Cross-border Shadow Education and Critical Pedagogy: Questioning Neoliberal and Parochial Orders in Singapore (Palgrave Studies on Global Policy and Critical Futures in Education) 3030928314, 9783030928315

Table of contents :
Acknowledgements
Contents
Abbreviations
Chapter 1: Considering Issues of Criticality and Humanization in Education
Questions for Which I Now Seek Answers
The Challenge to Surface Embedded Ideological Assumptions
Some Questions for Initial Attention
Recognizing Broader and Deeper Considerations of a Reflexive Kind
A Word Regarding Positivism
Reflexivity and Its Narrative, Poststructural, and Historical Attributes
A Social-Practices Problematic Concerning Organization and Regulation
Seeking to Uncover Ideologies in Singaporean-cum-Japanese Discursive Spaces
Specifying the Struggles of Being Both Parent and Critically Oriented Professional
Beliefs About Juku Attendance
Emotions Histories and the Affective Connection
Relative Paucity of Ethnographies That Offer Transformation and Hope
Worrying Background Literature on Studying, Time Allocation, and Opportunism
Other Studies on Household Behavior and Decision-Making
Juku Businesses and Their Opportunistic Behaviors
Complicity with the Flytrap of Education as an Undertaking in Credentialing
Considering the Possibility of Exploitation
Narrativizing the Setting: Japan and Singapore as Composite and Complicit Backdrop
Ideology as Revealed in Its Performativity and Visibly Enacted Performances
Dealing with the ‘External Environment’ as ‘Threat’ or ‘Treat’
Possibilities and Impossibilities in the Overall Narrative: Little Further Room for Compromise
Descriptions of Chapters
References
Chapter 2: Ideologies of Japanese Education Within a Normalizing Cultural Politics of Japaneseness
Examinations and Stratification in the Japanese Education System
Language Considerations in Education
Nihonjinron and the Engenderment of Ideologies of Insularity, Purity, and Uniqueness
A Lack of Awareness or Recognition of Cultural Diversity
Present-Day Concerns
Nihonjinron as Civil Religion
A Series of Caveats and (Dis-)qualifiers
What Can Be Learnt from the Allied Turnaround
Politeness as It Is Treated as a Commodifiable and Monetizable Item
Subtle and Surreptitious Forms of Policing and Regulation
Policing Gray Areas Through Applications of Situational Ethics
Reinterpreting and Rebottling Reality
Schooling as a Site for Essentialization of Identity, Japaneseness, and Otherness
Inculcating Rules of Polite Behavior in School
Regulation and Monitoring of Textbook Content by the Education Ministry
Ambivalent Responses to Internationalization on the Part of Policy-Makers
Effects on Attitudes Towards Children Returning to Japan from Overseas
Consequences of Inclusion and Exclusion for the Adult World of (Over)Work and Ostracism
Nihonjinron in Broader Perspective
A Well-Told Story on Culture and Identity and Then a Conclusion
A Mysterious Note Left in the Istanbul Japanese School Library
Moral of the Story and Its Relevance to Subsequent Discussion
References
Chapter 3: The Japanese in Singapore: A History of Trade with a Habit of Transplantation and Transposition
Understanding the History of the Japanese Presence in Asia and in Singapore
The Japanese Presence and Involvement in Singapore
The Exemplary Nature of Japan’s Bilateral Relations with Singapore
Japanese Business Ventures and Operations in Singapore
Transplantation and Transposition in the Schooling of Children of Japanese White-Collar Expatriates
Institutional Oversight of Japanese-Medium Education in Singapore
‘Exporting’ Japanese Cram Tutoring to Singapore
Final Comments
References
Chapter 4: Issues and Epistemologies Concerning Education, Work, Labor, Human Capital, (Identity) Investment, and (De)Humanization
Appreciating the Ideological Narratives Animating a Japanese–Singaporean–Cooperative Partnership
Japan and East Asia Versus Japan and the West
Pragmatic Aspects of Japan–Singapore Cooperation
Mobilizing Identity as a Form of Pragmatic Investment in an Overseas Situation
Considering Japanese Groupism as a Form of Capitalistic Investment
Exploring the Confluences of Human Capital and Education and Concerns over Stealth or Subtle Enactments of Child Exploitation
The Double Deal(ing) of Education as a Contributor to Work and Consumption
Matters of Moral and Ethical Concern
Regarding Work, Human Capital, and Education in Japan
Change in Education Hamstrung by Politico-Economic and Historical Considerations
Concluding Remarks
References
Chapter 5: Ethnographic Insights into the Culturalized Routines and Regimes of After-School Tutoring for Japanese Expatriate Children
Advertising Aggressively
Strategic Use of the Symbolisms of Space
Synchronization to Japanese Time, Rhythm, and Modes of Operation
Ethnographies and Narratives
Parent A, Juku Tutors, Test Scores, and In-Depth Treatment of Topics Being Taught
Parent B and How Juku Lessons Are Not Necessary in the West
Parent C and Juku Teachers as Charismatic Personalities
Parent D and the View that Juku Is Part of a Child’s Homeward Journey
Parents E and F and the Use of Juku Lessons to Keep Pace with the Japanese System
Parent G and the Way Juku Can Help Overcome State School Mediocrity
Parent H, English-Medium High School Education and Doing Away with Juku Tutoring
My Own Observations as Parent of Schooling and Tutoring During the Pandemic
Discussion
Not-So-Innocent Types of Irony
Testing Them and Insularizing Them
Draconian Outcomes and Dickensian Subjectivities
Claiming and Marking Out the Spaces of Exclusivity
Whether Schools and After-School Tutoring Centers Operate Synergistically or Antagonistically
Making Business Out of a Deficit Learning Model in the Shadow Education Sector
Disguising Hopelessness While Advancing a Pejorative Form of Hope
Design as a Form of Hope or a Futile Undertaking of Hopelessness
Acontextuality as Both Control and Chimera
High-Stakes Examinations and Long Hours Spent on Studies as Hope or Futility
Questions Raised About Admission Examinations
Parental Ambition and Design as Reasons for Juku
Matters Which Implicate or Disable Agency and Individual Empowerment
After-School Tutoring Begins at a Tender Age
Long Hours Spent at Tutoring
Considering the Possibility that Parents Are Looking in the Wrong Direction
Two Irreconcilably Different Life-Worlds Reminiscent of the Duality of Uchi and Soto Representations
References
Chapter 6: A Concluding Critique of Education, Entrepreneurialism, and Essentialism
Corollaries as a Consequence
Schools That Tap on Cram School Materials for Lessons
Answers to the Research Questions
Answering Question (1): Reasons for Subscribing to Cram Tutoring Classes
Answering Question (2): Levels of Achievement Sought for and Win-Win Benefits Presumably Gained
Sidling Up to and Mollycoddling Returnees and Their Parents
Returning to the Problematic as Part of Considering Research Questions (3) and (4)
A Problematic Representing Critical Poststructural Concerns in Human Relations
Thinking the Unthought Through Second Glancing
Answering Question (3): Cross-Border ‘Exported-to-Singapore’ and ‘Made-in-Singapore’ Enactments (Variants) of Juku
The Influence of Contextual Specificities on Organized Thinking and Behaviors
‘Born-in-Japan’ Mercantilism Transposed onto ‘Made-in-Singapore’ Jukus
A Matter of (Interesting) Perspective
Answering Question 4: Dominant Ideologies and Hegemonies Subtly in Operation
Providing More Leads on Matters of Concern: Openness, Closedness, and Conscientization
Academic (Re)views that Silence and Blindside
The Review
The Reality of Power Differentials Controlling What Can Be Said and in What Way
The Response to the Editor after Corrections Had Been Made
Conscientization as a Humanizing Attribute
Question 4 Answered: Dehumanizing and Hegemonic Ideologies Infiltrating Education as Investment
Parochialism as a Form of Hegemony
Hegemony and Homogenization Concealed within a Façade of Neutrality
Cram Tutoring as a Belaboring Form of Education (Consumption)
An Ideology of Economics Imbued in Female Bodies
An Ideology of Economics Imbued in Children
A Shifting of Labor to the Consumer
Conclusion
References
Index

Citation preview

PALGRAVE STUDIES ON GLOBAL POLICY AND CRITICAL FUTURES IN EDUCATION

Cross-border Shadow Education and Critical Pedagogy Questioning Neoliberal and Parochial Orders in Singapore

Glenn Toh

Palgrave Studies on Global Policy and Critical Futures in Education Series Editors Michael Thomas Liverpool John Moores University Liverpool, UK Jeffrey R. Di Leo University of Houston-Victoria Victoria, TX, USA

This transdisciplinary series investigates developments in the field of education in the age of neoliberalism, interrogating arguments and evidence for and against it as well as envisioning alternative educational futures. While much has been written about neoliberalism a key aim of the series is to explore and develop critical perspectives on how neoliberal and corporatist approaches have changed and impacted on educational institutions across all sectors, from schools to higher education, across the globe. The series engages with academics, researchers, curriculum developers, teachers, students and policy makers and provokes them to consider how neoliberal trends and values are affecting the direction of our educational institutions. Comparative studies with the US in particular as well as other prominent national and international contexts that have promoted these values will be encouraged alongside the UK, Australia and EU to identify the implications of recent policies, strategies and values on teaching, learning and research. Posing important questions and developing a critique around the need for evidence lies at the center of the series, which invites responses from advocates and proponents alike in order to shape an agenda which looks forward to making an impact on policy making. The series brings together a critical mass of evidence and aims to foster critical understanding and to understand the influence of neoliberal thinking on education in order to articulate alternative futures at this crucial moment when many professionals are deeply concerned about the developments taking place. To submit a proposal, please contact the editors or commissioning editor: Michael Thomas: [email protected] and Jeffrey R. Di Leo: dileo@ symploke.org Milana Vernikova: Commissioning Editor, milana.vernikova@ palgrave-­usa.com More information about this series at https://link.springer.com/bookseries/16341

Glenn Toh

Cross-border Shadow Education and Critical Pedagogy Questioning Neoliberal and Parochial Orders in Singapore

