Beyond ‘the West as Method’: Repositioning the Japanese Education Research Communities in/against the Global Structure of Academic Knowledge

Perspectives on Comparative and International Education in Oceania

“…Research shared at recent OCIES conferences has taken up questions of identity politics, indigenous approaches, and post-coloniality in education. OCIES scholars have continued to challenge regional configurations of power within and outside of academia including, for example, that which takes up Chen's (2010) construction of "Asia as Method" by Japanese, Australia-based scholar (Takayama, 2016b). Varied, conceptual, methodological, and theoretical approaches in institutions in Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand have seen an increase in decolonizing methodologies and post-structural approaches that have included critical discourse analyses, ethnographic, narrative, and phenomenological perspectives that seek to acknowledge locate researchers' positionalities in relation to ethical research approaches and recognition of voice (Blackman, 2017;Jesson & Spratt, 2017;McCormick, 2017a;Shah et al, 2017).…”

Relocating the frame of reference for studying play: Reflections from fieldwork in Chinese rural preschools

“…As we reviewed our field notes and videos, we began questioning the beliefs that were consistent with our graduate training and the dominant discourse we found in China's knowledge structure of play . This questioning echoes Takayama's (2011Takayama's ( , 2016 self-reflective evaluation of his own contributions to the knowledge of comparative education-that is, as researchers trained in the western tradition, we accept, contribute to, and embody a dominant mode of knowledge production about preschool play. This mode represents a globalized discourse of academic knowledge about play, which is also prevalent in China's academic play scholarship.…”

“…Like Takayama (2011Takayama ( , 2016, Chen (2010), and others in the fields of comparative education and globalization, we recognize both the growing trend to promote preschool play and the accompanying limitations in the modernization processes of the post-colonial era. Further, we suggest that researchers and educators in the field of play use an additional or alternative frame of reference.…”

Navigating postcolonial predicaments in/through comparative and international educational research: A reflection on Komatsu and Rappleye's interventions

“…Komatsu and Rappleye (2021a, p. 199) rightly argue that much domestic Japanese research on education tends to focus on intra-societal multiculturalism, with particular attention to class, gender and ethnicity disparities within Japanese education. Very few educational scholars in Japan adopt an international and comparative perspective to identify Japanese differences (Ichikawa, 1988), let alone to mobilize the differences to peculiarize and particularize what passes as 'universal' (Takayama, 2016). In this sense, Komatsu and Rappleye's single focus on inter-societal multiculturalism can be justified in that it addresses the badly unbalanced nature of the existing scholarship on Japanese education within Japan.…”

“…In the above analysis, they explain the self-negating postwar discourse of Japanese education in terms of the uncritical acceptance of anything Western or American. While there is a tendency to continue to look up to the US as the source of educational inspiration in Japanese educational research (see Takayama, 2016), the critical appraisal of Japanese education researchers towards their own education cannot be reduced to this single factor. Here, the kind of international and comparative perspective that Komatsu and Rappleye advocate seems warranted; education scholars and media in most liberal democratic states are just as critical of their own countries' education as are those in Japan, and education research in these countries tends to focus on intra-societal struggles because that is primarily where the politics of (re)distribution and recognition play out.…”