracy/industry/politics are raised in that very”rigid and communitarian atomosphere”of French institution,yet no one call them an insular.
Dujarric also left a comment in one of J-politics English blog on Abe advocated stronger Japan-U.S ties based on “common value”.His tongue-in-cheek comment was something like he can’t think of any common value being shared between LDP and American politics,but allowance of waterboarding.
Now if only he had Ph.D in Japanese history,he would have known that practice of waterboarding to “terrorists” in Japan had ended some time in the mid ’40’s.
Perhaps we just need more Japanese Harvard alumni on blogsphere to point that out to Dujarric….
“thus many are undergrads.”
That’s a good point, lots of Japanese students in the US on exchange programs for the English experience (these are the Japanese students that I have taught). With such low numbers of undergrads cited in that Harvard writeup, they most likely are not including short timers.
However, there really are lots of Japanese in grad schools in all areas.
“Now if only he had Ph.D in Japanese history,he would have known that practice of waterboarding to “terrorists” in Japan had ended some time in the mid ‘40’s.”
You don’t need a PhD to figure that out. Sometimes, I think that a PhD actually keeps some people from figuring that out.
“With such low numbers of undergrads cited in that Harvard writeup, they most likely are not including short timers.”
And I doubt that many Japanese see Harvard as an obvious place to go and do a TESOL course for a semester or two anyway.
I’m sure Harvard takes plenty of one or two semester study abroad students though. They certainly SEND them, and those are usually two-way exchange programs.