Challenging the system : education and resistance in Hokkaido, Japan

Abstract

The Popular Education Research Movement (Minkan Kydiku Kenkyu Undo), PERM, is the collective name given to groups of schoolteachers and academics who have challenged official education policy in Japan over the past century. This thesis traces the development of this movement on the island of Hokkaido, Japan’s northernmost frontier located far from the central control of the Japanese State. I incorporate the Foucauldian paradigm of power-knowledge relations to characterize the development of the PERM as a form of local knowledge-based resistance to centralised control of education in Japan. In so doing the thesis explores what made the PERM a form of discursive resistance to official education policy and how the actions of PERM teachers contributed to the development of education in Hokkaido. In the 1930s Hokkaido became the cradle of essay writing education (Hokkaido tsuzurikata kyoiku) in Japan. As a pedagogical activity essay writing education offered an alternative teaching method to connect formal learning with the real life experiences of children and represented one of the most important activities of the pre-war PERM. Although inactive during the Second World War, the PERM reappeared after the Japanese defeat as part of teacher opposition to American proposals for education reform. Teachers continued their battle against the exclusion of local knowledge from the school curriculum as the Ministry of Education chose instead to emphasise the creation of an “education myth” responsible for the Japanese economic “miracle” of the 1960s and 1970s. Following the establishment in 1961 of the Hokkaido Popular Education Research Association (Hokkaido Association) teachers’ efforts to resist the centre and develop education based on local knowledge were gradually overtaken by the power of the State. As such, teacher resistance effectively became a de facto form of compliance which contributed to the incorporation of Hokkaido into the Japanese national discourse. An analysis of the philosophy and activities of the Hokkaido PERM suggest that the most realistic outcome of such struggles is not necessarily major reform, but often the simple ability to continue the struggle and to construct an environment which makes such struggle possible.