Glenn Toh Language and Communication Centre Nanyang Technological University Singapore, Singapore

ISSN 2662-2246         ISSN 2662-2254 (electronic) Palgrave Studies on Global Policy and Critical Futures in Education ISBN 978-3-030-92831-5    ISBN 978-3-030-92832-2 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-92832-2 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

To Sakiko, Nobuyoshi and Megumi

Acknowledgements

Throughout my years as an educator, I have benefited greatly from people known for their good educational practice and, more importantly, sound principle, who have been a source of encouragement and support over the time that it has taken me to grow as a person and a professional. I name for special mention the following respected educators known for their candor and fairmindedness and the way they have stood up for equity and moderation, Professors Masaki Oda, Robert Phillipson, and Andy Kirpatrick. I record my deep appreciation for Professors Angel Lin, Ryuko Kubota, Nathaniel Rudolph, Damian Rivers, Peter Roberts, Joff Bradley, Paul McBride, Yukinori Watanabe, Kingsley Bolton, Darryl Hocking, as people of unstinting energy, passion, and creativity, whose work, fine example, collegiality, and friendship I have benefited immensely from. My sincerest thanks go to Professors Michael Thomas and Jeffrey R. Di Leo, editors of the Palgrave Studies on Global Policy and Critical Futures in Education series, Rebecca Wyde and the editorial board of Palgrave Macmillan, for their patience and strong support, and the four anonymous reviewers whose balanced and thoughtful comments and suggestions have helped me make this book so much better than it would have been. Last but not least, my thanks go to Sakiko, the love of my life, who apart from being the loving mother to our two children, has raised for us a wonderfully Christ-­centered family.

vii

Contents

1 Considering Issues of Criticality and Humanization in Education  1 Questions for Which I Now Seek Answers   4 The Challenge to Surface Embedded Ideological Assumptions   4 Some Questions for Initial Attention   5 Recognizing Broader and Deeper Considerations of a Reflexive Kind   6 A Word Regarding Positivism   6 Reflexivity and Its Narrative, Poststructural, and Historical Attributes   7 A Social-Practices Problematic Concerning Organization and Regulation   8 Seeking to Uncover Ideologies in Singaporean-cum-Japanese Discursive Spaces   8 Specifying the Struggles of Being Both Parent and Critically Oriented Professional   9 Beliefs About Juku Attendance  10 Emotions Histories and the Affective Connection  11 Relative Paucity of Ethnographies That Offer Transformation and Hope  13 Worrying Background Literature on Studying, Time Allocation, and Opportunism  14 Other Studies on Household Behavior and Decision-Making  15 Juku Businesses and Their Opportunistic Behaviors  17 ix

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Contents

Complicity with the Flytrap of Education as an Undertaking in Credentialing  17 Considering the Possibility of Exploitation  18 Narrativizing the Setting: Japan and Singapore as Composite and Complicit Backdrop  19 Ideology as Revealed in Its Performativity and Visibly Enacted Performances  20 Dealing with the ‘External Environment’ as ‘Threat’ or ‘Treat’  23 Possibilities and Impossibilities in the Overall Narrative: Little Further Room for Compromise  26 Descriptions of Chapters  27 References  32 2 Ideologies of Japanese Education Within a Normalizing Cultural Politics of Japaneseness 39 Examinations and Stratification in the Japanese Education System  39 Language Considerations in Education  41 Nihonjinron and the Engenderment of Ideologies of Insularity, Purity, and Uniqueness  41 A Lack of Awareness or Recognition of Cultural Diversity  42 Present-Day Concerns  43 Nihonjinron as Civil Religion  44 A Series of Caveats and (Dis-)qualifiers  45 What Can Be Learnt from the Allied Turnaround  47 Politeness as It Is Treated as a Commodifiable and Monetizable Item  48 Subtle and Surreptitious Forms of Policing and Regulation  49 Policing Gray Areas Through Applications of Situational Ethics  51 Reinterpreting and Rebottling Reality  52 Schooling as a Site for Essentialization of Identity, Japaneseness, and Otherness  53 Inculcating Rules of Polite Behavior in School  55 Regulation and Monitoring of Textbook Content by the Education Ministry  56 Ambivalent Responses to Internationalization on the Part of Policy-Makers  56

 Contents 

xi

Effects on Attitudes Towards Children Returning to Japan from Overseas  58 Consequences of Inclusion and Exclusion for the Adult World of (Over)Work and Ostracism  60 Nihonjinron in Broader Perspective  61 A Well-Told Story on Culture and Identity and Then a Conclusion  64 A Mysterious Note Left in the Istanbul Japanese School Library  65 Moral of the Story and Its Relevance to Subsequent Discussion  67 References  68 3 The Japanese in Singapore: A History of Trade with a Habit of Transplantation and Transposition 73 Understanding the History of the Japanese Presence in Asia and in Singapore  74 The Japanese Presence and Involvement in Singapore  74 The Exemplary Nature of Japan’s Bilateral Relations with Singapore  77 Japanese Business Ventures and Operations in Singapore  79 Transplantation and Transposition in the Schooling of Children of Japanese White-Collar Expatriates  81 Institutional Oversight of Japanese-Medium Education in Singapore  82 ‘Exporting’ Japanese Cram Tutoring to Singapore  83 Final Comments  86 References  86 4 Issues and Epistemologies Concerning Education, Work, Labor, Human Capital, (Identity) Investment, and (De) Humanization 89 Appreciating the Ideological Narratives Animating a Japanese– Singaporean–Cooperative Partnership  90 Japan and East Asia Versus Japan and the West  91 Pragmatic Aspects of Japan–Singapore Cooperation  92 Mobilizing Identity as a Form of Pragmatic Investment in an Overseas Situation  92 Considering Japanese Groupism as a Form of Capitalistic Investment  94

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Contents

Exploring the Confluences of Human Capital and Education and Concerns over Stealth or Subtle Enactments of Child Exploitation  95 The Double Deal(ing) of Education as a Contributor to Work and Consumption  97 Matters of Moral and Ethical Concern  98 Regarding Work, Human Capital, and Education in Japan  99 Change in Education Hamstrung by Politico-Economic and Historical Considerations 100 Concluding Remarks 102 References 102 5 Ethnographic Insights into the Culturalized Routines and Regimes of After-School Tutoring for Japanese Expatriate Children105 Advertising Aggressively 106 Strategic Use of the Symbolisms of Space 107 Synchronization to Japanese Time, Rhythm, and Modes of Operation 107 Ethnographies and Narratives 109 Parent A, Juku Tutors, Test Scores, and In-Depth Treatment of Topics Being Taught 112 Parent B and How Juku Lessons Are Not Necessary in the West 113 Parent C and Juku Teachers as Charismatic Personalities 114 Parent D and the View that Juku Is Part of a Child’s Homeward Journey 114 Parents E and F and the Use of Juku Lessons to Keep Pace with the Japanese System 115 Parent G and the Way Juku Can Help Overcome State School Mediocrity 116 Parent H, English-Medium High School Education and Doing Away with Juku Tutoring 117 My Own Observations as Parent of Schooling and Tutoring During the Pandemic 118 Discussion 120 Not-So-Innocent Types of Irony 120 Testing Them and Insularizing Them 121 Draconian Outcomes and Dickensian Subjectivities 122

 Contents 

xiii

Claiming and Marking Out the Spaces of Exclusivity 123 Whether Schools and After-School Tutoring Centers Operate Synergistically or Antagonistically 124 Making Business Out of a Deficit Learning Model in the Shadow Education Sector 126 Disguising Hopelessness While Advancing a Pejorative Form of Hope 127 Design as a Form of Hope or a Futile Undertaking of Hopelessness 128 Acontextuality as Both Control and Chimera 129 High-Stakes Examinations and Long Hours Spent on Studies as Hope or Futility 130 Questions Raised About Admission Examinations 131 Parental Ambition and Design as Reasons for Juku 133 Matters Which Implicate or Disable Agency and Individual Empowerment 133 After-School Tutoring Begins at a Tender Age 136 Long Hours Spent at Tutoring 138 Considering the Possibility that Parents Are Looking in the Wrong Direction 139 Two Irreconcilably Different Life-Worlds Reminiscent of the Duality of Uchi and Soto Representations 140 References 142   

6 A Concluding Critique of Education, Entrepreneurialism, and Essentialism149 Corollaries as a Consequence 151 Schools That Tap on Cram School Materials for Lessons 154 Answers to the Research Questions 155 Answering Question (1): Reasons for Subscribing to Cram Tutoring Classes 156 Answering Question (2): Levels of Achievement Sought for and Win-Win Benefits Presumably Gained 157 Sidling Up to and Mollycoddling Returnees and Their Parents 158 Returning to the Problematic as Part of Considering Research Questions (3) and (4) 160 A Problematic Representing Critical Poststructural Concerns in Human Relations 160

xiv 

Contents

Thinking the Unthought Through Second Glancing 161 Answering Question (3): Cross-Border ‘Exported-to-­Singapore’ and ‘Made-in-Singapore’ Enactments (Variants) of Juku 162 The Influence of Contextual Specificities on Organized Thinking and Behaviors 162 ‘Born-in-Japan’ Mercantilism Transposed onto ‘Made-­in-­ Singapore’ Jukus 164 A Matter of (Interesting) Perspective 166 Answering Question 4: Dominant Ideologies and Hegemonies Subtly in Operation 168 Providing More Leads on Matters of Concern: Openness, Closedness, and Conscientization 168 Academic (Re)views that Silence and Blindside 170 The Review 171 The Reality of Power Differentials Controlling What Can Be Said and in What Way 172 The Response to the Editor after Corrections Had Been Made 174 Conscientization as a Humanizing Attribute 175 Question 4 Answered: Dehumanizing and Hegemonic Ideologies Infiltrating Education as Investment 177 Parochialism as a Form of Hegemony 177 Hegemony and Homogenization Concealed within a Façade of Neutrality 178 Cram Tutoring as a Belaboring Form of Education (Consumption) 180 An Ideology of Economics Imbued in Female Bodies 181 An Ideology of Economics Imbued in Children 182 A Shifting of Labor to the Consumer 183 Conclusion 184 References 187 Index193

