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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 February 2017
The past decade has been a tumultuous one for Japanese higher education with faculty pitted against students, students against government, and government against both in an often chaotic and seemingly incessant search for an answer to the question “Who governs Japan's universities?” The answer given by many analysts is “no one”—that the conflict between these three bodies have rendered Japanese universities ungovernable. Failure to achieve consensus and implement needed reforms in higher education has been attributed largely to the decentralized internal organization of the leading universities and the tradition of deep-seated hostility between academic intellectuals and the Japanese government. Although the more violent and dramatic of the conflicts in the late 1960s and early 1970s have received considerable attention by observers outside Japan, the long tradition of conflict over university governance which provides such a significant part of the intellectual and political context for those caught up in the contemporary debates has received far less attention. The purpose of this essay is to provide an historical perspective on this conflict by sketching in the prewar background that constitutes the heritage of academic self-government at Japan's oldest and still foremost universities, the imperial universities of Tokyo and Kyoto.
1. See Michio's, Nagai Higher Education in Japan: Its Takeoff and Crash (Tokyo, 1971) especially pp. 129–137, and 251–252. Nagai has recently stepped down as Minister of Education, the first bonafide scholar to hold that position since the end of the American Occupation. Ivan Hall and William Cummings are two American observers whose recently published analyses have reached conclusions similar to those of Nagai. See Hall's, “Organizational Paralysis: The Case of Tōdai,” in Vogel, Ezra, ed., Modern Japanese Organization and Decision-making (Berkeley, 1975), pp. 305–330; and Kitamura, Kazuyuki and Cummings, William K., “The ‘Big Bang’ Theory and Japanese University Reform,” Comparative Educational Review (June 1972): 303–324. For translations of other Japanese views of the problems in higher education, see the special issues of The Journal of Social and Political Ideas in Japan, I (December 1963), and 5 (December 1967).Google Scholar
2. The only in-depth study in English of the prewar experience is an unpublished 1952 doctoral dissertation by Suh, Doo Soo, “The Struggle for Academic Freedom in Japan Universities before 1945” (Columbia University). Although Dr. Doo presents a wealth of information and a valuable bibliography, his study was completed too early to take advantage of the research and memoirs published in the last twenty-five years, and the account here differs in interpretative perspective as well as on some facts. For more general introductions to the history of Japanese education, see Passin, Herbert, Society and Education in Japan (New York, 1965); and the writings of Ronald P. Dore listed in my review essay, “Universal Social Dilemmas and Japanese Education History,” History of Education Quarterly, 12 (Spring 1972): 97–106.Google Scholar
3. The figures, which include twenty-two foreign teachers, are taken from Teikoku Daigaku ichiran [Bulletin of the Imperial University] (Tokyo, 1890). Details of the early history are found in Daigaku, Tōkyō Teikoku, ed, Tōkyō Teikoku Diagaku goj&uacrnenshi [Fifty Year History of Tokyo Imperial University; hereinafter cited as TTDGS] (Tokyo, 1932; 2 vols.), Volume 1.Google Scholar
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