The fax on the ground (Part 2)
The technological paradox at the heart of Japan's digital revolution.
In Part 1 we looked at the plans to roll-out digital textbooks from 2024 and some comparable digital initiatives to Japan’s GIGA schools initiative that failed.
It would be tempting to jump straight to looking at the digital textbooks themselves – and I promise that’s coming – but first we need to understand the context they will operate in. Japan’s political, social, and technological background in particular shape the GIGA schools initiative in some unexpected ways.
This time round, we’re going to use the classic PESTLE framework to peer under the hood of modern Japan.
There are four articles in this series, and if you want to understand what’s going on (to appropriate the words of one of Japan’s most successful technology exports) you gotta catch ‘em all.
Political
You can’t talk about modern Japanese politics without talking about Shinzo Abe. Abe was in power twice – once for a brief stint between 2006 and 2007, and then between 2012 and 2020 when he became Japan’s longest serving prime minister. His signature policy was an economic package designed to shunt Japan out of two decades of stagnant growth, known by the portmanteau Abenomics.
Before July this year it might have been sufficient to say that Japan has a stable political environment. Here’s the OECD’s summary from 2018:
Japan is a constitutional monarchy, with the role of the Emperor limited to ceremonial duties. Power is held by the Prime Minister, while sovereignty is vested in the Japanese people, who elect members of the Diet, the legislative body of Japan. A bicameral body, the Diet consists of the House of Representatives, in which members are elected by popular vote every four years, and the House of Councillors, in which members are also elected by popular vote but serve six-year terms. Japan has been governed by the Liberal Democratic Party, either alone or as part of a coalition for around 40 years, with other parties in power in 1991-93 and 2009-12.
On 8 July 2022, Shinzo Abe was assassinated at a political stump speech. It was an event that cause international shock and condemnation and unsurprisingly continues to ripple through Japanese political life.
To understand the repercussions, we need to consider the assassin’s motivation. The gunman claimed to have acted because he held a grudge against the Unitarian Church, with which Abe and his family had political ties, after his mother “had been financially ruined after being pressured to donate large sums of money”.
Religion and the state were formally separated in 1947 when the Emperor became a ceremonial role, rather than a divine figurehead for Shinto, the official state religion.
Just over a month after Abe was killed, the Minister of education Shinsuke Suematsu, was sacked for his connections to the Unitarian Church. This was part of a wider purge within parliament, bringing some rapid political changes.
The sudden rise to prominence of the Unitarian Church in the wake of Abe’s death begged a question: are religion and politics as separated as they should be under Japanese law?
As Philip Patrick writes for Unherd in an article that’s well worth a read:
Of those that flourished, some religions sought power and security through politics. The most famous of these is Soka Gakkai, a form of Nichiren Buddhism based on the teachings of a 13th century priest. It now claims eight million followers in Japan and twelve million worldwide. It has its own political party, Komeito, which thanks to the rigid discipline of its members – who vote as they are instructed – has become a key player in Japanese politics, often as a coalition partner for hire.
Komeito has been in alliance with the ruling [Liberal Democrat Party (LDP)] since 1999 and is the junior coalition partner of the present government. Michael Cucek of Temple University in Tokyo calls Komeito “the most important and least understood part of Japanese politics”. He says that the party is essentially run by women, with the most powerful part being its decision-making inner sanctum the Fujimbu, or mothers and women’s association. The political alliance is controversial within the LDP, but Cucek explains that as 25% of the party’s district votes are believed to be supplied by Komeito — in return, naturally, for favours — the awkward embrace looks likely to endure.
Assassination and intrigues aside, does the long rule of the Liberal Democrat Party explain the stability of education policy? Not really. Take a closer look and Japan has experienced significant ministerial churn. Since 2001 there have been 22 Ministers of Education.
By comparison, the UK has had 15 Secretaries of State for Education in the same period (five of those in the last year, including Michelle Donelan who had the indignity of occupying the post for a mere two days, and Kit Malthouse who was announced late on 6 September as part of Liz Truss’s new cabinet). In fact in the same period India has had 8, South Africa has had 4, America has had 9, Australia has had 13…
Counterintuitively (from an incomplete survey) Japan has had higher than average Ministerial churn. And yet, curriculum reform in this system is remarkably cyclical and steady-paced. Again, from the OECD’s 2018 profile:
MEXT determines the National Curriculum Standards, a broad set of standards for all schools from kindergarten to upper secondary schools. The National Curriculum Standards provide curriculum guidelines and structure education programmes to ensure that they comply with a fixed standard of education throughout the country. The National Curriculum Standards have generally been revised once every ten years or so since 1951.