Abbreviations

JCC JSEPA JSPP21 LDP SCAP TQC

Japan Creative Centre Japan–Singapore Economic Agreement for a New Age Partnership Japan–Singapore Partnership Programme for the Twenty-­first Century Liberal Democratic Party Supreme Command[er] for the Allied Forces Total Quality Control

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CHAPTER 1

Considering Issues of Criticality and Humanization in Education

I completed this book in the familiar surroundings of my university workspace in my native suburban Singapore, to which I returned after teaching for a period of almost nine years in the greater Tokyo area of Japan, but I found my thoughts shuttling constantly between northeast Asian Japan and southeast Asian Singapore as I wrote, the reasons for which will become apparent as the book unfolds. The birthing of the book was a result of a series of informal but by no means unexceptionable discussions among a number of parents and dedicated university professionals with children educated in Japanese-medium schools both in Singapore and in Japan. Even though these discussions covered a wide range of topics, there were a few concerns that drew recurrent attention. These were concerns over the teaching of English and social studies, for example, certain ways in which the history component of social studies was taught, or the types of classroom learning activities that were used to teach English speaking skills. Apart from concerns over teaching and learning, topics like payment for school trips, the purchase of uniforms and school T-shirts, laptops, and personal thermometers (over the peak of the corona virus pandemic) were also discussed. At least some of the discussions were a little more focused on the types of Japanese-medium schools (nihonjin gakko) that were operating in overseas locations, in places where significantly large Japanese communities existed. When conversations turned to

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 G. Toh, Cross-border Shadow Education and Critical Pedagogy, Palgrave Studies on Global Policy and Critical Futures in Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-92832-2_1

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possible reasons for the high cost (often in terms of add-on or incidental expenses) of seeking a Japanese-medium education in different overseas locations, the explanations offered became a little more speculative and at times, sensitive. Some explanations that came to mind had to do with the cost of transporting textbooks and other teaching materials from Japan or the cost of paying the salaries and overseas living expenses of the Japanese teachers. Other reasons were over the fact that the Japanese had a good eye for quality—good quality infrastructure and equipment, carefully planned-out learning environments, and professionally trained support staff—which would add to both fixed and operating costs. These would have been very good reasons for additional costs to be incurred, bearing in mind Chew and Thang’s (2006) description of the meticulous way in which one Japanese-­medium institution in Singapore, a kindergarten, had tried to make sure that authentically Japanese artifacts were flown in to let Japanese children have a real feel of Japan (a refrigerated snowman included), and the fact that the kindergarten sought painstakingly to replicate an authentic Japanese environment in tropical Singapore (see Chap. 5). There were, to be truthful, some concerns that were expressed over whether certain funds or budget apportionments had to be purposefully shifted or circulated around in a culturally practiced fashion for reasons to do with supporting surrounding Japanese businesses or whether some funds were meant simply to be kept as savings in long-term deposits (see Fukuda et  al., 2003; McGuire & Dow, 2003). Recollected experiences that were highlighted in this respect were about ways in which some institutions required their teaching staff purchasing computers or other equipment to follow specified ways of requisitioning such equipment. A piece of equipment costing, for example, 160,000 yen ($1488) online would cost a much larger amount of money when purchased through certain designated bureaucratic channels. Institutions would nevertheless willingly purchase such equipment at higher prices, citing the need to follow officially prescribed procedures for the sake of compliance and uniformity. To some, this signaled the possible but unspoken existence of a type of closed or regulated system where funds needed to be channeled or cleared in a certain presumed or prepondered fashion (see Fukuda et al., 2003; McGuire & Dow, 2003). One university academic (and parent like me) said that an overnight trip for a school club activity cost some 30,000 yen (about $285), making it seem as if certain schools were at liberty to set their own

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prices for expenses of such nature. On my own part, I raised the matter of the price of English textbooks used for teaching basic English in the Japanese-medium school (nihonjin gakko) in Singapore (one of five) where my two children were studying (see Toh, 2019). These textbooks that were published in the United Kingdom (UK) had to be bought through a designated book distributor based in Singapore, and no other. Finally, there was, inescapably, the question of the need to set aside yet more money from the family budget for up to ten or more hours a week of cram tutoring classes held on weekday evenings and/or Saturdays, very fundamental questions of a moral and ethical nature (see Goosseff, 2019; Ball, 2016) now being key reasons for me to express my concerns over the influence of neoliberal ideologies and values on education. My own interest in these matters came not only by virtue of my being married to a Japanese national domiciled in Singapore, but also by way of our being absorbed in the manner of things into various social, communal, and parenting activities related to our children’s schooling. Important as these concerns over children’s schooling are, writing this book has made me come to the realization that it is not simple to be both conscientious parent and educator within one and the same (possibly conflictual) existence. I came into the issues that I now raise at a time when I was also negotiating my own ontological positionings as both parent and career educator. The unfolding process became one of a struggle that saw changes in my own reflexive positionings as concerned parent and critical educator, and as critical parent and concerned educator, in one. To explain, I have, for the most part, not experienced any conflict when speaking professionally about my interest in critical pedagogy or critical literacy. I have, in recent research, voiced my concerns over aspects of teaching methodology that are exploitative of learners’ deficit positionings (Toh, 2019, 2021) or those that are derelict in their failure to acknowledge the role of teachers’ and learners’ evolving identities in classroom interactions (Toh, 2013, 2015a, 2016, 2017a, forthcoming). In contrast, I have felt less comfortable assuming the role of a concerned parent, and still less, a critical one (see Grant, 2004, for an article written by a critical educator and concerned grandparent). One of the initial reasons for my struggles was with the need for my own teenage son to be enrolled in supplementary tutoring classes, or to be more exact, cram tutoring classes or juku in Japanese, and my own reservations with what I knew about the shadow education or tutoring industry’s core values and teaching

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practices. The ease with which these practices played into neoliberal discourses of production and consumption, competition, marketization, and corporatism became concerning enough for me to reflect more deeply about their implications regarding matters to do with equitability and ethicality.

Questions for Which I Now Seek Answers In seeking the answers to the questions that I will raise, I am led to view ethnography as a form and means of knowledge production, and critical ethnography as a way of examining and deconstructing beliefs, situated processes, and stakeholder positions (Simon & Dippo, 1986; Goodman, 1998; Foley, 2002; Noblit, 2004). As will be seen, these beliefs, positions and processes relate to Japanese schooling and cram tutoring programs catering to Japanese expatriate families domiciled in Singapore. Concerning critical ethnography, I am reminded by Britzman (1995) that ethnographic work of a particularly poststructural nature is characteristically dynamic and reflexive (also see Noblit, 2004). If ethnography offers a way to understand social experiences and practices, (1) critical ethnography recognizes its political, didactic, and emancipatory potential (Simon & Dippo, 1986), while (2) postcritical ethnography draws attention to its fluidity, negotiability, and reflexivity (Foley, 2002; Noblit, 2004). Work of such nature, according to Britzman (1995) is at once ‘both a process and a product’ that involves careful deconstructions of practices, discourses, and histories (p.  229). Moreover, ‘good ethnographic texts’ are said to be able to meet the challenge of ‘tell[ing] stories that invariably embody qualities of a novel’ (Britzman, 1995, p. 229), a point similarly acknowledged by Foley (2002) who notes that ‘reflexive epistemological and narrative practices’ enable ethnography to be an ‘engaging, useful, public storytelling genre’ (p. 469). The Challenge to Surface Embedded Ideological Assumptions For such a study to proceed, I highlight here possible challenges that need to be recognized from the outset. These challenges take the form of resistances and hegemonies traceable to the presence of powerful systems and structures within a Japanese and Singaporean neoliberal discursive framework, one which is characteristically elitist, individualistic, competitive, and market driven. Such systems

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and structures, being matter for ‘a critique of ideology and domination’ (Noblit, 2004, p.  197), are ones that serve to maintain a status quo of particularized and intransigent social practices. As formidable challenges, they apply especially to situations where inequitable relations are also ones that are ‘dominated by a hegemonic culture’ (Simon & Dippo, 1986, p. 196). Japan and Singapore have a shared history of relations and inhering these relations are discourses of an economic, ideological, and political nature. These discourses are identifiable for the role they play in sustaining a powerful but no less dehumanizing cultural narrative (discussed in Chap. 3 and in this chapter—see section on Japan and Singapore as narrative). The cultural artifacts, tools, technologies, and discursive strategies supporting the hegemonies inhabiting such a narrative, need to be explored thoroughly even though they may prove unamenable and resistant (see Chap. 6 for discussion on amenability) to the deconstructive and transformative perspectives of critical ethnography, and thus be unyielding to such perspectives. Simon and Dippo (1986) nevertheless argue for the usefulness of critical ethnography as an approach toward uncovering the inner workings of complex systems or regimes of operation. The work involved in such forms of uncovering will help to make relevant and ‘“topical” both the actual practices [as well as] points of view of people’ implicated in these practices (p. 195, italics added). In the present case, these practices and viewpoints are those attributable to the actors and stakeholders involved in undertakings allied to Japanese-medium education in Singapore and the parallel existence of a comprehensive system of cram tutoring for children of Japanese expatriate families. In combination, both systems constitutively make up the education experience of Japanese expatriate children in their lives lived outside of homeland Japan. Some Questions for Initial Attention To enable my search for answers to a number of research questions to which I now turn, I follow Simon and Dippo (1986, p. 195) in seeking to ‘make “topical”’ for readers the purposes, agendas and ideological assumptions behind the respective practices, viewpoints, and motivations of the actors and stakeholders concerned. I should make clear here that these research questions are actually an initial part of what I hope is going to be a wider-ranging discussion, which

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I will explain in a later section. At this moment, the questions I address concern: (1) the range of factors causing or motivating Japanese families domiciled in Singapore to subscribe to cram tutoring classes; (2) benefits to be gained, whether material or perceived, attributable to these classes; (3) enactments of Japanese cram schooling unique to its being carried out in an overseas location like cosmopolitan Singapore; and ultimately (4) the types of ideologies and hegemonies that have a part in influencing the observations and realities surfaced in answer to (1), (2), and (3).

