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    Eisner (1988), in his work on methods and consciousness, states that "Aside from the politics of status, control, and power located in our forms of professional socialization, our social work structures, and our reward systems, the ultimate politics of methods is its impact on our view of reality." He goes further asserting that neither technique nor technology are epistemologically neutral. What I am trying to bring into debate here cannot be more effectively put than in Eisner's own words: "To acquire a language or a set of methodological conventions without examining what they leave out as well as what they contain, is to take the part for the whole. Hence, when I talk about the politics of method, I do not simply mean matters of position, authority, or professional socialization in the narrow sense, but rather the ways in which the mind is shaped and beliefs are fostered. The politics of method ultimately has to do with the politics of experience. Method influences how we think and what we are permitted to feel" (p. 19). The inconspicuous relation between the politics of method and the theoretical foundation of school instruction implies the possibility that teachers who do not examine the objectives or contents of education could not escape the influence of the educational paradigm of the past and are constricted to the reproduction of deficient traditional lessons.

    Driver (1999) makes some assertions about the Japanese school system and the way information is crammed into children's heads. He contends that "Cram schools do not bestow knowledge. They inject data into heads that are already stuffed with information, much of it absorbed for the narrow purpose of performing well on tests." As for such issues as the formation of an educated society and the implications of the influence the educational system has on people, he states that "An educated society does not place such an onerous requirement on its future citizens, because an educated person is a great deal more than thousands of bits and bytes of information. Playing and thinking and having time to try this and that in childhood as well as in adulthood is what develops an individual." These assertions conform with comments made by Eisner on the primacy of experience: on how it is necessary for the school to provide students with the tools and the skills to understand and negotiate the world. Information and events by themselves, however, cannot do the trick. The simple fact of children being exposed to information, events or objects does not necessarily characterize experience. The skills and tools school should have provided children with are essential for them to grasp and decode the universe of opportunities that constitute their lives and enable them to create their experience. The politics of method play a huge role in determining the language, intention and schema that shape the minds of students as well as maintaining the discourse, values, practices and assumptions of the dominant order. As Eisner (1988) contends, "What we teach, whether in the primary school or in the university, is a means for altering the ways in which students think.... The methods we espouse, the way we define knowledge, the work we regard as respectable, reflect our conceptions of virtue and the courses we teach, in turn, are designed to help students achieve such virtues." Therefore, when teachers are not able to help students to transcend and think for themselves, the opportunity to experience the real world is quashed, and what is left is a shell of a person engaged in perpetuating routine. Enduring such a situation is not a demonstration of fortitude. It is an exhibition of mulish intransigence by an unenlightened society.

    One of the problems with Japan's educational system is that it is not geared toward producing freethinking individuals, but automatons who will take their place in the economic machine. Until Japanese educators realize that real education is about teaching people to think, observe and analyze rather than obey and memorize, there will be problems. The educational system should be overhauled to allow the personal creativity of individuals to flower. Creativity and ideas are now the fire and steel of the new global economy and the development of a creative and knowledge-based society cannot be created by nurturing and bestowing on people the same antiquate and venerable social or educational precepts. Only by allowing the personal and creative development of ordinary people will the Japanese nation be able to prosper in the future. For Soltis (1984), "a useful way to look at the tensions in contemporary educational research is to see them in a broader context of 20th-century philosophical traditions" -- logical empiricism (positivism); interpretive theories (analytic, phenomenological, hermeneutic); and critical theory (neo-Marxism, Freireism, feminism) -- "concerned with the epistemology of human and social knowledge." To reach these goals, new approaches to society and especially to education are imperative.

Signs Indicative of a Struggling Higher Education

    In this section I intend to outline some contrasting critical arguments regarding Japanese universities and the higher education system in general. The aims are to shed light on the situation of Japanese higher education institutions, to establish a rationale for understanding the production of knowledge, and to construct a line of thinking to explain the trends of research being conducted within the discipline of PE.

