Due to progressing globalization in educat ion and demographic change\, the education systems of numerous countries ha ve undergone rapid changes over the last two decades. In the case of Japan\ , two main developments affect education today: (1) steadily decreasing stu dent populations\; and (2) the reorientation of education towards relaxatio n (yutori) and internationalization (kokusaika). Both these trends were bel ieved to make the Japanese shadow education industry\, a vast private educa tion market supplementing students’ educational careers\, superfluous. Howe ver\, shadow education in Japan remained surprisingly strong. Hence\, the a uthor addresses the question how Japanese shadow education manages to remai n strong despite these unfavorable circumstances. Previous research simply missed to discuss this topic\, even though a strong dependence on shadow ed ucation has major implications for a national education system in terms of educational quality and opportunities as well as social inequality issues. Based on the author’s recent fieldwork and data collection\, the ongoing su ccess of shadow education in Japan is explored in relation to these changes . Findings show that the originally highly specialized supplementary school s\, the juku\, have expanded their range of supply and taken on additional functions to respond to changing educational demands. In conclusion\, these findings imply that instead of vanishing\, the juku-industry further gains importance as educational gap-closer and authority in educational and soci al matters. Juku increasingly take on functions outside their original purv iew such as care\, counseling and guidance and thus achieve many of the yut ori education goals that regular schools struggle to accomplish. The author argues that the evaluation of the development of a country’s shadow educat ion system allows conclusions about the state of progress and the success o f educational reforms in the regular schooling system as well.
Steve R. Entrich is a research assistant and lecturer
at the Chair for Social Scientific Educational Research and the vice-speake
r of the Department for Education at the University of Potsdam. He graduate
d with a Master’s degree in History and Educational Sciences at the same un
iversity\, before studying Japanese at the Humboldt University\, Berlin. Cu
rrently\, he pursues his PhD in educational sociology focusing on shadow ed
ucation in Japan\, wherefore he carried out fieldwork as a “visiting gradua
te student” at Dōshisha University\, Kyoto\, and as a scholarship fellow at
the German Institute for Japanese Studies\, Tokyo\, in 2012 and 2013.