Recognizing Broader and Deeper Considerations of a Reflexive Kind Having now outlined these questions, which the keener among readers will be wanting to know about fairly quickly, I now feel more at liberty to discuss matters of a more discursive and reflexive kind. In providing early in the discussion some customary (but nonetheless important) research questions, and then moving on to issues of a slightly more subtle nuance, I do not mean to be facetious about my actual need to answer these questions, something which I plan to do in Chap. 6. A Word Regarding Positivism The fact of the matter here is that there are other aspects of a book like this that four crisply worded research questions may not be able to attend to satisfactorily, at least not as deeply as the way I wish to be accountable to readers. Research questions, especially those proceeding from unmistakably (or mistakenly) positivist assumptions (see Goodman, 1998, for discussion on post-positivism) that they can be answered by following some methodically adhered to approach, customary as they are, can only reveal so much about issues as ideological as the ones I am next going to highlight. These are issues on Japanese schooling that I have worked (and struggled) with, as documented in my recent writing (see, e.g., Toh, 2019, 2020, 2021). In the final chapter (Chap. 6), I will endeavor to offer readers a more trenchant critique of positivism in educational research where its severe limitations and tendency toward oversimplicity vis-à-vis the type of issues I am concerned with will be more fully exposed.

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Reflexivity and Its Narrative, Poststructural, and Historical Attributes For purposes of deeper accountability, I will now explore a further strand of thought that has led me to approach the writing of this book in the way that I am now going to explain. In so explaining, I acknowledge: (1) the importance of the narrative and autobiographical element that makes possible the more critically reflexive aspects of the ideological deconstruction I engage in. I am encouraged by Lie (2008) who expresses his agreement with sociologist C. Wright Mills’ observation that inclusion of the ‘the biographical against the larger contexts of history and social structure’ can be a powerful way of reconciling and consolidating ‘the personal and the political, the past and the present, the concrete and the abstract’ (Lie, 2008, p. xii; also see Chap. 5 for more detailed treatment of educators’ personal and their professional landscapes) (2) the poststructural ethnographic element (Britzman, 1995) by which I am led to consider and appreciate: (a) my own positioning as parent of half-Japanese children educated entirely in the Japanese-medium, one of whom is enrolled in a Japanese cram tutoring program; and (b) the unique but yet fluidly situated positionings of different actors and interlocutors from among the community of Japanese people living in Singapore (3) the fact that critical ethnographers in their sometime capacity as truth-telling ethical subjects may also be the ‘fearless speakers’ who have had what Ball (2016) knows very well to be ‘bruising confrontations with prevailing regimes of truth and power’ (p. 1139) (4) the relevance of accepting an emotions history dimension (see Jorgensen, 2019) to the issues I undertake to raise: the fact these issues are located within histories that are at once marked by both grounded experience and affect. Jorgensen (2021) recognizes the role of emotions histories in accounting for ways in which researchers have been prompted to respond to concerns of an otherwise seemingly factual or technical nature.

Also following Simon and Dippo (1986), I am led to consider the experience of writing a book like this as being part of attending to a larger problematic—which can be thought of as a posited way of revealing social practices, wherein these social practices point to ‘produced and regulated forms of action and meaning’ (p. 197).

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A Social-Practices Problematic Concerning Organization and Regulation The problematic I attend to here is one that will broaden the scope of this book beyond the questions outlined earlier. It is one that will allow me to seek deeper insights into social practices, which in this case concern the way education is treated within an overseas Japanese community. As will be shown, these practices embody, enact but also conceal ‘historically structured social forms that organize, regulate, and legitimate specific ways of being, communicating, and acting’ (Simon & Dippo, 1986, p. 197). Attending to this problematic will therefore lend support to my initial intention to approach ethnography critically in that an emergent critique of localized forms of action and the meanings they produce will: (1) bring to light particular ways in which human relations and subjectivities are negotiated in given situations, in this case situations that spell movement, border-crossing, relocation, and migration; and (2) shed light on the social dynamics of border-crossing experiences, especially those that involve ideologies of Japaneseness and homogeneity within a neoliberal economic order. In both these considerations, I am helped by observations in Connelly and Clandinin (1999) that identity negotiations (which include my own) indeed take place in the sorts of dynamic situations described in (1), even though there will be people in the Japanese expatriate community who may not themselves readily admit to this fact of reality. Seeking to Uncover Ideologies in Singaporean-cum-Japanese Discursive Spaces For good measure, I will also consider a third aspect of the problematic mentioned above, which is how the practices and social relations uncovered in (1) and (2) can in turn shed light on (3)—the way ideologies that are grounded in Singaporean-cum-Japanese spaces (geographical, cultural, physical, and symbolic spaces) are naturalized and legitimated (see section on Japan and Singapore as narrative). In other words, within the observed relational frameworks and habituated practices, questions can be asked about the types of hidden ideologies that can be made visible, considering that ideology is itself an ‘indispensable medium in which individuals live out their relations in a social structure’ (Eagleton, 1991, p. 2). Given present concerns, these are ideologies

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relating to ways in which Singapore and Japan are constructed in the minds, practices, and actions of various human actors. Additionally, within Singaporean and Japanese relational spaces, questions can also be asked about the sorts of human narratives and identity practices that are legitimated or promoted ideologically. Admittedly, these questions are ones that implicate at the very least the neoliberal mercantilist histories predetermining and dominating the Japanese presence in Singapore as well as the overwhelmingly middle-class business expatriate composition of Singapore’s Japanese population (BenAri, 2006; Chew & Thang, 2006; also see Befu, 2003, and Chaps. 3 and 6 for elaboration). Befu (2003) uses the term ‘corporate soldiers’ (p. 5) to describe these businesspeople and company executives sent abroad by Japanese multinationals as part of Japan’s economic globalization initiative (Befu, 2003).

Specifying the Struggles of Being Both Parent and Critically Oriented Professional As may now be gathered, the questions and areas of concern that I have just outlined are ones that carry with them both their thought-provoking and worrying aspects, the emotions history (see Jorgensen, 2019, 2021; and also Behar, 1996) of which I will now make clear to readers. Dealing with the reality of my own teenage offspring’s attendance at a cram school is not an easy one for me, even though in his case, the decision to enroll was primarily his own (see Entrich, 2015, for discussion on students’ choice). In coming to his own decision after speaking to his mother, his reasoning was that the teaching in the regular classes at his Japanese-medium junior high school in Singapore was not as detailed and thorough as he had hoped, especially given the difficulties he faced with school tests and assessments. Seeing that there was some discrepancy between assessment difficulty levels and teacher-taught content, and hearing from his peers how tutoring classes pre-taught important material ahead of the school, his reasoning was that these classes would be the solution he needed in view of the difficulties just described. In this regard, our son’s decision was principally his own (see Entrich, 2015), and not one that came by way of any pressure from me or my wife. In other words, while our situation differed somewhat from Entrich’s (2015) observation that decisions to enroll in tutoring classes were primarily made within

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families, and within families primarily by the parents, I remain in agreement with the way ‘[s]tudents’ actual participation in shadow education’ may be used in a general sense ‘as a proxy for the families’ decision to invest in shadow education’ (p. 202). Nevertheless, as an educator, I remained wary of the methods that were supposedly used in cram school teaching. Looking at the time, energy, and money (see Entrich, 2015) that would be spent on such tutoring vis-à-vis my monthly take-home salary, my first (if visceral) reaction was one that led me to entertain the thought of whether Japanese cram tutoring might be thought of as a form of business exploitation. This was a question that, on hindsight, came out of a sense of disquietude that my own fourteen-­ year-­old was of an age where students in the Japanese schooling system would be vying competitively for a place in a ‘good’ high school back in Japan. As was explained to me by my wife, a Japanese national who is not employed in education, the usual and socially accepted (see Roesgaard, 2006; Watanabe, 2013; Entrich, 2015, 2018) way to increase one’s chances of getting into a ‘good’ high school was by way of the kind of coaching our child would receive in a rigorous tutoring program offered by one of the several large corporate tutoring chains (see Dierkes, 2013 for observations about such jukus). These were the corporate chains that had branches in downtown and suburban Singapore to cater to Singapore’s Japanese population. Beliefs About Juku Attendance The practice of juku attendance is said to be woven around the belief that ‘the pedagogy employed in these schools leads to superior results’ even though this is a claim that has ‘not been tested’ conclusively (Dierkes, 2010, p. 25). Society at large in Japan has been variously (self-)conscious that the juku industry might be ‘seen as something illegitimate’ or ‘sometimes even shameful’ (Dierkes, 2010, p. 25), while public views have vacillated between one of resignation (‘it can’t be helped’) and appreciation for its ‘supposedly superior pedagogy’ (Dierkes, 2010, p.  26). Particularly among middle school students, and despite the need ‘to somehow manage the high costs’, Entrich (2015) observes that cram schooling ‘appears to have become an accepted part of children’s school life’ (p. 205). According to Dierkes (2010), public reasonings of the efficacy of jukus suffer rather hopelessly from the use of ‘post-hoc functionalist logic’ (p. 26) describable in the following manner: if their teaching methods were not good,