    The situation in Japanese higher education is not much better than in the schools. In addition to reforming elementary, middle and high schools, there is also a need to reform higher education. Fukukawa (1999) contends that "higher education in Japan is inferior to that in Europe and the United States." He goes further, asserting that "Unlike European and U.S. universities and colleges, once students in Japan enter a university they can just coast along until they graduate." Coleman (2000) adds to the claims of Fukukawa by stating that "Universities also are coming under fire for their traditional role as a four-year vacation between the grind of high school and the grueling work world." Okano (1983) adds: "Once accepted at the University, however, a student's life is relatively undemanding; the function of the universities is social selection, not education.... Japanese universities are isolated at the inter-department, inter-university, and international levels. In hiring staff, preferential treatment is always given to school alumni, and departments tend to be mutually exclusive. Moreover, the number of foreign teachers and students at Japanese universities is significantly small." These assertions reveal a side of Japanese higher education that contrasts with western ideals -- most likely with the rest of the world too -- of quality and seriousness in professional education. This must suggest explanations why Japanese companies impose training for their new employees. According to Saito (1999) "Since the end of the 1980s, a series of reports calling for university reform has been issued by industrial organizations, such as the Japanese Association of Corporate Executives and the Japan Chamber of Commerce and Industry. Until then, companies, distrustful of universities' abilities to produce high-caliber human resources, trained their employees by themselves."

    Companies are not alone in their distrust of universities as universities themselves are aware not only of the troubles they have been facing but also of the situation of the educational system in general. According to Coleman (2000), "Japan's most hallowed ivory tower is showing cracks. For more than a century, Tokyo university has churned out Japan's top bureaucrats, its giants of industry, its masters of technology. Now the talk is of decline.... The university is well aware of the decline. In a scathing in-house report in October, the school cited plummeting student motivation, a lack of fresh teaching talent and crumbling infrastructure as top problems." He goes further to comment on the troubles at 'Todai' (short for Tokyo Daigaku = Tokyo University). He states that "The decay extends well beyond the university. The troubles at 'Todai'-the apex of Japan's national university system-come as changes in society and economy are putting new strains on the higher education system in general. Critics say the academic skills of high school graduates are slipping, dragging down the colleges with them. " Regarding Todai's in-house report, Coleman (2000) says that "The study also called for reforms to cut class size, attract more young lecturers and researchers and design special courses to boost basic skills, saying the new generation of students suffers from 'a lack of incentive, inquisitiveness, independence and maturity.'" From a more critical standpoint, we can say that students now suffer because they have not been exposed to an inquisitive, independent, creative and mature educational system. This results in a key problem in the proper upbringing of young researchers, that is, students are taught the methodology of solving problems as a form of knowledge that can be found through conducting natural science-oriented investigations. No emphasis is placed on the development of skills that are indispensable for nurturing creativity, such as developing alternative approaches or redefining the goals.

    Again about the situation at universities, Saito (1999) posits another concern: "Universities are also anxious about the brain drain to other countries. Their declining ability to compete is another serious problem. There are defects in the university system that are hindering their development, including complacent teaching staff who rest on their academic laurels and are apathetic about revising the study program. Against this backdrop, talented teachers and promising students who have become disillusioned with their universities often go overseas. Students often argue that a degree from a Japanese university is not valid internationally." The Justice Ministry confirms Saito's (1999) allegations regarding the brain drain to other countries. According to the Ministry, "The number of Japanese going overseas for college has exploded from 24,000 in 1985 to more than 180,000 in 1998.... Fuelling the boom has been the strengthening of the yen and a weak economy back home that has made job prospects-and therefore a Japanese-only education-less attractive. The trend has gained strength as the overall reputation of Japanese universities, which traditionally require a minimum of work from students, has declined. Some students also yearn for an alternative to the style of education in Japan, where teachers talk and students listen with little interaction or voicing of opinions or ideas" (Associated Press, 2000). However, as students try to find alternatives for their education, they face serious hindrances to their careers when they return to Japan. "There is a price to pay for going to school elsewhere: the difficulty of finding a job back home in Japan after graduation. Though practices are slowly changing, Japanese companies are often reluctant to hire people who have studied abroad, in part because of the difficulties in adjusting from a more freewheeling life overseas to the demands of Japanese corporate hierarchies" (Associated Press, 2000). The resolve of companies to make the process of hiring people with more freewheeling attitudes -- not to mention more creative, more prepared, more ambitious/motivated -- more difficult may be an indication of why Japanese schools and the educational system are the way they are. As I have been attempting to prove throughout this study, the educational system we have in Japan is not meant to produce educated, creative, independent individuals. It serves one purpose: to provide companies with workers that conform to the companies' organization. If we are to have a Japan prepared for the new challenges of the pressing future, educational reform is of the utmost importance.

