How the japanese learn to work 2nd edition - part 1 pot

How the Japanese Learn to Work
Education and training has long been cited as a key component of Japanese
industrial and commercial success. A recognition of the importance of
vocational training, the high standards expected in school and college and
the respect for education in Japanese society has produced an extremely
able and well-qualified work-force.
In this new and extensively revised edition Ronald Dore and Mari Sako
provide a comprehensive overview of the Japanese system of education and
training. There are chapters on the general education system for children,
the types of institutional vocational training and the importance of laying
the groundwork for further training. The section on training in the workplace
is of particular importance in understanding Japanese success. Also included
are chapters on the qualification and vocational skill testing systems and the
policy superstructure—the role of the individual, firms and the state.
How the Japanese Learn to Work is a valuable contribution to our
understanding of why one of the world’s most motivated work-forces has
been able to achieve so much. There are valuable insights for both policy
makers and businesses, not least of which is the Japanese desire to keep on
learning right through their working lives.
Ronald Dore is a Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for Economic
Performance, London School of Economics and Political Science. Mari Sako
is Professor of International Business at Said Business School, University of
Oxford.

The Nissan Institute/Routledge Japanese Studies Series
Editorial Board
J.A.A.Stockwin, Nissan Professor of Modern Japanese Studies,
University of Oxford and Director, Nissan Institute of Japanese Studies
Teigo Yoshida, formerly Professor of the University of Tokyo,
and now Professor, Obirin University, Tokyo

Frank Langdon, Professor, Institute of International Relations,
University of British Columbia, Canada
Alan Rix, Professor of Japanese, The University of Queensland
Junji Banno, Institute of Social Science, University of Tokyo
Leonard Schoppa, University of Virginia
Titles in the series:
The Myth of Japanese Uniqueness, Peter Dale
The Emperor’s Adviser: Saionji Kinmochi and Pre-war Japanese Politics, Lesley Connors
A History of Japanese Economic Thought, Tessa Morris-Suzuki
The Establishment of the Japanese Constitutional System, Junji Banno, translated by J.A.A.Stockwin
Industrial Relations in Japan: the Peripheral Workforce, Norma Chalmers
Banking Policy in Japan: American Efforts at Reform During the Occupation, William M.Tsutsui
Educational Reform in Japan, Leonard Schoppa
How the Japanese Learn to Work, Ronald Dore and Mari Sako
Japanese Economic Development: Theory and Practice, Penelope Francks
Japan and Protection: The Growth of Protectionist Sentiment and the Japanese Response, Syed
Javed Marwood
The Soil, by Nagastsuka Takashi: a Portrait of Rural Life in Meiji Japan, translated and with an
introduction by Ann Waswo
Biotechnology in Japan, Malcolm Brock
Britain’s Educational Reform: a Comparison with Japan, Michael Howarth
Language and the Modern State: the Reform of Written Japanese, Nanette Twine
Industrial Harmony in Modern Japan: the Invention of a Tradition, W.Dean Kinzley
Japanese Science Fiction: a View of a Changing Society, Robert Matthew
The Japanese Numbers Game: the Use and Understanding of Numbers in Modern Japan, Thomas
Crump
Ideology and Practice in Modern Japan, Roger Goodman and Kirsten Refsing
Technology and Industrial Development in pre-War Japan, Yukiko Fukasaku
Japan’s Early Parliaments 1890–1905, Andrew Fraser, R.H.P.Mason and Philip Mitchell
Japan’s Foreign Aid Challenge, Alan Rix

Emperor Hirohito and Showa Japan, Stephen S.Large
Japan: Beyond the End of History, David Williams
Ceremony and Ritual in Japan: Religious Practices in an Industrialized Society, Jan van Bremen and
D.P.Martinez
Understanding Japanese Society: Second Edition, Joy Hendry
The Fantastic in Modern Japanese Literature: The Subversion of Modernity, Susan J.Napier
Militarization and Demilitarization in Contemporary Japan, Glenn D.Hook
Growing a Japanese Science City: Communication in Scientific Research, James W.Dearing
Architecture and Authority in Japan, William H.Coaldrake
Women’s Gidayu and the Japanese Theatre Tradition, A.Kimi Coaldrake
Democracy in Post-war Japan, Rikki Kersten
Treacherous Women of Imperial Japan, Hélène Bowen Raddeker
Japan, Race and Equality, Naoko Shimazu
Japan, Internationalism and the UN, Ronald Dore
Japanese-German Business Relations, Akira Kudo
How the Japanese Learn to
Work
Second edition
Ronald Dore and Mari Sako
London and New York