I have found no legislation or policy that commits Japanese Ministers of Education to this steady cycle of change. So what prevents the kind of policy ping-pong you might expect to see in an environment with such churn? A cultural collectivism that moderates the usual ministerial ambition to announce their arrival on the political stage with a flagship policy? A respect for the tradition of slow, planned reform? A fear of killing the golden goose? A lack of bold ideas?
I’m tempted to think it’s partly a respect for what has become a tradition and fear of undoing something that’s working well. This newsletter has a broad readership, so if you can offer some insight here, hit reply or have your say in the comments.
Economic
Japan is the third largest economy in the world by GDP, but it’s got a problem. From the OECD’s 2018 country profile:
Despite high economic performance, Japan has had a sluggish economy for more than 20 years. At the start of the 1990s, the Japanese asset price bubble burst, throwing the Japanese economy into turmoil. The economic recovery that ensued did not restore Japan’s prosperity. The subprime crisis in 2008 triggered a recession, with a growth rate of -5.5% in Japan in 2009, causing Japan to sink even deeper into what is now called the “lost decades”. Japan’s GDP per capita, which almost matched the level of the top half of OECD countries in 1990, is now 19% below that.
During that period, persistent deflation increased the debt ratio, while chronic deficits were maintaining this effect. Today, the gross debt stands at 216% of GDP, and the public debt service is now the biggest item in the Japanese budget (24.3%). This leaves little leeway for government policy action. In response, the government launched a package of reforms to stimulate the economy, including monetary easing to tackle the liquidity trap, fiscal stimulus to boost consumption and policies to spur private investment and revive growth.
This background has contributed to rising inequalities, linked to the development of a dual labour market after the price asset bubble crisis. As declining growth shifted the Japanese lifetime employment model, labour law reforms gave firms incentives to explore alternative forms of human resources practices (Aoyagi and Ganelli, 2013). Since the early 1990s, a rise in the share of non-regular workers (refers usually to workers who do not enjoy employment security: short-term contract, part-time work or indirect employment) in the workforce has fuelled the increase in inequality in income, strengthened the dualism of the labour market (regular versus non-regular workers), generated a working-poor population, and potentially leveraged the poverty rate (Jones, 2007).
The Abenomics programme was intended to target this persistent economic stagnation. The current Kishida administration has pledged to maintain the Abenomics programme, with its focus on two targets:
Achieving sustainable economic growth by “Implement[ing] comprehensive reform to accelerate an economic virtuous cycle, which will help grow GDP to 600 trillion yen”. The date for this target was 2020, but, well, ‘rona.
Restructuring the economy around the country’s aging demographics – or, in the words of the policy: “Society 5.0 is a national vision aimed at realizing a data-driven, human-centric society for our future generations. It is a vision in which economic development, digitalization, and solutions for social issues are aligned.”
As with every policy goal set in the 2010s, no one expected the pandemic. The shuttering of economies, reduction in social contact, and vast programmes of government spending have left concrete plans in the dust. And now we have the return of inflation and the spectre of a global recession.
But could there be a silver lining? Japan’s been struggling with deflation for years, which has only exacerbated the value of the debt on the public balance sheet. For the timebeing at least, Japan’s inflation figure is tracking at a truly envious level, broadly within the range that the Bank of England targets.
Investment in education is a more complex picture than it might at first seem. Japan has the lowest level of education expenditure as a share of GDP across OECD countries. In 2018, Japan invested $10,185 per student in primary to tertiary-level institutions, compared with an average of $10,454 across OECD countries.
However, these figures don’t account for private tutoring and after-school schooling. Many students are enrolled in juku, which is a form of after-school tutoring that often focuses on English and Mathematics. Participation in juku ranges from 26-27% in the early years of primary to 58% in the final years of lower secondary as students prepare for entrance exams (juken, in case you’re wondering about the etymology of juku) for upper secondary schools.
Private tutoring is a global phenomenon. For comparison, in 2019 the Sutton Trust found that 27% of 11-16 year olds in England and Wales had received private tutoring, of whom 37% had received support for a specific GCSE exam and 24% for a school entrance exam. There was a disparity between economic groups (20% of poorer homes have had tutoring, versus a third from richer) and between rural and urban (41% of 11-16 year olds in London reported receiving private tuition).
Similar inequalities exist in Japan, particularly with the post-crash arrival of the gig economy. There has also been a phenomenal social shift in the country with rapid urbanisation, which potentially makes life for those in rural populations less equal still.