    In addition to students having their minds shaped by the politics of the educational method, students suffer from a lack of practical experience. Also, students' lack of critical perspectives is reflected by the fact that they have not yet entered the real working world and have not yet faced any real demanding responsible task. Perhaps if students were given the "responsibility for their own education while considering it an important part of their future" (Hashizume, 1999), the educational system would indeed be revitalized. A committee under the jurisdiction of the Japan Productivity Center for Socio-Economic Development has outlined a draft plan containing proposals to revive the educational system (JPC-SED, 1999). The committee, asserts Hashizume (1999), has contended that "people's values will become more diverse in the future, so it is no longer appropriate to structure the education system in a simplistic manner. Instead, it was agreed that a more flexible environment, in which parents and teachers are able to propose and discuss new ideas, should be introduced." While sociologists like Hashizume are calling for more flexible environments for proposals and discussion, I would like to call for a more flexible and adequate environment for conducting alternative research in PE in Japanese universities.

Trends of Research in Japanese PE

An analytical approach

    When a country's educational system prepares children specifically for the reality of life in that country, children are not prepared to face and cope with a much broader world reality as if that country was a part of that world. Repercussions in the social structure are indeed expected. The Japanese way of life holds that the world is something that exists outside Japan; something that is not directly related to daily life. People in Japan usually tend to extol Japan's prowess and achievements. On the other hand, they do not seem to grasp firmly the influence other countries had and still have on Japan neither to detect the dependence Japan has on foreign goods, markets and economies. A consequence is that Japanese students, and some researchers as well, undertake research from a Japanese perspective in this narrow-minded view of the world. A reason why research and theories on PE promoted in Japanese universities are left out of the international academia is the limited scope of the investigations, which, generally, describe or explore local or national concerns. Another area that raises great concern is the fluency of researchers and graduate students as well in more internationally effective languages. To make matters worse, research conducted chiefly through positivistic methodologies contribute to the narrowing of the perspective. As Nakao (1998) asserts, "more extensive methodological training is called for in Japanese universities. The lack of emphasis on methodological training is partly an unfortunate consequence of the structure of Japanese academic institutions. Consistent with the vertical structure in traditional Japanese organizations, mentorship is emphasized in graduate training. This results in a deficiency in structured curriculum covering a wide variety of core sociological courses at the graduate level. This type of training tends to produce highly qualified specialists in narrow fields" (p. 514). High levels of specialization are extremely important for high-tech societies as they bring about up-to-date scientific and technological advances. However, (1) we have to be careful not to produce highly specialized professionals with narrow-minded approaches. According to Cavalli and Fujiwara (2001) that seems to be exactly the situation in which research in Japanese PE finds itself. In an analysis of the paradigmatic orientation of Japanese PE, they have found out that in the past 10 years only 2.44% of the research was conducted using alternative paradigmatic methodologies. From a total of 818 investigations, 97.56% of the research work approached PE from a positivist standpoint. No wonder Nakao insists on the development of extensive methodological training at Japanese universities. And (2) we cannot help but observe that, if research in PE is to continue being conducted primarily from positivistic perspectives, the approach given to the society PE represents is also biased by this imbalance on paradigmatic orientation. We, as a research community, are constructing one and only one type of PE, and we are not even close to determining the true essence of our field. We should step back from our domains and begin to understand the validity of a major holistic approach to PE and, also, to start making connections between PE -- and sport as well -- and other social dimensions.

    Kageyama et al. (1993) have been asking for a more critical approach to Japanese PE for a long time. Although critical pedagogy in PE has yet been extensively debated in international circles (Evans, 1986, 1988; Kirk, 1988; Kirk & Tinning, 1990; Armstrong & Sparkes, 1991; Bain, 1992; Colquhoun, 1992), it does not seem to have not caught the Japanese research community's attention as one can easily observe. Although, Kageyama et al. indicate the existence of many needs for a critical pedagogical approach in Japan. The main reasons according to them are: "(1) critical consideration of the social functions of physical education; (2) critical consideration of the institutionalization of physical education; and (3) critical consideration of the discourses of physical education and the sciences related to them." A "paradigm shift" (Kuhn, 1970) on PE's approach to teaching and researching is needed if Japanese PE wants to develop a higher profile PE.