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they would be out of business; but as they are still in business, their pedagogy must somehow be good. The tendency toward such fallacious forms of reasoning is not helped by the belief that ‘the market mechanism’ itself is a strong driving force that causes juku teachers to supposedly ‘keep striving to improve lessons, textbooks, and other teaching materials’ (Watanabe, 2013, p. 84), and to stay ‘agile in adopting new … teaching techniques’ (p. 85). According to Watanabe (2013), the belief that schoolteachers who are prefectural employees may have ‘no incentives’ (sic) to be innovative in their teaching is one that reinforces the idea that jukus are generally more responsive to the ‘demands of students and parents’ (p. 85). Emotions Histories and the Affective Connection To be sure, there was clearly for me an affective side to the issue in the form of how the matter became a self-reflexive one, particularly every time I found myself waiting late evening in the car park of the tutoring center for our son’s classes to end for the night. For the record, the thrice-a-week weeknight tutoring classes (besides those on Saturdays) would end as late (or early) as 9.20 in the evening. Reaching home past 10 o’clock after a reasonable drive (which would be well past the bedtime of a young person in his mid-teens), the question that came repeatedly to my mind was how even a critically reflexive educator like myself could have ended up in a situation where both parent and offspring would be caught (subjectively) in what was perceivably to me little more than an oppressive and opportunistic scam or racket, which capitalized parasitically on the supposed learning deficiencies of young learners. With or even without all this time, energy, and money spent (see Nishino & Larsen, 2003; and Watanabe, 2013, for relevant statistics), the question was also one of whether someone in my position as an educator (and not a worldly wise businessperson) would even have the right to take up the matter from a critical and educational viewpoint. Jukus were after all registered businesses in the truest sense of their undertaking to turn in profits for their ‘individual or corporate owners’ (Dierkes, 2010, p. 27). Not being schools as such, jukus would, in Dierkes’ (2010) words, be ‘entirely unregulated and only have a legal role as a small (and sometimes very large) business’ (p.  25). As amoral businesses, what would quickly betray me as a total outsider in this world of money-making would be my genuine or naive struggle with whether juku activities might be viewed

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morally, ethically, reflexively, not to mention, educationally. The type of still small voice that invites such moral reflection would be one that resonates with Apple’s (2005) observation that businesses have their way of encroaching into the lives of ordinary people and their families. In seeking for ways to expand, businesses have been seen to trespass on the ‘non-­ market’ part of people’s lives, which ‘must be pushed so that these spheres can be opened to commodification and profit-making’ (Apple, 2005, p. 12). The fact that such ‘changes in … daily lives’ can occur so easily ‘in and out of education’ (Apple, 2005, p. 12) is one that seems likely to be more literal than Apple (2005, p. 12) would have intended to mean. In the case of cram schools, they are (not ironically) also ‘in and out of education’ in the sense that as businesses, their status as educational institutions is one that hangs in doubt. Resonating with Apple (2005), I continue to think about the way cram tutoring may well be part of an exploitative production and consumption circuitry (or racket) preying on the vulnerability of children and their families, the hegemonies of which I would in no way want to be part of—not with the sense of professional compromise I continue to feel about my being (albeit reluctantly) a complicit parent. As someone familiar with discussions framed in Freirean critical pedagogy (see Freire, 1998, 2000, 2005, 2014; Dale & Hyslop-Margison, 2010; Roberts, 2012), such forms of opportunism would simply suggest to me that there would well be an oppressive element (see Kavanagh & Fisher-Ari, 2018; Yung, 2021) in the so-called tutoring programs provided by the jukus. It was in this sense that Jorgensen’s (2019, 2021) work on emotions histories and their part in motivating empirical research have now become relevant to my struggles, bearing in mind that the subject of emotions histories may not be the most immediate aspect of a business (or, dubiously, an ‘educational’) issue to receive scholarly attention. Behar (1996) notes that emotions have only ‘a foot inside the academy’ and there is an unsureness on the part of academies as to whether emotions should be given ‘a seminar room, a lecture hall, or just closet’ for some airing (p. 16). Having a sense of obligation to highlight for discussion matters concerning the way knowledge and meaning are constructed (constricted) and imparted to learners, here to those enrolled in cram schools, my robust response to these concerns is, in this sense, no different from those of the environmental conservationists’. These conservationists respond rigorously to the serious challenge of species endangerment (in Jorgensen’s (2019) case, the extinction of the passenger pigeon) much like the

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academics who object strongly to neoliberal forces that ‘generate destructive forms of competition’ through shadow education (Zhang & Bray, 2017, p. 64) or empathize feelingly with the ‘inhuman suffering Japanese children undergo in their quest for education’ (Roesgaard, 2006, p. 3).

Relative Paucity of Ethnographies That Offer Transformation and Hope No book has been written on neoliberal marketization in education that raises concerns over cram school tutoring in a community of businesspeople and their families (here the 30,000-strong Japanese expatriate community in Singapore) devoting attention to the issue of what cramming practices may reveal about ways in which beliefs and ideologies exert a powerful influence on educational decisions—and on the young lives so affected by these decisions. Moreover, with due respect to the body of scholarly work done on cram tutoring in Japan and elsewhere, there appear to be relatively few examples of research problematizing the neoliberal free market per se that also provide readers with insightful perspectives grounded in ethnography. Noteworthy exceptions to the latter observation are Roesgaard (2006) and Hartman (2008), even though only Hartman (2008) writing in the Egyptian context attempts to address issues pertaining to free market competition. Thus far, scholarly works on Japanese cram schools have typically attended to the following: attribution of their origins to rapid economic developments in the 1960s and 1970s (Dierkes, 2010, 2013); the history of the industry covering government disavowal, reluctant legitimization, institutionalization, and maturation (Russell, 1997; Dierkes, 2013; Watanabe, 2013; Yamato & Zhang, 2017; Entrich, 2018); the effects of formal schooling and family socioeconomic status on the industry’s shaping and functioning (Matsuoka, 2015; Entrich, 2018); their role in the hard work of test and examination preparation (Nishino & Larsen, 2003; Roesgaard, 2006; Watanabe, 2013; Allen, 2016); their complicity with maintaining hierarchy, prestige, and social inequality (Roesgaard, 2006; Dawson, 2010; Matsuoka, 2015; Zhang & Yamato, 2018) and heavy investments by families of high socioeconomic status resulting in unfair advantage (Entrich, 2018; Zhang & Yamato, 2018). While informative in their own right, these works do not primarily undertake from the outset to offer transformative and yet reflexive

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ethnographic insights (see Behar, 1996; Fook, 1999; Noblit, 2004) into the social practices and situated experiences of participants and actors, enacted within a given setting. Nor do they offer a critical ethnographic element to readers with an interest in contestations involving education, social relations, power, and neoliberal ideology, alongside focused observations on oppressive aspects of teaching and learning, from a hopeful and/or emancipatory viewpoint (see Freire, 1998, 2000, 2005, 2014; see Yung, 2021). Along with Yung (2021) who problematizes the more oppressive aspects of cram schooling, both of these latter concerns are mine in this present discussion, even as I venture to acknowledge that my background in critical literacy and pedagogy will mean that the ethnography that I engage in here will no doubt be influenced by my parent areas of interest.

Worrying Background Literature on Studying, Time Allocation, and Opportunism Shadow education decisions are acknowledged to be strategized ones that are typically ‘made within family contexts’ (Entrich, 2015, p.  212). Investment strategies adopted by these families with respect to private tutoring are thought to enhance academic achievement and education levels (see, e.g., Watanabe, 2013; Matsuoka, 2015; Entrich, 2015, 2018; Brehm, 2018). Discussing the Shadow Education Investment Theory (or SEIT) formulated by education sociologist Kazuo Seiyama, Entrich (2018) notes that shadow education is understood to be about choices that families make ‘based on their economic … as well as social and cultural capital’ vis-à-vis their ‘future aspirations for their children’ (p. 81). Matsuoka (2015) reveals that families of high socioeconomic status are inclined to find ways to convert economic capital into academic performance through shadow education, ostensibly for eventual conversion back into economic and other forms of capital and advantage. The ‘highly convertible economic capital’ (p. 287) of such families is legally tendered in the shadow education market in exchange for academic performance, as if the two are presumed to be substitutable in the neoliberal marketplace (Matsuoka, 2015). Academic knowledge, in this way, is reduced to being a tradable and hence purchasable commodity. Demand for shadow education moreover becomes acceptable as ‘a result of rational cost–benefit considerations of forward-looking individuals’ (Entrich, 2018, p.  83), who

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might also be led to regard education attainment as a positional good, implying that the value of education is dependent on how much is attained by others who are in direct competition (see Fujihara & Ishida, 2016). According to Fujihara and Ishida (2016), this ‘relative standing of education’ can be measured not only with reference to scarcity in ‘the distribution of education’, but also ‘returns in the labor market’ (p. 26). If these observations in Entrich (2018) and Fujihara and Ishida (2016) are taken seriously enough, attendance at juku may, symbolically or even literally, be a precocious form of seeking the benefit of returns from the labor market (see also Brehm, 2018) by having households and more so the children pay forward the costs involved in getting these returns. In this case, a presumptuously early form of entry into the labor market is actually set in motion in the way education is reified as a scarce commodity to be striven for. Such scarcity has to be paid for, not only to the putative providers (here juku businesses) in monetary terms, but also in terms of the time and energy spent occupied in attendance (payment by physical output), as if study becomes a vicarious if also precocious form of labor. The value of education is thus deemed to be found in ‘the occupational returns that [it] brings in the labor market’ (Fujihara & Ishida, 2016, p. 26). As ‘[e]ducational attainment leads to later occupational attainment in the labor market’ (Fujihara & Ishida, 2016, p. 26), education becomes a presumptuous way of vying or jostling for a better position in this same market. Such a state of affairs is one that must prove favorable to the viability of juku businesses. Households equating good grades with the promise of supposed returns in the labor market (Fujihara & Ishida, 2016) are obliged to pay for these grades prior to their returns being unlocked and made available, albeit at a future date. In terms of Bray’s (2010) discussion on ways supplementary tutoring might be further understood conceptually, keen educators in the area may wish to look to more emancipatory critiques (e.g., Yung, 2021) of the neoliberal ideologies of production and consumption in education for possible conceptual frames toward destabilizing neoliberalism’s besetting hegemonies. Other Studies on Household Behavior and Decision-Making In various real-life situations, the idea of young people thus being likened to ‘economic assets’ in the labor market may not be so much a matter of questioning neoliberal views of human capital accumulation, but plainly one of household survival (Rosenzweig & Evenson, 1977, p.  1065).