First published 1989
by Routledge
11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE
This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2002.
Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada
by Routledge
29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001
Second edition 1998
First edition © Crown copyright 1989. Published by Routledge by permission of the

Controller of Her Majesty’s Stationery Office.
Revised edition © Crown copyright 1998. Revised by permission of the
Controller of Her Majesty’s Stationery Office.
The views expressed are those of the authors and do not necessarily
reflect the views or policy of the Department for Education &
Employment or any other government department.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any
form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented,
including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system,
without permission in writing from the publishers.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book has been requested
ISBN 0-415-14881-2 (hbk)
ISBN 0-415-15345-X (pbk)
ISBN 0-203-01575-4 Master e-book ISBN
ISBN 0-203-21022-0 (Glassbook Format)
Contents
List of figures and tables vi
General editor’s preface viii
Preface x
Acknowledgements xx
1 The general school system 1
2 Who goes where? 15
3 Vocational streams in the mainline formal education system 42
4 Post-secondary, non-university vocational education and
training (VET) 67
5 Training in the enterprise 93
6 Standards and qualifications 134

7 Public expenditure on VET 161
8 Policies and prospects 167
Appendix: Ministry of Education budget for vocational
education, 1994 176
Bibliography 178
Index 184

List of figures and tables
FIGURES
2.1 Progression routes in the Japanese Educational System,
1994 28
3.1 Sample curricula of university engineering faculties,
1986 61
4.1 Distribution of senmon-gakko students by subject
category 83
TABLES
1.1 Educational composition of intake of new graduates
in selected industries, 1955–94 2
1.2 Primary school timetable 5
1.3 Junior secondary school timetable 5
1.4 Senior high school course timetables 10–11
2.1 Employers’ attitudes to graduates of high schools:
technical, commercial, ordinary 22–3
2.2 Destinations of upper secondary school graduates,
1994 24
2.3 Hensachi distribution of public senior high schools in
Iwaki City, 1986 27
2.4 Hensachi distribution of public senior high schools in
Tokyo Prefecture, 1983 31
2.5 University places available by subject and rating of

university, 1986 34–5
2.6 Sectoral distribution of graduate recruits and ‘quality’
of intake, 1975 and 1990 37
2.7 University graduate and high school graduate
earnings compared (bonuses included): by age group,
all manufacturing firms with more than ten workers 38
2.8 Wage differentials by size of establishment 39
3.1 Distribution of vocational courses and pupils (per cent) 42
3.1(a) Curriculum at a technical high school, 1996 48–9
3.1(b) Curriculum at a commercial high school 50–1
3.2 Distribution of university students by course 59
4.1 Post-secondary, non-university vocational schools
and colleges: types, schools and pupils 68
4.2 Ministry of Labour training budget, 1996 70–1
4.3 Curriculum of nurse training course 78
5.1 Expenditure on education and training by size of firm
(manufacturing only) 98
5.2 Curriculum of the NEC two-year training school for
multi-skill technicians 103–5
5.3 Dengyosha Pump Company: proposals for
interdepartmental mutual teaching programme 112–13
5.4 Provenance of correspondence courses recognized as
eligible for Ministry of Labour support grants 117
5.5 Work-related study programmes: a questionnaire survey 127
5.6 The emphases of training programmes: differences by
size of firm 131
6.1 Qualifications controlled by the central government 141
6.2 Skills tested by the Ministry of Labour skill testing
system (133 skills) 148
7.1 Distribution of expenditures on education under

jurisdiction of the Ministry of Education, 1993 162
A.1 Ministry of Education budget for vocational education,
1994 176

