What is it about?
Japan's high school curriculum promises to teach universal human rights as a means to nurture global citizens and a multicultural society. Yet there are also curricular and policy aims to reaffirm Japanese identity, traditional Japanese culture, and respect for the Japanese nation. How does the curriculum portray and resolve these two potentially contradictory aims? Utilising social studies textbooks as a means to investigate the official curriculum, this research shows that human rights and human rights issues are portrayed differently according to identity.
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Why is it important?
This portrayal undermines broad respect for individuals, a fundamental component of the definition of human rights. Moreover, as the portrayal of human rights for Japanese is often unrealistic or trivialised, the attention paid by the curriculum to the rights of non-Japanese suggests that they are privileges extending above the norm of society. This research yields unique understanding into how policy circles likely view notions of human rights and multiculturalism for Japan's society.
Perspectives
This research utilises computer assisted text analysis, as of yet uncommon in investigations of curricula as text. I believe that readers might be interested in this exciting aspect of the research as well.
Thomas Meyer
University of Oxford
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Difference as privilege: identity, citizenship and the recontextualisation of human rights in Japan’s social studies curriculum, Critical Studies in Education, July 2017, Taylor & Francis,
DOI: 10.1080/17508487.2017.1352007.
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