At about 3 AM tomorrow, Eastern Daylight time, Japanese Emperor Akihito will abdicate the Chyrsanthemum Throne in favour of his son, Naruhito. With that, the Heisei Era will end and the Reiwa Era will begin (time in Japan being marked by Imperial reigns; after their death, emperors become known by the “reign names”, which is why we know refer to Emperor Hirohito as the Showa Emperor and yes this does go all go back to Han-era China, why do you ask).  

For the last few months, the Japanese press has been doing nothing but Heisei era retrospectives, often focussing on the “best” of the era, like which Prime Minister was best (Junichiro Koizumi), which baseball player (Ichiro Suzuki), which sumo wrestler (obviously Hakuho, the GREATEST OF ALL TIME, only somewhat embarrassingly a Mongolian whose birth name is Mönkhbatyn Davaajargal, but this too is an important sign of the times, and yes this is totally relevant to higher education, how dare you suggest otherwise).  But since I haven’t seen one on higher education, I thought I would make a small contribution to posterity for my second-favourite country and write it up for y’all this morning.

Emperor Akihito ascended the throne in 1989.  At the time, Japan was considered to be an almost unrivalled economic power: seven of the world’s ten biggest companies were Japanese, and Japanese technology was universally considered the world’s most advanced.  Talk of “world-class universities” was still a decade away, but the reputation of Japanese universities – or at least of the seven former “Imperial” universities and one or two of the oldest private ones such as Keio and Waseda – certainly benefitted from the perception that Japan was at the top of the word, scientifically. 

The problem, however – or at least the perceived problem – was that to the extent universities were involved in Japan’s technological success, it tended to be through deals with individual companies to provide specific types of applied research, rather than through basic research.  That worked well as long as Japan was playing catch-up to the technological frontier and employing a strategy of using process engineering to manufacture lots of small improvements to existing products.  But – as places like Korea, Taiwan and to some extent China are re-learning today, the strategies that get a country through the technological catch-up phase are not necessarily the ones that allow you to lead once you actually arrive at the technological frontier (for an excellent primer on this, I recommend University of Toronto professor Joseph Wong’s  excellent book Betting on Biotech: Innovation and the Limits of Asia’s Developmental State).  So starting about the time Akihito took the throne, the government forced the country’s major public institutions to start changing their graduate programs to make them look more American, with a dual mandate both to pursue more basic research and more professionally-oriented education to provide industry with graduates trained to integrate such knowledge into new products (graduate education having previously been mostly focussed on the needs of academia itself for new professors).

In the short term, what that did was close off the public universities to new undergraduate enrolment (which, at 440,000, is slightly lower than it was in 1989) in order to focus on their graduate programs and diverted all new demand to private sector universities (which grew from about 1.45 million students to 2 million over the Heisei era).  For a brief time, American universities thought they could be part of this expansion; though it is long-forgotten now, there was a mini-boom in American branch campuses located in some truly obscure locations around Japan, which pre-dated the boom in similar structures elsewhere in Asia and the Arabian Gulf by a good 15 years.  Rather unsurprisingly, these organizations were hampered by a combination of terrible locations and mindboggling bureaucratic catch-22s and most exited by about 2000.

In the medium term, there was some improvement in research output and around 2000 Japan briefly accounted for about 10% of the world’s scientific papers.  But progress was slow and pretty soon people were trying to out why Japan’s performance in science and technology seemed to be progressing more slowly than it had in previous decades.

As a result of this, and a general feeling that corporate/institutional Japan as a whole was not responding quickly or well to the new freewheeling tech-focused market of the 1990s, the government came up with a variety of initiatives around the turn of the century, most of which were executed under the government of Junichiro Koizumi and which collectively came to be known as the “Big Bang” in Japanese Higher Education.  Part of this was a boost to competitive research funding, but the main part was what became known as the “Incorporation” movement.  Prior to 2003, Japanese universities were not independent legal entities: technically, they were an extension of the Education ministry which could – and often did – move personnel between institutions with no more thought than Toyota would have shifting someone from an office in Tokyo to the head office in Nagoya.   The “big idea” here again was to move to a more North American-style system: make each institution its own corporation, with its own mainly lay Board of Governors, and make them compete for students, research funding, etc.  Thus, it was believed, institutions would have the incentive to become dynamic, entrepreneurial organizations capable of generating more of their own resources (paying down Japan’s galactic-sized debt being an increasing concern), contributing to economic growth, etc.

Or that was the theory, anyway.  In practice it did not work out so well.  It turns out that being an entrepreneurial university has a lot more to do with culture than it does with legal structures and what in the end turned out to be fairly minor financial incentives; the “new” money for competitive research ended up being spread around fairly widely and in many ways just plugged the hole created by a gradual reduction in core operating grants.  The old ossified bureaucratic structures linking institutions to the Ministry in Tokyo were replaced by new ossified structures inside an institution created to serve the newly-powerful independent university Presidents, because of course Japan modelled university presidencies on those prevalent in corporate Japan.  In another imitation of corporate Japan, ministry-regulated institutions increasingly gave high-level jobs to recently-retired ministry officials, thus re-interpreting the notorious practice of amakudari (descent from heaven) which ensured incredibly tight informal relations between government and universities even though in theory the two were separate.

By the second decade of the new century, the effects of this were obvious to all.  While global rankings regularly showed Asian institutions becoming global powerhouses, Japanese universities were notable in heading the other way.  Todai (the University of Tokyo) remained a top-20 institution, but the number n the top 100 or even top 500 has fallen substantially, mainly because Japanese institutions were basically alone in the OECD over the past decade or so in having declining rates of scientific publication.

In sum, the Heisei era in Japanese higher education – as in the country as a whole – was kind of a disappointment.  The expectation at the outset was certainly that Japan could conquer higher education in much the way it had conquered various technologies in the 1970s and 1980s; in the end what it got was a much larger but not very good private sector, a set of new graduate schools which were theoretically more “American” but which were treading water where basic research was concerned, and a new set of institutional structures which in many respects just swapped old rigidities for new ones.   Heisei was perhaps not as glorious for Japan as the last days of Showa.  To be fair, that was an awfully high bar, an era of growth and prosperity the likes of which we may never see again.  Will Reiwa be different?