List of figures and tables vii
General editor’s preface

Japan as the new century approaches is going through a turbulent period, in
which some of her most entrenched political and economic institutions and
practices are being increasingly questioned. The financial crisis which
occurred in the latter half of 1997 affected most of the so-called ‘tiger
economies’ of East and South-East Asia, and did not spare Japan. The collapse
of several important Japanese financial institutions signalled both that the
system was in crisis but also that the government was no longer willing, or
able, to rescue ailing institutions. The sense of crisis quickly dulled the lustre
of the ‘Asian model’ in the eyes of the world’s media, but also concentrated
minds within Japan on the task of reforming the system. The extent to which
the system needed reforming remained a matter of sharp dispute, but a
consensus was emerging that many entrenched practices which derived from
the immediate post-war period of the ‘economic miracle’ needed to be
radically rethought. At the end of March 1998, the extent and timescale of
the desired revolution remained in doubt. Elements of the old regime seemed
to be falling apart, but the shape of the new was still but dimly discernible.
Reading the world’s press in the aftermath of the financial crisis one could
well derive the impression that East Asia (including Japan) was heading for
collapse and that the world could safely direct its attention elsewhere, notably
to the dynamic and successful market economies of North America and
Europe. Such an impression, however, was greatly exaggerated. Japan and
its surrounding region remained a zone of intense economic production and
interaction, resourceful and dynamic. Though there was a financial crisis,

the economy remained massive in size and diversity, retaining great economic
power both regionally and globally. Radical reform was needed, but historical
experience suggested that the capacity of Japan to reform itself—even though
it might take some while—ought not to be underestimated. If the world
thought that the East Asian region could safely be ignored, it was likely to be
in for a rude shock in a short span of years.
The Nissan Institute/Routledge Japanese Studies Series seeks to foster an
informed and balanced, but not uncritical, understanding of Japan. One aim
of the series is to show the depth and variety of Japanese institutions, practices
and ideas. Another is, by using comparisons, to see what lessons, positive or
negative, can be drawn for other countries. The tendency in commentary on
Japan to resort to outdated, ill-informed or sensational stereotypes still
remains, and needs to be combated.
Education is a field where the Japanese experience has attracted much
interest since the 1980s, with several Western countries looking to Japan for
models at the same time as pressure for reform has been growing within the
Japanese education system itself. In this revised edition of their book first
published in 1989, Professors Dore and Sako investigate vocational training
and its place in Japanese education and industry. Perhaps the most important
lesson they draw is that in Japan vocational training is taken extremely
seriously and that enormous efforts are made to ensure that even those at the
lower levels of the ability range are educated and trained to the highest
practicable level, so that the emergence of a semi-literate, semi-numerate,
barely employable underclass is effectively prevented. The sheer richness of
the vocational training environment, both in a wide range of educational
establishments and in the workplace, is ably demonstrated in this book, as is
the culture of education and employment which underpins the vocational
training exercise as a whole.
J.A.A.Stockwin
Director

Nissan Institute of
Japanese Studies
University of Oxford

General editor’s Preface ix
Preface
By the mid–1990s the conviction that the improvement of vocational
education and training was a prerequisite for improved national
‘competitiveness’, had taken deep root in the politics of Britain and, to a
slightly lesser extent, the United States. In the search for foreign models,
Germany and its apprenticeship system held pride of place. Businessmen’s
study tours of Japan tended to concentrate on management systems and shop-
floor organization—just-in-time delivery, continuous improvement, quality
circles. But there was also a growing realization that the in-house training
systems which supported these techniques of management were as important
as the techniques themselves, and that the whole Japanese system of
vocational education and training was worthy of careful examination.
A century ago, the study tours went in the other direction. In the early
1870s a delegation of senior Japanese statesmen spent nearly a year touring,
and studying, the United States and Britain. They visited centres of
government, of commerce and, in Britain especially, of industry. The recently
republished record of that visit (Kume 1978) with its detailed sketches and
descriptions of industrial processes, contained numerous reflections on what
it was that made Britain and America so prosperous while Japan remained
so poor. It was not so much, the delegation concluded, in industriousness
that the difference lay, nor in natural resources. It lay rather in the application
of science to production, in planning, organization and disciplined skill.
The delegation’s return confirmed the conviction of Japan’s leaders that
the road to a secure and respected place in the international system lay in a
national endeavour to ‘catch up’ in the accumulation of industrial skills as