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Studies involving the topic of child labor, too, uncannily (given present concerns with education) address issues concerning choices that families make based on their economic situation but are hardly about the future aspirations for the children that Entrich (2018) refers to. Such studies have similarly been carried out based on ‘an economic theory of family behavior’, the difference being that they concern the need to have children work to support their families (p. 1066). Among economists, such studies have been undertaken with a view to attain a better understanding of family decisions and household behavior, but vis-à-vis a very different form of ‘child investment’ that in turn affects ‘family size, schooling, and child labor-force participation’ (Rosenzweig & Evenson, 1977, p. 1065). In understandably difficult situations like the ones described in Rosenzweig & Evenson (1977), families are obliged to make what they call ‘timeallocative’ decisions about ‘schooling and work activities’ (p.  1065) for their children, often with implications that work and schooling may be traded-off against each other in a manner of mutual exclusion. The ways or patterns in which such decisions are made in turn have an effect on ‘the demand for children and child schooling’ (p. 1065). Cram tutoring is not about the situation of having children engage in work for reasons solely to do with the economics of family survival. It is nevertheless about household and family behavior and decision-making (Entrich, 2015) and resonates with concerns about ‘the influence of shadow education [decisions] on students’ everyday lives’ (Entrich, 2018, p. 5). The high cost of such tutoring may also directly or indirectly affect family size or at least family budgeting in palpable ways. Decisions made to enroll a child in tutoring programs are also time-allocative in nature and there is already documented evidence that families view these programs as a deliberate and strategized form of investment in a young person’s future (Watanabe, 2013; Matsuoka, 2015; Entrich, 2018; Zhang & Bray, 2017; see Chap. 5 for more evidence). For three or four days in a week depending on the number of subjects enrolled for, young people attending cram school may experience days that extend to their being away from home for as long as 14 hours (or 16 hours as it is tallied in Dickensheets, 1996). Decisions to go for tutoring will in turn have an effect on the sorts of demands that are made on a child’s time spent on studies as opposed to time spent on sports and recreational activities, a concern raised in Nishino and Larsen (2003). They will also have an effect on the demand for places in juku classes, the viability of which depends on many a child’s regular attendance, bearing in mind that such classes are run by business

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establishments that are strictly speaking not schools, but profit-seeking companies (Dierkes, 2010; Dawson, 2010; Entrich, 2018). Juku Businesses and Their Opportunistic Behaviors True to their profit-seeking inclinations, such companies have also been known to possess resilient ways of ‘expanding the market’, which as Dawson (2010) observes, can often be seen in their ‘[p]edagogical and curricular practices’ that have ‘functioned to increase “anxiety” and “insecurity”’ among a clientele vulnerable to such emotions (p. 14). By way of these practices, private tutoring establishments are liable to be ‘feed[ing] off the insecurity of parents and students’ (Dawson, 2010, p. 15). Indeed, when further reforms to yutori kyoiku (the relaxed education movement begun in the late 1970s; see Yamato & Zhang, 2017) were introduced by the Japanese government in 2002 to ‘ease’ the curricular and examination burden on students, a meeting had to be called by the education ministry. Invited to this meeting were representatives from 200 private tutoring companies, during which ministry representatives proposed the idea of having them organize sports events, computer classes, and nature outings as part of supporting the new initiative (see Yamato & Zhang, 2017). As Dawson (2010, p. 18) then reveals, the ministry’s intention was also ‘to issue a warning’ to these companies ‘to not increase exam preparation curricula’, which would not only raise anxiety levels among parents and students, but not incidentally, also company revenue. It is not ironic when Yamato and Zhang (2017) report about the way neoliberal changes including the easing of public-school zones allowing greater choice among public schools, compounded by the supposed freedoms afforded by yutori kyoiku, actually contributed to increasing the role of jukus. In one of the cases highlighted, the hiring of a school principal from the business sector paved the way for a prestigious juku business to run tutoring classes inside the school campus—which is reminiscent of an observation in Bray (2015) about the way shadow tutoring may come across as being intrusive vis-à-­ vis regular school education. Complicity with the Flytrap of Education as an Undertaking in Credentialing The opportunistic nature of such forms of behavior continues to be made possible by the overall orientation to education, which has long been one

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that sees education ‘as a credentialing process that awards prestige to those who pass entrance hurdles’ as opposed to those who ‘master substantive skills or develop their erudition’ (Dierkes, 2013, p. 12). Shadowing this credentialing process is a laborious form of cram tutoring: Anything in the Ministry of Education’s curriculum is covered by juku instruction. What juku offer is a deepening of the prescribed content, not an expansion of it. Where a school text may suggest a problem set with 10 math computations involving numbers up to 100, juku may instead go through 20 computations involving numbers up to 200. (Dierkes, 2013, p. 16)

In making the above observation, Dierkes (2013) highlights what he notes to be a ‘deeply held belief’ among Japanese educators, that achievement stems largely from ‘the effort put in by students’ as opposed to ‘their ability to comprehend difficult subject matter or to apply solutions to different problems’ (p.  16). In juku classes, students work mechanically through pages and pages of worksheets, as jukus ‘sell themselves’ (p. 16) in this way to their clientele. According to Dierkes (2013) and clearly reminiscent of what Freire (2000) calls a ‘banking’ form of education, there is ‘very little curricular innovation’ to be spoken of, if at all (p. 16). Content is either drilled or memorized mechanically; students are turned ‘into “containers,” into “receptacles,” to be “filled” by the teacher’ and education then ‘becomes an act of depositing, in which the students are the depositories’ (Freire, 2000, p. 72). Considering the Possibility of Exploitation Given the above concerns, a question like whether juku cramming involves a presumptuous form of exploitation of a clientele of young learners, whether as economic pawns or assets, in the guise of academic study, is not an unreasonable one. While my intention is not to equate cram schooling with outright exploitation, one wonders at the similarity in the way that both are aligned to the motif of economic capital production, here involving young lives as economic subjects, enacted within a broader superintending motif of (belabored) production and (voracious) consumption. For now, it is certainly a matter that I seek to take seriously and investigate by way of the critical ethnographic approach described earlier.

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Narrativizing the Setting: Japan and Singapore as Composite and Complicit Backdrop As already noted, the issues I seek to highlight involve both the Japan where I lived for close to nine years with wife and school-going children, all Japanese nationals, and my native Singapore to which we subsequently relocated as a family. Besides being the background of the present discussion, both locations (as spatial and discursive affordances) are also symbolic and ideological sites for the negotiation of power and identity-related positionings, and the enactment of identity-borne acts of performance (see Davies & Harre, 1990, for their treatment of identity negotiation). As will be seen in this and subsequent chapters, a combined Japanese– Singaporean human narrative is one that demonstrates how the social world can be thought of as what Swanborn (2018) calls an ‘analytic narrative’, one that provides observers with reasoned localized accounts of historical events influencing the lived experiences of people involved. Such a narrative in the present case lends itself to retelling compelling stories (see Chap. 5) of human yearnings for stability, security, authenticity, and predictability, especially in situations of change, where forces to the contrary are all too likely to be encountered. At the best and worst of times in recent history, Japan as a nation has struggled with issues of border and identity construction, immigration, international marriages, mixed identity positionings, and even xenophobia (Hall, 1998; McVeigh, 2000; Lie, 2001, 2008; Willis & Rappleye, 2011; Rudolph, 2016, 2020; Rudolph et  al., 2018; Doerr, 2020; Kamiyoshi, 2020)—as they often interface with the problems of a low birthrate, depleting labor force, and debates over the need to accept greater participation of foreign workers to overcome labor shortfalls (Ezrati, 1999; Douglass & Roberts, 2003; Mouer, 2009; Doerr, 2020). Lived experiences in my own Japanese–Singaporean mixed marriage show an evolving Japan where mixed marriages have become increasingly common if still somewhat relegated or jettisoned to society’s fringes (Murphy-Shigematsu, 2003). Consequently, mixed marriages are also ones that challenge and defy the more conservative or nationalist quarters that bemoan the perceived erosion of the purity of Japaneseness within Japanese society, ‘[l]ong thought to be immune from … globalization’ (Douglass & Roberts, 2003, p. 3). My own human and professional narrative, too, documents soul-­ searching struggles with structural domains of inclusion and exclusion,

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localness and foreignness, acceptance and alienation, which also draw attention to sociocultural discontinuities and juxtapositions between Japanese and Singaporean spaces (see, e.g., Toh, 2015b, 2017b; and Connelly & Clandinin, 1999, for teacher identity negotiations). The act of writing itself, moreover, brings along with it both its performative and discursive qualities (see Davies & Harre, 1990) as I engage (not painlessly) with contested positionings that ‘foreign husband’, ‘foreign son-in-law’, ‘foreign teacher’, in Japanese society, versus ‘non-Japanese husband’, ‘Singaporean–Chinese parent’, among the tightly knit Japanese community in Singapore. The factors that led to our joint decision to relocate to Singapore when our children were of elementary school age were in no way free of these struggles or of our desire to allow our children a broader diversity of cultural experiences and relational landscapes that we hoped the move to Singapore would make possible. In the light of what has just been discussed, I argue here that Japan and Singapore are not just about physical location or even culture per se. By virtue of their contrasting backdrops, they take on the qualities and character of being a narrative vis-à-vis our own storying and the storying of the people in the Japanese community (see Davies & Harre, 1990; Connelly & Clandinin, 1999), particularly in the unfolding ways in which it (this joint narrative) concerns the topic of children’s schooling. Ideology as Revealed in Its Performativity and Visibly Enacted Performances Chew and Thang (2006) provide examples of the types of investments in cultural narratives that are carried out by Japanese people in a Singaporean setting. In Toh (2021), I describe my experience of interacting with a Japanese teacher of English in one of Singapore’s Japanese-medium schools, and the way she had difficulty choosing between prioritizing her Japaneseness (see Chap. 2) and her professionalism as a schoolteacher. In Toh (2020), I trace a discursive pattern in Japanese–Singaporean social relations marked by both the building of cultural bridges and the erecting of cultural barriers. I also describe the way school excursions in a Japanese elementary school contribute to reinforcing cultural stereotypes. To learn about the Indian community [in Singapore], the students are taken to Little India and a Hindu temple. To learn about the Chinese community the students visit Chinatown and a Chinese temple. To learn about the

