Navigating postcolonial predicaments in/through comparative and international educational research: A reflection on Komatsu and Rappleye's interventions

Abstract

This paper begins by revisiting my earlier critical review of the international scholarship on Japanese schooling (Takayama, 2011). In this work, I critiqued three books on Japanese schooling, by Ryoko Tsuneyoshi (2001), Nancy Sato (2004), and Peter Cave (2007), along with other English-language schol-arships on Japanese education. Drawing on a postcolonial critique of culture and difference, my work identified the underlying culturalist logic of the exist ing literature, where the cultural binary of Japan (East) vs West was unprob-lematically accepted and reinforced, the homogeneity of Japan was assumed, and culture was conceptualized as the predominant force shaping Japanese pedagogic practices. Erased from the discussion of Japanese education, it was suggested, were power and domination and the role of culture in perpetuating the ideology of cultural homogeneity and uneven relations in/through Japanese schooling. More than ten years later, this paper reassesses this critique in light of the emerging scholarship of Hikaru Komatsu and Jeremy Rappleye. who draw on a similar culturalist discourse of Japanese pedagogy and explicitly mobilize the ‘Japanese difference’ thus generated to peculiarize and parochial ize the Western cultural premises of ‘best practices’ promoted by international organizations. Through critical engagement with their research, I identify five themes/challenges around which the broader implications of their research are explored, while demonstrating how doing so has also forced me to rethink my earlier critique.