much as in the accumulation of industrial capital, that Japan was at the
beginning of a long apprenticeship. One of the first tasks of their ambassador
Preface xi
in London was to recruit a group of young Scotsmen to found the first Tokyo
college of engineering.
And cultural lags are such that only in recent years have these perceptions
begun to change. The manifest reversal in their rankings in industrial power
began only in the 1980s to make the Japanese more, as it made the British
less, complacent. The prolonged recession of the 1990s did a lot to erode
that new-found self-confidence, although these swings of mood had more
effect on what the management journals said should be done than on what
people actually did. Still, as Chapter 5 suggests in some detail, a Japanese
factory is more likely than a British factory to be a learning organization.
The ruling assumption is more likely to be: ‘We’ve still got a long way to go
to reach satisfactory levels’ rather than ‘We’re doing pretty well’. A recurring
need for special training programmes is taken for granted. They do not have
to be justified on the grounds that ‘these boffins keep coming up with
something new and we jolly well need to keep up’, but are perfectly acceptable
even when they are presented as getting people up to long-established levels
of satisfactory competence.
And what has certainly not changed is the assumption, which grew quite
naturally out of that century-long preoccupation with Japan’s backwardness,
that the state has a vital role to play in raising the nation’s standards of
vocational competence.
In the standard theory of liberal democracy, the state’s involvement in
vocational training is justified only on the grounds of market failure. Training
has a lot of external economies which you cannot, except through taxation
and collective public action, get the beneficiaries to pay for—the benefits
nurses get from having doctors to work with, the benefits employers get
from having sick employees cured, the benefits we all get from having

competent soldiers to defend us, etc. Hence, although we can still rely to
some extent on the market to provide individuals with what they want—i.e.
opportunities to develop the talents they need to sell in the market in order to
get the income they desire—the market needs a lot of supplementation by
the state.
Of course, that argument from individual interests has never, anywhere,
been a complete account of the reasons why liberal democracies have
interested themselves in vocational training. National considerations—to
strengthen ‘national champion’ firms against their foreign rivals, to raise the
nation’s strategic power—have been powerful concerns in Britain ever since
alarm at Germany’s industrial strength began to grow at the turn of the century.
But still, in so far as one can measure the balance in such matters,
xii Preface
individualistic arguments about opportunities for self-development have
tended to dominate in Britain.
But hardly so in Japan. For the last hundred years, the national need to
build up skills has been part of a collective national drive to strengthen Japan’s
international position. At first it was a matter of national survival. That
assured—by the time the delegation returned in 1872—the objective became
to make the country strong enough, in the first instance, to persuade foreigners
to amend the ‘unequal treaties’ which they forced on Japan in the 1850s, a
quarter-century struggle still well remembered today, and the subject, not
surprisingly, of a multi-billion yen movie in 1986.
Japan’s international position today, and her ranking in the various pecking
orders of international competition, are beyond all except the wilder dreams
of the Japanese of the 1880s—or of the 1950s, for that matter. But still, old
assumptions and old motivation patterns persist. After a century striving to
be accepted as an equal, the inertia of the striving reflex sets new goals—to
become first among equals. Hence the journalistic popularity of newspaper
polls about Japan’s standing—is she ahead, behind or level with the US in

cell fusion techniques, in laser semiconductors? How does Japan compare
with Germany in the development of new operatic forms?
Hence the assumptions about the role of the state in vocational training
which have shaped Japan’s current VET institutions over the last century
remain largely unchanged, even if a lot of their manifestations today smack
more of bureaucratic nannying than of leadership in a concerted drive for
success. This circumstance will be reflected in many of the succeeding
chapters—in what is said about the guiding philosophy of the general
education system, and especially apropos of the state’s role in setting standards
of vocational competence which will be described in Chapter 6.
The other thing about Japanese society which powerfully shapes the system
to be described—another product of history and culture—is the kind of moral
feelings the Japanese have about needing to be good at their jobs. Whether
because of the efforts of state agencies to preach the national need for
competence over the last century or for some other reason, the Japanese do
tend to feel that competence is a moral duty and not just a means of earning
money by giving satisfaction, that sloppiness is a sin and not just something
to avoid because it puts you in danger of getting the sack.
That also counts for something. It is a factor in the response which private
firms show to government initiatives, and in the initiatives they take without
prompting. It is a factor in the response of the individual workers to enterprise
Preface xiii
programmes. It is a factor, too, in the vigour of the private enterprise training
sector described in Chapter 4.
But the important role played by these cultural factors in shaping the
Japanese vocational education and training (hereafter VET) system does not
mean that there are no lessons to be learned from it. There may well be, to
begin with, hints to be found in individual institutional devices for financing
training and motivating take-up. There seems, also, to be a good deal which
might be learned from nuts-and-bolts pedagogical practices in Japan, though

on that we have very little to say in this book.
What we hope we do show however, is a different way in which one can
learn by examining Japan. Confrontation with a system built on assumptions
somewhat different from our own brings those assumptions into relief. It
causes us to question ideas which we might otherwise never question, and to
think of possible alternatives we might never have thought of—solutions,
one might even say, to problems we never realised we had.