Social
Any description of national character runs the risk of stereotyping, but there are a couple of aspects that are at least adjacent to national character that will become important. Firstly, from the OECD:
The concept of social peace and group identity is pervasive in Japanese education and society in general. The socialisation process in Japanese primary schools mimics the distinctive features of Japanese law, government and management (Rohlen, 1989). Teachers develop group behaviour among pupils, without exerting strong authority. As in civil society, authority tries to shift responsibility downward to lower-level groups. This results in a great sense of order within the group, and prepares children for group participation and bonding, which are required in the Japanese society at every level. Some experts have suggested that the Japanese concepts of attachment and group behaviour as part of social order could explain why Japan is a more ordered society than China or South Korea, for instance, which share the same Confucianist roots (Hechter and Kanazawa, 1993).
You can see this devolution of authority in action through the way that MEXT devolves a significant amount of responsibility to prefectures, rather than centralising decision-making. And as I’ll argue when we come to look at what goes on in Japanese classrooms, devolution of responsibility plays out in pedagogy.
Related to this, consider the way discipline works in Japanese schools. The following is based on Lucy Crehan’s description in Cleverlands, which is an excellent read for on-the-ground observations about classrooms in Japan as well as other high-performing countries.
In Elementary schools, children are put in hans, mixed ability groups within a class that will work together on tasks. Discipline is loose and children can roam around freely, but the teacher will call out hans that are not yet ready to finish their task and the social pressure of the group will encourage the wayward child to get back on it.
Then, at Junior High School, discipline is much more openly instilled by the teacher. The collective unit becomes the class, with rotating class leader roles, and there is formal competition between classes within a school. Collective responsibility reinforces the role of the social group in policing individual behaviour.
We also need to understand the roles of patriarchy and late-stage capitalism. According to Dr Brigitte Steger of Cambridge’s Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies:
You can’t understand Japanese society without understanding gender.
There is a lot of new interest in ideas around masculinity. Japan’s economic success in the post-war era has been built on a clear gendered division of labour: the reproductive housewife and the hard-working man.
For men, the model to which they aspired was that of the dark-suited “salaryman” – the central pillar of Japan’s economy and also of his family as the sole breadwinner. But the old type of salaryman have a reputation of not knowing how to talk to women, bad communication skills, lack fashion sense and are renowned for smoking and drinking a lot and having an aged smell.
For the middle classes, it has long been the expectation that boys will go on to become salarymen – white-collar workers, hired from school and working long hours for the same company, never leaving the pub or karaoke before the boss, barely seeing their family until retirement or karōshi (death from overworking).
And what of the women? As Lucy Crehan observes:
Parents, particularly mothers, are expected to be heavily involved in the education of children in Japan, and they take this role seriously. […] the children feel the weight of their parents’ expectations, which motivates them further to succeed at school. Failure does not only have a personal cost; it reflects badly on the family.
This intense involvement in the child’s education is expected by society and by the schools. It is bound to have a positive effect on exam results, but significantly impacts women’s career opportunities. For example, a survey of 3,500 25–44-year-old women by Japan’s Labour Ministry found that 47 per cent reported being told at work that they were “causing trouble” or that they “should retire” when they fell pregnant. It’s culturally expected that as a mother you wouldn’t do anything which would interfere with your ability to supervise your children’s homework, or make their packed lunches for the school trip. Schools send home a list of responsibilities that parents are supposed to take on, such as marking their child’s homework. They are told what time students should go to bed, and how much time they should have for playing with friends during the holidays.
Abenomics has attempted to change these gender roles through a focus on increasing the number of women in the workforce, and there have been initiatives to promote Ikumen – fathers who do some childcare, see their family, don’t kill themselves at work – as fashionable and desirable. Success in this domain has been more modest.
Now we come to the elephant in the room. No description of the social conditions in Japan is complete without noting its aging population and declining birth rate. In 2020, 28.8% of the population was aged 65 or over, versus 12% of the population aged 0-14 years old. This demographic thinning has led to some remarkable drops in both the school population and the number of schools in the country.
Technological
Japan’s population has urbanised significantly, going from 79% living in urban areas in 2000 to 92% in 2021. (79% of the UK’s population was urban in 2000 too; by 2021 this had grown to 84%.) Urbanisation acts as a key enabler for the GIGA schools programme, because it provides better access to digital infrastructure. This, of course, means that providing for the 8% of the population who live in rural areas is comparatively expensive.
Despite the availability of infrastructure, up until the pandemic hit, only around 2% of state school classrooms had any kind of digital devices. There’s a weird contradiction here that needs some unpacking.