    Clearly, there have been great achievements regarding the paradigm debate in scholarly inquiry in a number of disciplines over the past decades. The 1990's have witnessed immense changes in the world, some of which are paradoxical, some contradictory while others signal a desire for peaceful co-existence. In Japan too, changes in daily life and in educational perspectives, to a certain extent, can easily be observed. Such changes require a firm understanding of sociopolitical, economic, educational and ideological diversity. As PE is an integral part of these interdependent elements, there is an increasing need for engagement in alternative studies to bring about mutual understanding of the world from a more holistic perspective. Harris (1983), when addressing research models for scholarly inquiry in PE, contends that such alternatives "would likely expand even further the scholarly diversity that already exists among us...." Methodological diversity is the key to enlightenment for any field of study.

    The work of Cavalli & Fujiwara (2001) reveals that the situation of research in Japanese PE contrasts to that in western countries. In their content analysis of research in Japanese PE they have indicated that only six articles-out of 818 published over a 10 year-period-have approached the paradigm debate for conducting scholarly inquiry. They have noted that of these six articles, three were written by foreign researchers and refer to foreign countries' realities; and one is not a scientific investigation but a symposium report. Consequently, in the past decade only two of the articles in their sample have approached the paradigm debate. This leads us to conclude that research in Japanese PE is not much concerned about its paradigmatic orientation and the possible implications derived from this preference; the research community is satisfied with the present condition of research activities, production of knowledge and paradigmatic orientation, or they are unconcerned about the paradigm debate situation and do not bother investigating other possibilities.

    Again, quoting Cavalli & Fujiwara (2001), they have also determined that of the 818 articles published in 6 Japanese scientific journals of PE only 20 approached research from an interpretive or critical perspective. Examining these 20 articles, I have determined that only 3 investigated children's activities or school PE. The focus of the other 17 are as follows: the sociology of the body: 3; sciences of PE/sport: 7; body/health: 4; sport sociology: 2; and sport history: 1. This leads us to believe that Japanese PE does not have much knowledge drawn from alternative research stances of contemporary schoolchildren's perspectives of PE and sport. That is to say that much of the knowledge of children's PE comes from positivist research. Therefore, generally speaking, we do not know the 'whys' of present-day school PE. The only insight we have are the shreds of knowledge that were assessed by positivist research. The more rich sociopolitical and sociocultural insights gained through the usage of qualitative methodologies to approach children in their school context are lost due to the distance between researcher and the researched observed by positivist investigative techniques. Furthermore, I can assert that due to the slight amount of research conducted within alternative perspectives (barely 2 articles a year) neither researchers nor teachers have access to alternative information about Japanese PE. As Kageyama (1995) has pointed out, the problematic components of present-day Japanese PE are regarded as a social result of a conservative, controlling educational system known in Japan as 'Control-oriented Education.' Perhaps some insights into why this situation persists may be appropriate here.

A philosophical approach

    Consistent with Japan's hierarchical system, the training and formation of acolytes to respect, worship and abide by a researcher's work institutionalize mentorship. Japan has a social system wherein challenge to authority poses a threat to social order, therefore, situations where authority or expertise are contested are rarely encountered. Researchers, considered as 'experts' in their respective fields, provide a kind of "God's eye view" of reality. However, the utilization of a single mode of inquiry and the embodiment of its assumptions, values and practices have caused serious drawbacks in terms of generation of knowledge in research in Japanese PE. Questions approaching the 'whats' and 'how manys' of PE situations are well documented in Japan; statistical data and analyses are abundant as well. Yet the whys and wherefores of specific and general educational, social and political circumstances of PE are still undermined. Just to cite an example: "Why has the discourse of physical education today so little to do with education and so much to do with the systematic production of sporting performance?" Whitson & Macintosh (1990).

Lecturas: Educación Física y Deportes · http://www.efdeportes.com · Año 6 · Nº 33

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