COMMON ASSUMPTIONS ABOUT VOCATIONAL
TRAINING WHICH JAPAN BRINGS INTO QUESTION
Here, for example, is a list of some of the assumptions which are often—not
universally, to be sure, but often—implicit in the VET policies and the VET
policy debate in Britain and North America, assumptions the validity of which
the example of Japan undoubtedly calls into question.
(i) That the provision of training courses and of the opportunity to enter
them—individual learning accounts, training vouchers, etc. —is the most
important contribution the state can make to its citizens’ skill acquisition.
The Japanese, by contrast, seem to believe that the the state has two prime
functions in this field:

(a) to ensure the basic trainability of all its citizens—giving them confidence
in their ability to learn and competence in the use of language and
numbers—what in Britain and North America are nowadays often called
the ‘core skills’. It is now well-known that the most striking difference
in core-skill attainment of British or American children on the one hand,
and of Japanese and German children on the other, is among those in
the bottom half of the ability range. That is one reason why Japan does
not have a ‘youth unemployment problem’ and so spends very little on
the sort of ‘social rescue’ schemes to which Britain’s Training and
xiv Preface

Enterprise Councils devote the bulk of their expenditure—on the
implausible grounds that it is improving the nation’s competitiveness,
(b) to provide both the possessors of skills and those who might want to
employ them, or be their customers, with the public facility of a testing
and certification system. The approach is traditional; tests test only the
testable, and certificates certify only that which is tested. Japan has not
yet been invaded by the ‘total occupational competence verified on the
job’ ideology of Britain’s National Council for Vocational Qualifications,
and its certification system is largely free from the expense, the jargon
and the bureaucratic organization which that entails. See points (v) to
(viii) for further elaboration of this theme.

(ii) That industry must use its board and council memberships to
influence the school and higher education system to be more responsive
to industry’s needs.
The school and university system under the aegis of the Japanese Ministry
of Education keeps industry very much at arm’s length. Vocational high
schools and engineering faculties have fewer links with industry than their
counterparts in this country. Engineering research is further towards the ‘basic’
as opposed to the ‘applied’/‘developmental’ end of the spectrum in Japan
than in Britain. The countervailing factors are (a) the performance of the
school system in providing mastery of the basics, (b) the acceptance by
employers that the responsibility for detailed job-oriented training is theirs,
(c) the heavy involvement (in quite arduous quasi-voluntary leg-work) of
private industry engineers in devising curricula and setting standards for the
skill tests operated by ministries other than that of Education—MITI, the
Ministries of Labour, Construction, Health and Welfare, Communications,
Transport, etc. These exercise a powerful influence on all post-employment
training.
(iii) That training is best provided by specialists in training.

Japanese firms rely relatively less on courses provided by training firms or
outside consultants, more on mutual teaching, off-the-job as well as on but
more often the latter, within the firm.
Consequently there are fewer people employed as full-time teachers of
particular vocational skills than in Britian. A fortiori, there are far fewer
people employed in the ‘training industry’ more narrowly defined —i.e.,
Preface xv
those (organizers of courses, officials of certifying bodies, academic experts,
etc.) whose expertise is, not in any particular subject matter in which people
are trained, but in the practice of training itself.
(iv) That expenditure on off-the-job training is a good measure of the
extent to which a firm is a ‘learning organization’.
Apart from the mutual teaching/on-the-job training just mentioned, Japanese
employees get a good deal of their training inexpensively through
correspondence courses—of a traditional (pedagogically low-tech) kind.
(v) That vocational qualifications primarily tell one what their possessors
have learned.
No-one really believes that Volkswagen employs German youths coming
out of a bakery apprenticeship because they have acquired some transferable
skills in measuring quantities and mixing ingredients which might come in
handy in the paint shop. Yet discussions of VET often proceed as if that were
the case. In fact, in any society, qualifications, especially at lower and
intermediate levels, are often read largely, even primarily, as indicators of
personality factors—application and willingness to ‘fit in’ —and of general
learning ability. The transparency of this use of the vocational qualifications
delivered in the general school system in Japan (vocational high schools and
engineering faculties)—the transparency due to the commercial mock test
and standardized score (hensachi) system and the high quality of research
into recruitment processes in Japan—prompts one to look harder at these
aspects in other countries too. Most people would acknowledge in principle