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Malay community, a trip to a re-modelled Malay village and a mosque is organized. Students are given a tourist’s view of Singapore. This is accomplished by having them chaperoned to these places on tour buses with large windows, reifying the students’ outsider subjectivities that such tours reinforce. (Toh, 2020, p. 286)

As noted earlier, within Singaporean and Japanese discursive (and performative) spaces, questions may be asked about the sorts of identity investments, human narratives, and capital accumulation practices, which are inherently ideological. These are the types of ideologies that may not be immediately obvious to observers especially if they are naturalized subtly behind a façade of routinized social practices and superficial human relations. Together, they reflect constructions of Japan and Singapore as seen in the actions, beliefs, and behaviors of different actors and human agents. As a case in point, the strongly felt need to make use of the curriculum of a Japanese kindergarten to socialize Japanese children to Japanese homeland norms (Chew & Thang, 2006) comes across as being part of an immune response to cope with a decidedly non-Japanese environment like Singapore. Singapore is certainly not home despite all the pleasures and creature comforts of luxurious condominium living complete with swimming pool and tennis courts (see Toh, 2021). As Japan is ideologically and discursively monoracial and monocultural (see Chap. 2), Singapore stands for the very opposite in its unmistakably multicultural ways of social interaction (Toh, 2020, 2021). In Singapore, there are not many shops or supermarkets where authentic supplies of Japanese product-quality goods and groceries can be found, although they have been increasing in number over the years as the influx of Japanese expatriate families has ebbed and flowed with economic trends and movements of capital. The food, water, and weather in Singapore are said to be a challenge for the Japanese constitution. Japan enjoys a somewhat more pleasant temperate climate with distinct seasonal changes; equatorial Singapore is hot, humid, and wet all year round, which takes some getting used to especially for those newly arrived from Japan. The deployment of senior executives from headquarters in Japan to Singapore is a practice that supports a center–periphery narrative. This narrative duly positions Tokyo as the center and Singapore in the distant periphery. ‘Tokyo’ is where salaries and promotions are decided and from where orders from head office are issued (Ben-Ari, 2006). Japanese

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companies located overseas are generally divided into two spaces, an inner space, which is the preserve of the Japanese management, and an outer space, which includes a company’s local Singaporean employees (Ben-Ari, 2006; see discussion on uchi and soto spaces in Chap. 2), giving rise, in addition to a center–periphery narrative, an insider–outsider version as well: While there are a variety of formal and legal discriminations between head office and branches, or main and daughter companies, the most important one is the informal differentiation between the Japanese and other parts of a company … for Japanese expatriates, the “real”  – in the sense of both personally relevant and culturally shared – organization is the one in which Japanese people participate. (Ben-Ari, 2006, pp. 227–228)

It is therefore not surprising that the conflict of discourses within a center–periphery and insider–outsider narrative can give rise to human dilemmas about appropriate times when one needs to act or be like a Japanese, and times when one may loosen up and behave in a less contrived manner. Particularly for senior-ranking expatriates, ‘[t]he risk is one of losing one’s Japanese essence: to appear to “have gone native,” to be seen as too localized’ (Ben-Ari, 2006, p.  229). Strong expectations are placed on expatriates to maintain the appearance, attire, behavior, language, and overall superior demeanor that identifies them and distinguishes their overall Japaneseness (Ben-Ari, 2006). One high-level executive relates his struggles in this regard: When I meet Japanese guests, I always wear a suit. If I don’t I will feel awkward, very uneasy. Maybe they will think that I am too localized, too relaxed. So in order that they don’t get that impression I dress this way. (Ben-Ari, 2006, pp. 229–230)

As for matters as banal (or abdominal) as food consumption, Japanese businesspeople (mostly businessmen) obligingly entertain each other in Japanese restaurants. The widespread assumption is that Japanese people would find Singaporean food too fatty, spicy and unJapanese-tasting, and therefore ill-suited to their ‘physical constitution’, or as claimed by one Japanese senior manager, ‘Our body does not accept oily food like Chinese food (sic)’ (Ben-Ari, 2006, p. 236).

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Dealing with the ‘External Environment’ as ‘Threat’ or ‘Treat’ In short, to newly arrived Japanese expatriate families, Singapore would appear to be almost everything that Japan is not (see Befu, 2003; Chew & Thang, 2006)—precisely why Japanese-medium education in Singapore, beginning as early as preschool, is regarded as an opportunity that must be quickly seized upon to actively ‘inculcate cultural notions of what it means to be … Japanese’ (Chew & Thang, 2006, p.  244). In one Japanese-­ medium institution in Singapore, the private kindergarten described in Chew and Thang (2006), [t]he entire year is punctuated with various ceremonies and celebrations that remind the children of Japanese tradition (e.g., mochitsuki or rice cake making, hinamatsuri or Girls’ Festival) and Japanese seasonal changes (e.g., natsukihoiku or summer caretaking). (p. 244)

Chew and Thang (2006) note that there was in fact one particularly memorable year when this kindergarten managed to have an actual snowman flown to Singapore from Japan to give Japanese children growing up in the tropics an authentic feel of what winter in Japan would be like. Sponsorship for this came from a Japanese airline (Chew & Thang, 2006) whose higher management obviously felt it worthwhile or important enough to be in support of such a highly ‘educational’ undertaking—to be flying or transporting a part of Japanese winter all the way to sunny Singapore. Acts like these reify the ideology that Japan is the center of the lives of these Japanese children and their families, while the realities of daily life in Singapore are held in constant comparison to what goes on in homeland Japan as point of reference. In the above example, multicultural Singapore is discursively shaped as an extraneous external environment (Chew & Thang, 2006) and indeed becomes the backdrop for an intentioned emphasis on the need to socialize kindergarten-age children into Japanese culture and customs right from a very tender age. Interestingly enough, this same kindergarten described in Chew and Thang (2006) is also the site of contestations over the teaching of English, which in homeland Japan is seen depicted ideologically as a foreign language owned and spoken by its heavily racialized white and blue-eyed native speakers (Aspinall, 2013; Rivers, 2013, 2019; Kubota & Fujimoto, 2013; Rudolph, 2020; Rudolph et al., 2018), principally for reasons to do with the way such a belief plays into Japanese

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nation-statist and culturalist stereotyping. From Chew and Thang’s (2006) work, it is apparent that the setting aside of lessons in the timetable for the teaching of English in an overseas Japanese kindergarten and the employment of two full-time native speaker teachers from the UK for this purpose, is not entirely a case of being open to some form of internationalization or cultural exchange. The truth, according to Chew and Thang (2006, p. 252) is that it took a group of what were supposed to be ‘more progressive’ parents to make their voices heard. These parents took to lobbying for more English to be taught (regardless the old methodologies that were in use—see below), making themselves vulnerable to being regarded as acting somewhat differently from what would have traditionally been expected of them by the Japanese establishment. Aspinall (2013) notes that in Japan, younger English teachers who tend to be more fluent in the language than their older counterparts are actually discouraged from speaking English in the staff room because it can be a source of embarrassment to the former. Having good English skills may cause a Japanese speaker of English not to blend in with a Japanese environment or with the Japanese establishment (Aspinall, 2013). Lobbying for more English was therefore considered something ‘more progressive’ but also quite out of character. Moreover, among one group of parents described as being fairly traditional in outlook, it was observed that ‘the mothers [would] differ from the fathers’ (Chew & Thang, 2006, p. 252). While the fathers generally preferred a more ‘Japanese’ approach to teaching ‘to prepare the children for reintegration upon their return to Japan’, the mothers were thought to be quite unusual in expressing some wish ‘for more English lessons and other “international” experiences for their children’ (p. 252). The reality of the matter would certainly have been that neither the school’s administrators nor the worried fathers in this case, would have had much of anything to fear. The teaching of English was for all intents and purposes both tentative and sporadic even though it was touted as ‘one unique feature of the kindergarten’ (Chew & Thang, 2006, p. 251). There was originally only the one lone native speaker teacher, who, in her own words, felt herself to be like a piece of humanized furniture: ‘As long as they could tell the parents there was an English teacher on the premise that was good enough’ (p. 251). This lone teacher, furthermore, taught all three kindergarten grades, a cohort of no less than 400 children, all on her own. The teacher herself reveals confidingly that:

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What I was doing with the children, because I was teaching so many of them, it was just a drop in the ocean. I was seeing them once a week and that was it. Now [after the arrival of another English teacher] at least they are seeing me two or three times a week … I would say this is definitely an improvement. (Chew & Thang, 2006, p. 251)

Readers are then reminded that this supposedly ‘improved’ status of English teaching was the result of extended ‘negotiations’ between the aforementioned ‘more progressive’ parents and the school administration, which involved the extremely difficult and delicate matter of ‘balancing the desire to “internationalize” and “internalize” the children’ (Chew & Thang, 2006, p. 252). Singapore, in this instance, became the site for deep soul-searching introspections and contestations over the educational direction of young Japanese children and the all-important trajectorial orientation of Japanese-­ medium kindergarten education. If one is allowed to consider such forms of culturally loaded quibbling somewhat more positively, the Singapore where this Japanese kindergarten is located may be seen from the behaviors of these ‘more progressive’ parents as a more supportive or internationalized cultural space where some margin for negotiation is deemed to be more permissible than might otherwise be, had it been homeland Japan. English, in this context, is treated as the ‘something extra’ or something harmless enough for conservative kindergarten administrators to soften on their stance to some superficial extent (Chew & Thang, 2006, p. 252)—or at least for these parents to feel some entitlement or sufficient levels of license as white-collar expatriates to enter into some form of negotiation over. Singapore’s perceived foreign or internationalized cultural environment then becomes for these parents not so much a ‘threat’ as such, but more of a temporary overseas ‘treat’. The opportunity and prerogative to speak up for themselves and what they want for their children, appears to be available to them as expatriates of some presumed or perceivable social status. Particularly from the actions of the mothers, it may be the case that Singapore is regarded (by them) as a non-Japanese cultural setting in which they would find it easier to make their voices heard by their attempts to influence teaching in the kindergarten. Such assertiveness and sense of prerogative is perhaps not disconnected from their newfound status as expatriate wives, yet again only possible where (and when) the husbands’ overseas posting allows the wives to rise to the occasion of being in such

