Belated thanks to Jeffrey Broadbent and Mary Alice Haddad for letting us know about their research on media and the environment in Japan - really valuable!

I'll now try to put down a summary and some thoughts on education and climate strikes. It's been interesting to see the contrasting observations from members at different institutions. Sheila Cliffe noted the relative lack of interest in climate activism or concern about climate change at Jumonji Gakuen Women's University, whereas Naoko Hashimoto found the opposite among students in the Global Leaders Program at Hitotsubashi University. Edward Vickers commented on the apparent relative lack of environmental consciousness among staff and students at Kyushu University. Charles Cabell stated that his experience at Toyo University was that there was an unwillingness to tackle difficult or 'taboo' topics among either staff or students.

Saki Mizoroki suggested that students become averse to expressing opinions because the 'authoritarian' school education system does not encourage or train them to do so. Brigitte Steger suggested that because 'good citizenship' and 100% class attendance is important in Japan, this makes the idea of a 'school strike' hard to accept for students (and others). Nick Kapur similarly suggested that street protests and in a sense even 'politics' have been stigmatized since the protest movements of the 1950s and 1960s (partly because of the associations with violence). He also suggested that students are too busy (in school with clubs and juku, and at university with job-hunting) to engage in politics, and that, in any case, they have become highly risk-averse in their life choices. In somewhat similar vein, Mary Reisel suggested that the considerable pressure that students are under during high school leads them to focus only on their own lives; and also that many students, in her experience, show a lack of critical thinking and ability to connect arguments across areas of life.

Sakari Mesimaki raised some very interesting points about young people and politics which went well beyond the education system, suggesting that the young people he interviewed have little experience discussing politics anywhere (at home, at school, etc) and are unsure/chary about how to do so.

As in the case of the media, in the case of education too there is plenty of scope for further empirical research. I have not made any systematic study of how environmental issues are treated in Japanese school textbooks. However, these topics have certainly featured to some extent in textbooks for many years. For example, when I was doing research in junior high schools in the mid-1990s, the market-leading Mitsumura Japanese language (kokugo) textbook contained a text about the increasing amounts of waste (plastic etc) and the need to tackle this issue. Ten years later, the same publisher's textbook contained a different text, this time about what the fate of Easter Island tells us about exploitation of nature and consequent environmental collapse. A systematic study of textbooks could be interesting.

I think it is also important to note that the introduction of Integrated Studies (sougou-teki na gakushuu) into the elementary and junior high curriculum from 2002 created significant space in the curriculum for schools to explore subjects of their choosing. In the small number of junior high schools I studied in depth for my 2016 book Schooling Selves, I found little evidence of schools using that time to focus on environmental issues (though the environment was usually a possible subject for individual student projects), which rather surprised me. There seemed to be several reasons for this; one important one was that schools tended to think that Integrated Studies should be used for experiential learning about the local area, which did not necessarily lend itself to environmental study unless the local area had particularly interesting environmental features. Other important reasons were the amount of work that preparing study about the local environment demanded of teachers, and, quite simply, the lack of enthusiasm that many showed for Integrated Studies. Personally, I found this disappointing, since I thought that Integrated Studies had great potential, but this did not chime with the view of many junior high teachers that this stage of education is about learning 'the basics' of academics and behaviour. The point, however, is that there is curricular space for environmental studies, should schools wish to avail themselves of it.

In my own experience, and according to the research I am aware of, it is true that Japanese secondary education does little to develop students' abilities to construct and express arguments (though I do not think that merits the term 'authoritarian'). The extent to and means by which this happens in other school systems no doubt varies, but I suspect that so-called Western countries whose academic traditions trace back to the Renaissance, and ultimately to classical Greece and Rome, contain embedded within them a strong valorisation of training in argument and debate, at least for more academically proficient students. I think it is important to note that there is also a strong tendency in Japan for more academically prestigious high schools to give their students more scope for intellectual development and discussion - this was noted by Thomas Rohlen about Nada High School back in the 1970s, and I have found the same at the elite high schools I have visited in Tokyo, even if this does not go as far as at their equivalents in the U.K. A reasonable hypothesis might be that young people's participation in climate change activism could be related to academic attainment; an empirical study of this in different countries could be interesting.

I am not convinced by suggestions that Japanese high school students are too busy to be involved in school strikes or other political activities. In fact, research by Takehiko Kariya and others has shown that hours of study outside school by students at less academically demanding high schools declined dramatically between the 1970s and 1990s. Moreover, it could well be argued that precisely because Japanese high school students have alternative means of study such as juku, they have more scope to skip school than their counterparts in many other countries, who are, after all, also under considerable pressure to perform well. (The niece of an elementary school teacher I know managed to enter Todai despite being notorious at her academically prestigious public high school for non-attendance. The school was far from amused that she gave all the credit to her juku teachers, and the fact that it was rare for students at the school to get into Todai just rubbed salt in their wounds.) In addition, the March 2019 school strike took place at a time when university entrance exams had finished and final year high school students could go on strike with more or less complete impunity. I suspect that awareness of school strikes had not percolated through to high school students in Japan at that time, but it will be interesting to see what happens if there is another major global school strike organised in March 2020.

However, there is also the issue of how far teenagers in Japan are socialised to discuss and take action in relation to social and political issues beyond the education system (e.g. in the family). This relates to the points raised by Sakari Mesimaki and Nick Kapur. I suspect that this wider socialisation is probably more significant than what happens in the education system. Again, it would be very interesting to see an empirical study of how students participating in school strikes have developed their consciousness. One suggestive snapshot is provided by this Guardian article about a 13 year old student called Holly Gillibrand, from a small town in the Scottish highlands: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/feb/08/holly-gillibrand-school-strike-climate-action-skipping-class What I infer from the report is that the influence from Holly Gillibrand's family was probably stronger than that from her school, even though the school was supportive. It would not surprise me if few teenagers in Japan are being socialised to discuss and take action about social and political issues in their families, because this would reflect what I see as a widespread sense in Japan in general not just of alienation from politics and activism, but also that what can be achieved by such means by ordinary people is limited. (Here I am pre-empting a possible future post on Green politics or the lack of it!) This would chime with Jeff Broadbent's findings of the way that climate change issues are covered in the Japanese media - i.e. that they are matters for government action, not popular activism.

Finally, I think I again want to reiterate the point I made in my previous posting on media, i.e. that it needs to be remembered that even though the number of participants in school strikes in Europe, Australia, etc are high compared to Japan, they are still only a small proportion of the entire student population. It's not the case that most school students anywhere are protesting about the climate. The question is, why have there not even been a small (as opposed to miniscule) proportion protesting in Japan? Hopefully, through this discussion, we are getting closer to an understanding of this.

Peter

Peter Cave
Senior Lecturer in Japanese Studies
SALC, University of Manchester
Samuel Alexander Building
Oxford Road
Manchester M13 9PL
United Kingdom
Tel: +44 (0)161 275 3195
www.manchester.ac.uk/research/peter.cave/