that courses do get ability-labelled by received impressions of the ‘calibre’
of the students who get on them. They would acknowledge that this label
affects (i) student motivation, (ii) pedagogical effectiveness, (iii) the likelihood
that employers will offer graduates the jobs for which they have been trained,
and (iv) their effectiveness in those jobs if they get them, and that effects in
each of those dimensions feed back on the others. These considerations do
surface in our debates, but always covertly. The anybody-can-be-taught-
anything-provided-the-teacher’s-good-enough ethos of the training industry
all too often dominates—in Britain, for instance, in discussions of Training
Workshops for the unemployed and of the Youth Training Scheme. In Japan
the transparency of the screening functions of some vocational courses
xvi Preface
(vocational high schools) and the absence of screening functions in others
(nationally tested vocational skill training) highlights the crucial importance
of those screening functions which VET planners ignore at their peril.
(vi) That the state has a role in testing and certifying occupational
competence only where public health and safety are involved or, possibly,
in order to improve the working of the labour market.
Japanese Ministries are active in testing for the additional purpose of raising
standards of competence—of plumbers and printers, cooks and computer-
programmers—in the interests of national efficiency.
(vii) That the definition, testing and certification of occupational
standards is best left either to self-regulating bodies of practitioners, or
to the training institutions.
Japan acts more often on the assumption that only the customers have an
unalloyed interest in maintaining high standards—the customers represented
most often by the state, sometimes (as with welding) by the employers of the
people they certify.
(viii) That the certifying of occupational competence is primarily a matter
of certifying whole-package occupational roles: i.e., licences to practise—

as a plumber, as a systems engineer, as a craftsman fitter, as a dentist.
While Japan also has a wide range of ‘whole role’ qualifications (state
examinations for doctors, midwives, architects, etc.) this is very widely
supplemented by what one might call the boy-scout-badge approach—the
certifying, particularly at lower and intermediate skill levels, of discrete
isolable skills, like the ability to drive a heavy goods vehicle, or to handle
certain types of dangerous chemicals, or to use a turret lathe, or to install
jacuzzi baths. The substantive content of these certification packages is
determined by the logic of the job function. There is no need to fit it into a
system of ‘modules’ or ‘credits’ with each credit guaranteed to represent X
contact hours and Y credits adding up to the qualification of Master-
Whumpfer. This results in less padding or skimping of training content, more
functionally defined training, more flexibility in individual combinations of
Preface xvii
skills, and an easier linking of pay to performance rather than to some
conventionally defined ‘skill status’.
TRAINING AND COMPETITIVENESS
It is not hard to imagine a certain kind of response to all that—and one from
which one cannot withhold a certain sympathy. ‘OK. We see all that. Those
are just the sort of points which would be made by people like you who have
been seduced by this insidious Japanese tendency to see all matters in terms
of national interest and efficiency, and not at all in terms of individual self-
fulfilment, of providing the bases for individual competence and a sense of
self-efficacy. And didn’t you yourselves start off this introduction by
explaining why Japan came to be so special in regard to competitiveness?’
That is true. But the ‘competitiveness imperative’ has come to be an
important factor in discussions of education and training in Europe and North
America too. It began to hit Britain as its manufacturing import bill started
to soar in the 1970s. In the US, it became the subject of Congressional cries
of pain, wide-ranging reports of the Office of Technology Assessment and

commissions of inquiry sponsored by the White House in the mid–1980s, as
the fear came to be ever more stridently voiced that the US might be losing
its manufacturing supremacy to Japan.
Changes there have been. Britain, for instance, has tried to improve the
quality of basic education, particularly for the bottom half of the ability
range, by insisting on a state-prescribed core curriculum and introducing
universal testing of attainments in language and arithmetic. But these efforts
have been relegated to second place in the debates about education, which
have been dominated by questions of parental choice of school and selection.
Individual self-fulfilment, as individuals or their parents define it, is still the
dominant concern, and the large sums of government money spent on training,
are, for the most part—barring a few courses on the taking of which social
security is made conditional—spent on the provision of opportunities for
individuals to take or leave.
Perhaps that is as it should be in a individualistic democracy, though if
we downgrade the collectivist objective of national competitiveness, we
should perhaps draw the logical conclusion and rethink our devotion to the
principle of free trade and open competition across open borders. But if
xviii Preface
large amounts of taxpayers’ money are to be spent on improving skills, it is
as well that it should be well spent. As the preceding paragraphs have tried
to suggest, it is by no means obvious that this is the case.
THE PLAN OF THE BOOK
These are the thoughts which have determined the emphases of the book
which follows.
We begin with the general education system and stress not just the sheer
quantity and intellectual quality of what goes on there, but also the moral
quality and prestige status of the teaching and learning process, reflected as
it is in the status and pay of teachers.
Chapter 2 is about who goes where—about the all-important screening

