Politics of Externalization in Reflexive Times: Reinventing Japanese Education Reform Discourses through “Finnish PISA Success”

With the release of the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) 2003 results in late 2004, Finland became the focus of international admiration. Soon after the study's release, scholars, journalists, and government officials from around the world flocked to the small Nordic nation in search of the "secret" of its educational accomplishment (Asahi News 2002). While Finland enjoyed international acclaim, Japan - the former exemplar of educational excellence - was in the midst of serious soul-searching about its own educational system. The Japanese "academic achievement crisis debate" ('gakuryoku teika ronsō') erupted in the late 1990s, generating a national moral panic over declining academic performance (see Takayama 2007). The PISA 2003 results were released at the peak of this controversy, and Japan's "drop" in ranking in some areas from PISA 2000 to PISA 2003 led many observers to believe that the suspected scholastic crisis had been confirmed (see Takayama 2008c). In the aftermath of the PISA shock, Japanese journalists, scholars, and government officials followed the international trend, traveling to Finland in search of the Finnish secret (Fujita 2005). Meanwhile, various Japanese professional educational associations invited Finnish education scholars and former and incumbent ministers of education to learn from the world's best education system (Asahi News 2005b; Tanaka 2005b; Kitagawa 2006.