Japan is a well-established leader in technology and innovation. It’s the home of the just-in-time system that revolutionised manufacturing in the 1970s, minimising waste and downtime on production lines through highly efficient resource management. Culturally, in the West at least, Japan is a country that has embraced technology with a quirky gusto – it’s all robots and video games and musical toilet seats.
But the truth is that Japan has tended to hang on to old technology, taking a “If it still works, why fix it” approach. As reported in May 2020:
There are arguably two most glaring symbols of just how old-fashioned and conservative the average Japanese company is: the fax machine and the “hanko,” or carved official seal.
A study by the government last year determined that virtually every Japanese company and one-third of all households still use fax machines — technology that dates from the 1980s — for a good proportion of their communications. […]
“We are seeing the coronavirus ushering in a new way of working in Japan, and I think it's about time,” said Ivan Tselichtchev, a professor at the Niigata University of Management, who says the nation’s attachment to the fax machine is particularly difficult to fathom, but is probably rooted in older employees’ reluctance to trust modern technology.
Criticism of the reliance on faxes has risen after a doctor used Twitter to criticize the legal requirement that hospitals and clinics complete pages of paperwork on new cases of coronavirus by hand and then send it all to public health centers – where the data is input by hand into a computer so authorities can monitor the spread of the disease.
“Come on, let's stop this,” tweeted the doctor, a specialist in respiratory medicine at a hospital. “Reporting cases in handwriting? Even with the coronavirus, we are writing by hand and faxing.”
On 30 August 2022 Taro Kono, Japan’s Digital Minister, declared war on the floppy disk. He promised “I'm looking to get rid of the fax machine, and I still plan to do that […] Where does one even buy a floppy disk these days?”
An ageing population and a distrust of new technology may help explain this seeming contradiction. The experience of the pandemic has highlighted the risks and issues associated with using old technology, however. There’s a new impetus and a hard drive [pauses for laughter] to embrace new technology throughout society.
Legal
There are a few aspects of legislation that have a direct impact on the role and position of textbooks in schools.
Firstly, during compulsory education, textbooks must be provided for students for free. This has placed the textbook at the heart of curriculum reform in Japan. For example, the curriculum being implemented at the moment was approved in 2018, but only starting being implemented in schools between 2020 and 2022 when the textbooks for the relevant stages were published.
While the law governing textbooks was updated in 2018 to account for digital, the position of print textbooks has not changed: “Paper textbooks play an important role in school education.” However, under Article 34 of the School Education Law, teachers can use digital textbooks in place of print, particularly to improve “deep learning” and access for students with special educational needs.
Formerly the School Education Law had placed limitations on the amount of screen time for students, but the cap has now been removed. There’s no expectation that ebooks will be used for every minute of class time, but this change is intended to encourage best use of the digital.
As regular readers will remember, MEXT is responsible for quality assurance of the textbooks available for use in public schools. Only approved textbooks can be provided to students, so MEXT acts as a powerful gatekeeper for publishers.
As we’ll see in Part 3, MEXT expects digital textbooks to include additional content. Curiously, then, there is no requirement for the digital content to pass through an approval process. Approval of the print textbook will mean that the digital textbook is automatically approved, on the basis that the digital edition contains the same content, plus enhancements.
A final relevant legislative detail is that the Ministry controls the price that publishers can charge for their textbooks. Which means that MEXT bears responsibility for making sure that digital investment is financially sustainable for publishers.
Environmental
While Japan’s response to the pandemic and speed of reopening schools was generally pretty good, it is perhaps curious that the country wasn’t better prepared for distance learning. Sitting at the boundary of four tectonic plates, Japan experiences volcanoes, earthquakes and tsunamis.
In 2011, an earthquake and tsunami damaged 7735 school buildings across the north-east of the country. Schools were turned into emergency accommodation, so when they reopened there were some students who were living and learning in the school building while they waited for safe accommodation.
Is the move towards digital textbooks a shift towards better preparation to provide education in emergencies? For reasons that will become apparent, that seems unlikely.
See you space cowboy…
Understanding the context in which the GIGA schools initiative is being introduced is important to understand some of the features of its design. The key features to remember are:
Political stability and consciously paced change
Collective responsibility for classroom behaviour
Devolved accountability and decision-making
Conservative social attitudes towards technological change
In Part 3, we’re going to look at the digital textbooks themselves. What does MEXT intend to improve by the move to digital? What is the “deep learning” expected from digital? And how do you convince and train teachers to get the best out of technology?