processes within the system which determine which children, of what ability
levels, are channelled into what types of school and why employers have
very different expectations of a vocational school in a rural area and of a
school with identical curriculum, staff and equipment in a big city.
The next two chapters give the factual picture of the three main types of
institutional vocational training; the vocational high schools and vocational
faculties of colleges and universities within the system supervised by the
Ministry of Education; the public vocational schools under other Ministries
and local governments; and the wide range of private vocational training
schools, mostly offering one- or two-year courses for 18-year-old high-school
leavers. At both the high school and the university level, explicitly vocational
courses absorb about a third of the students. The courses tend to be wide-
ranging and comprehensive rather than specialized—the assumption being
that one is laying the basis for further learning rather than producing a
complete product. The other two types of school provide more specialist
courses; the private sector being numerically the most important (absorbing
about one-fifth of high-school graduates), but of uneven quality.
Training within industry is the subject of the longest chapter, Chapter 5.
The practices of Japanese firms cannot be understood, of course, except in
the context of Japanese ‘lifetime employment’ practices but it is not by virtue
of large budgets devoted explicitly to training that Japanese firms are
differentiated from British or North American firms. They are ‘learning
organizations’ because of the high level of mutual teaching-learning which
goes on—partly pre-programmed in initial training periods, partly arising
out of the introduction of new processes and products. It is partly self-directed
by employees and there is a flourishing correspondence course industry (using
Preface xix
quite traditional methods) which serves it. A lot depends on attitudes—the
modest acceptance that everyone has much to learn, the acceptance by all
supervisors that teaching is a part of every supervisory role. Those attitudes, in

turn, are much dependent on the social characteristics of Japanese enterprises
which, as compared with enterprises in Anglo-Saxon countries, are rather more
like communities and rather less like markets where one sells the minimum
effort for the maximum gain.
The qualification system and the vocational skill testing system are treated
in some detail in Chapter 6. We show the extensive nature of the system, and
elaborate some of the points made above—especially the Consumer
Association/abuse of monopoly point about who validates standards (the
practitioners or the trainers or the independent representatives of the customers)
and the packaging point (‘whole role’ diplomas or ‘boy-scout-badge’
certificates) —the latter, of course, having a lot to do with pay systems which
are steadily changing in Britain in a Japanese direction—i.e., more person-
related and less job-related—without the change being much reflected in
training practice.
The last three chapters are about the policy superstructure. Chapter 7 gives
details of financing and attempts the unusual task of an overall assessment of
who (state, enterprise or individual household) finances how much of the
national VET effort. It includes both the expenditures which normally enter
into GNP calculations (like the salaries of trainers in both public and private
sectors) and those which do not (like individuals’ many hours of home study)
and should at least prompt some reflection about the importance of the latter.
The last chapter briefly describes recent policy trends—if anything
reinforcing existing patterns—and the penultimate describes the fragmented
and uncoordinated nature of Japan’s policy-making process. Rampant
sectionalism and inter-ministerial rivalry are the price one pays for the energy
and dedication which Japanese civil servants display in perfecting their own
department’s programmes.
That is only one of the trade-offs which the book outlines. There are few
simple solutions in the VET business.

NOTE
As a rough guide to the translation of the yen cost figures in the book,
recent figures for the purchasing power parity equivalent of ¥1,000, as
calculated in the Penn World Tables, were £2.60 and $4.60 in 1986; £3.35
and $5.32 in 1992.
Acknowledgements

The authors wish gratefully to acknowledge the help they have received
from Kevin McCormick on the training of engineers, and also from their
friends and mentors in Japan, among whom they would especially, if
inevitably invidiously, pick out for mention: Aiwa Akagi, Ikuo Amano, Hideo
Iwaki, Atsuyoshi Ohe, Kazuhiko Otsuki and Kenji Tsunekawa, and, for this
substantial 1998 update of the first edition, Takeshi Inagami.