Free Your Mind
Japanese colleges are starting to rethink the cookie-cutter view of education and pay attention to creativity
By DONALD MACINTYRE Fujisawa
Nestled in farm country within sight of Mt. Fuji, Keio University's Shonan Fujisawa campus doesn't look like an institution on the cutting edge. Students say they can't use the tennis courts at night because the lights might keep cows in nearby pastures awake. Pungent barnyard smells sometimes waft past the campus' glass-and-concrete libraries and lecture halls. Yokohama, the biggest city nearby, is more than half an hour away. But far from being a backwater, Shonan Fujisawa is an unusual beacon of change in Japan's troubled university system. Instead of cookie-cutter bureaucrats and blue-suited corporate clones--the traditional crop of top Japanese schools, including Keio--Shonan Fujisawa is trying to nurture something new: entrepreneurs and independent thinkers. Says Hiroaki Wakashita, a communications-technology student: "Shonan Fujisawa is going with the Western ideal--individuals who can work for themselves."
Those are the creative types many Japanese say their country needs in order to revitalize itself. Most universities are still geared to mass-producing graduates who can cram facts, follow orders and work impossibly long hours. That's what Japan Inc. wanted when manufacturing was king and the economy was booming. But times have changed. Fleeter, information-based companies are taking over. Japan's top business lobby, the Keidanren, is clamoring for well-rounded grads who can handle an Internet IPO as smoothly as a night on the town with gaijin business partners in New York.
The Education Ministry is listening. It has rolled out a reform blueprint aimed at boosting standards in undergraduate and graduate programs and loosening rules that make the universities so rigidly uniform. This year it is letting students enroll in the fall (instead of only in the spring) and making it easier to earn degree credits outside the university. Also in the works: allowing undergrads to finish in three years instead of four. By making universities more flexible, the ministry hopes to spark more creativity on campus. It is also encouraging schools to leaven curriculums with more liberal arts classes. "The 21st century will be a time of tremendous change," says Hideaki Matsugi, a ministry official working on the reform program. "We won't get through it without this."
Critics call these moves piecemeal. They say universities have not veered sufficiently from their traditional role of catering to big business instead of the individual. Such conservatism is hardly surprising. The ministry's bureaucrats have spent much of the postwar period trying to roll back the liberal educational reforms brought in under the American occupation. Conservatives have felt the reforms put too much stress on individual freedoms and not enough on citizens' duties to the state. So there is skepticism about the ministry's top-down push to encourage Japanese students to "pursue their own ends," as a ministry-commissioned report puts it. "What they are trying to do is a kind of planned spontaneity," says Ivan Hall, a U.S. expert on Japanese education who has also taught in the country.
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THIS WEEK'S TABLE OF CONTENTS
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Young Japan Home
The Me Generation:
The country's privileged youth are struggling to define what they want. Their efforts--both frivolous and fundamental--are already beginning to transform the culture
Day in the Life:
What a 17-year-old girl does--and buys
Culture Club:
Tokyo has taken over as the source of what's hip and happening for the rest of East Asia
Sound Factory:
An Okinawa school turns out stars
Talk Talk:
What teens are chatting about online
Not Playing Ball:
A fresh generation is starting to shake up the hidebound world of Japanese baseball
Outside the Box:
Breaking the education straitjacket
Viewpoint:
Actress Youki Kudoh says respect the old ways
Viewpoint:
Parents should examine their own ethics
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