The Emperor’s New Clothes:
The Discourse of kokusaika in Japanese Higher Education
(Abstract)

Go Murakami and David Ewick
Chuo University, Tokyo

For more than twenty-five years the Japanese government and Japanese universities both public and private have emphasized, planned for, and promoted kokusaika—“internationalization” as the term usually is translated—in Japanese higher education. Simultaneously foreign students, educators, and scholars at Japanese universities frequently have complained that Japanese educational policy is exclusionist and resolutely national(ist?) rather than international in its aims. Some criticisms of policy have come from within the Japanese system itself, most often in an attempt to explain the slow development of kokusaika, but these most commonly are advanced by Japanese intellectuals and policy makers whose concerns and arguments do not take into account the foreign voices that exist at the margins of the system.

This study demonstrates that the absence of an external imagination results in a system that closes in on itself, speaks only to itself, and hears only itself and no other.The absence of an externality at any level of Japanese educational policy, in other words, has resulted in a serious gap between representations of kokusaika and the insular nature of the system to which the term is applied. Finally the paper shows that kokusaika as it is understood in Japanese higher education is little more than a tightly-woven discourse of self-regard, and that when external voices are added to the weave the thread begins to unravel, and to remind of an old tale, many times told, of an emperor and his extravagant new clothes.

The analysis relies largely on primary materials, particularly the twenty-eight reports of the Government Advisory Council on Higher Education (Kôtôkyôiku kenkyûkai, Daigakushingikai zen 28 tôshin, hôkokushû, 1987-2001) and official publications of the former Ministry of Education (Monbushô, 1976-2001) and the re-named Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science, and Technology (Monbukagakushô, 2002-2004). A partial bibliography may be found here.