After the defeat of the World War II, Japanese people tried to rebuild their society by relying on humanistic and democratic values. It was the renewal of education system that constituted one of the key aspects of the reform. Teachers and scholars gathered together to find, a way to construct an autonomous realm of education with the aim to get rid of militaristic and ultra-nationalistic ideology which was precisely the fundamental principle of education during the imperial period of Japan. However, their effort ended up succumbing to political power, seeking to control education for a more efficient governance of people. The main purpose of this article is to consider the following questions: Why has Japanese school become once again a place of indoctrination of values and norms conforming to the government at the time? How did teachers at school lose their freedom to determine what to teach? From interdisciplinary perspective, this paper tries to answer these questions through analyzing the following three important processes realized in modem Japanese education: Legalization, Moralization, and Disciplination. 1> I) This paper is based on oral presentation at the Asian Law & Society Association 4th Annual Meeting (Osaka, Japan, 2019).
Tsuchiya et al. (Wed,) studied this question.