Japanese Higher Education as Myth Revisited : Can We Learn Nothing from Japanese Universities ?

The view of Japanese higher education remains largely negative. Based on highly-cited works such as McVeigh’s Japanese Higher Education as Myth (2002), the general consensus remains is that there is little to learn from Japanese universities. Our piece attempts to think differently; to challenge this taken-for-granted assumption of deficit. To do so, we argue that marked changes in the landscape of global higher education over the past two decades prompts us to reevaluate Japanese higher education. These changes include the accelerated marketization and neo-liberalism managerialism prominent in Anglo-American universities, commodification of international student flows, the emergence of ‘competition’ in research, the dominance of for-profit publishing, and the politics of knowledge production. These changes push us to pause, rethink and reevaluate, shifting away from a view of Japanese higher education as lagging behind, toward recognition of perhaps different priorities at play there. The larger contribution we seek to make in this piece is to find ways to create a more equal dialogue, replacing the current one in which ‒ due to international rankings and other recent developments in global higher education ‒ Anglo-American universities are viewed as the sole global standard, a stance which leaves little space for nuance, alternatives, or learning from others.