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an enviable position. This would be one interesting case where Japanese ‘capitalism and patriarchy’ (Sugimoto, 2010, p. 166), which mostly places women in disadvantaged positions, might, in a backhanded way, accord the women some privilege as expatriate wives—comparable in status to the wives of expatriate husbands from America or Great Britain. As noted in Befu (2001), Japanese people are by fondness of habit, often found to be comparing themselves with people from America and the UK (also see Rudolph, 2020). Be this as it may, a piece of well-articulated wisdom from Appadurai (1990) would in part capture the sort of dilemmas that Japanese expatriate families may be facing in cosmopolitan multicultural Singapore where ‘conscious choice, justification and representation’ must come into play in negotiations of identity and social positionings (p. 18). Concerning the sorts of changes that were already happening in accelerated mode at the time of his observations, Appadurai (1990) called forth a world ‘in which both points of departure and point of arrival [were already] in cultural flux’, thus making ‘the search for steady points of reference, as critical life-­ choices are made … very difficult’ (p. 18). In these sorts of shifting realities, vain (pun intended) attempts at inventing tradition, ethnicity, kinship, and other identity-markers ‘can become slippery, as the search for certainties is regularly frustrated by the fluidities of transnational communication’ (p. 18). In Chap. 2, I will discuss tradition and ethnicity in greater detail, as they relate to the way in which Japanese people, both at home and more so abroad, attempt to identify, represent, and conduct themselves. Possibilities and Impossibilities in the Overall Narrative: Little Further Room for Compromise As for the teaching of English, which in the Japanese context can be reacted to as a fairly sensitive or controversial matter (see Horii, 2015; Rivers, 2013), Chew and Thang (2006) recall the way in which the kindergarten administrators were finally only negotiable up to a certain point, and no further. Despite the allowance given for a certain amount of negotiation to take place with the more eager of parents (notably the mothers), Chew and Thang (2006) note that English continued to be treated as something of an ‘extra’ (or extraneous) offering: ‘[b]esides English, the “extra” provided in the school curriculum also [included] the offering of computer lessons common among local [Singaporean] kindergartens’ (Chew & Thang, 2006, p. 253). So, while the kindergarten was willing to

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come across as being flexible to some extent and amenable to adapting to what might have been considered ‘overseas’ norms like allowing computer skills and English to be taught, it also sought to make clear that it would not compromise on its policy ‘of adhering closely to the Japanese system’ of socializing children, games, fun activities, snowmen, and all (Chew & Thang, 2006, p.  252). The actions of the kindergarten administration would be something like a tokenistic form of opening up or facing up to the fact that it was operating in an overseas environment, but not without ultimately and decisively reclaiming its stated mission to uphold the banner of Japaneseness. These forms of performed or sedimented behaviors, postures and posturings, give readers an idea of what is possible for Japanese people and institutions in Singapore, but more importantly, also what is not possible. They characterize and encapsulate the essences of the sorts of Japanese narratives that are ‘made in Singapore’ and only possible given Singapore’s particular set of circumstantial realities. Interesting as the discursive and ideological aspects of their enactments must be, their deeper significance extends to the way in which schooling and cram tutoring will need to be understood in the later chapters of this book, not only as the banking approaches to education that they quite unfortunately are (Freire, 2000; Toh, 2020, 2021), but as culturally situated and ideologically borne undertakings of an overseas Japanese community. From the observations in this section, the fact that cosmopolitan Singapore (and not Japan) is where these Japanese children are doing all their living, learning, playing, and growing, may already be enough of a warrant or justification for the type of critical ethnographic study described earlier in this chapter to be set in motion in the ensuing chapters.

Descriptions of Chapters Following this opening chapter, the contents of Chap. 2 address dominant discourses that naturalize particular understandings of an essentialized form of Japaneseness. This heavily essentialized form of Japaneseness is captured in a genre of literature known as nihonjinron (tenets or Japaneseness) literature. Nihonjinron is seen recognizable as an ideology that reifies Japan as a monoculturally homogeneous nation. The pervasiveness of its influence is a reason for the general lack of awareness or admission that the country is more diverse than generally assumed, with a growing number of people of different ethnic origins and cultural

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histories. Japanese monoculturalism and homogeneity are valued as much as dominant (even official) rhetoric enables them to be naturalized as hegemonic forms. Despite the naturalized and largely unquestioned aspect of its influence, nihonjinron’s resilience as an ideology is traced back to events in history, particularly those surrounding the policy changes of Japan’s Allied occupiers after World War II.  Confronted by threats that came with the onset of the Cold War, the Allied occupiers led by America supported defeated Japan’s reemergence as a conservative Japan that would become part of the frontline in the fight against the tide and threat of communism. The resultant emphatic return to conventional understandings of Japanese culture and uniformity proves to be a significant influence on the ways in which Japanese social relations are reproduced and Japanese approaches to education uncritically structured and standardized. Schooling and its collaborating structures become channels for reinforcing essentialized understandings of Japanese identity and social norms. Ways in which Japanese identity, culture, and social relations are normalized ideologically then carry implications for corresponding ways in which Japanese people living in an overseas location like Singapore conduct their businesses and live their lives. Set patterns in which children are schooled are subjected to the same normalizing tendencies that promote uniformity in its most culturalist of forms. The significance of corresponding acts of control is found in the way children are put through regimes of cram tutoring, drilling, and overlearning as largely unquestioned aspects of their education. In Chap. 3, attention is directed toward Japan’s strong contributory role in the growth of Singapore’s fledgling economy after its independence from a century and a half of British colonial rule. Singaporean policy-­makers are seen to be welcoming of the Japanese presence, not only in the provision of much-needed foreign investment but also in the sharing of cutting-edge forms of technical expertise the Japanese are known for. One result of this openness to foreign investment and expertise, in this case from Japan, is the growth of a significantly large Japanese community made up of white-collar professionals and businesspeople, and their families. To fulfill the need to educate the children of these families, a schooling system of nihonjin gakko catering specifically to Japanese needs is duly put in place. Given the elaborately regulated, systematized and administerial nature of Japanese homeland styles of education, attention is drawn to the way in which their highly regulated if superimposing ways can be successfully replicated in a distant location like Singapore. The setting up of

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the Japanese education machinery in Singapore is seen to reflect its very successful transplantation and transposition into a situation that is as socially and culturally divergent as any might be from homeland Japan. Seen alongside this successful transplantation is the complementary presence of a cram tutoring industry that has gravitated to the island republic in service of the needs of a clientele of Japanese families eager for their children to be accepted in good schools when they return to Japan. In these elaborate arrangements to educate Japanese children growing up in a non-Japanese location, it is ironic that carefully guarded forms of egalitarianism in homeland Japan are seen to be compromised by an aspiring mercantile middle class of Japanese families. Singapore is therein revealed to be a remote location where the rules of egalitarianism may be surreptitiously compromised, ostensibly because of its culture of supporting a neoliberal ‘free market’, which provides enough of a camouflage for Singapore to be treated as a clandestine base for training up a new generation of elites. In Chap. 4, the discussion turns its attention to epistemological connections between education and human capital studied not only by scholars of human capital theory but also educators seeking to bring together concerns over academic study, schooling, skills, work, labor, human capital, human subjectivity, and humanization in education. It will be noted that studies within the education–human capital nexus have sought to examine possible ways in which relationships between the two areas inform understandings of time invested in education, perceived returns on such investment, scholarly theorizations of labor, and considerations of humanization in conscientized educational practices. The contents of Chap. 4 continue to draw attention to the workings of ideologies underlying particularized narratives enacting Singaporean and Japanese economic and cultural interactions. One is reminded that Singaporean and Japanese cultural and discursive spaces are also historical and ideological ones that support emergent narratives imbricating business practices and human social relations. Accordingly, attempts are made to understand more recent ideological rhetoric animating Singaporean–Japanese spaces, revealing on their part new roles and synergies circumventing or replacing older center–periphery, donor–recipient frameworks. These are the sorts of emerging synergies that drive the joint promotion of free trade, market-driven regionalization, and economic interdependence while supporting the unproblematic acceptance of entrepreneurialism, the free market and free trade liberalization. With their emergence, the Singapore–Japan

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partnership assumes a newfound apostolic dimension in its potential ability to animate, actualize, naturalize, and promote not only the presumed benefits of capitalistic entrepreneurialism but also its attendant outcomes for the way labor and human capital can be tapped, harnessed, and mobilized. Given the book’s concerns with education, equity and humanization, uneasy (and unequal) relations configured in the symbolically violent confluences of entrepreneurialism, education, and the engenderment of human subjects, in a Singaporean–Japanese context, are given their deserved critical attention. Chapter 5 provides critical accounts of the way in which Japanese after-­ school cram tutoring is carried out in Singapore, beginning with its exclusivity and other idiosyncratically spatialized characteristics that suggest the reappropriation of Singaporean spaces for the purposes of consolidating Japanese identity positionings, besides and beyond money making. Narratives relating to family trajectories, expectations, and aspirations vis-­ à-­vis enrollment in costly cram tutoring programs are examined critically for the way they play into circumscribed data-bound conceptualizations (see Ball, 2016) of achievement and success. After-school cram tutoring is revealed to be based on deficit understandings of teaching and learning, on account of which repetitive drilling and overlearning makes the former an intensely time-consuming commitment for young people of school-­ going age. Japanese cram tutoring in Singapore, like in Japan, is seen to be an industry dominated by bigger industry players that have set up branches in Singapore, epitomizing the involvement of private enterprise in education and in the life-worlds of families with school-going children (see Apple, 2005). Japanese tutoring businesses, especially the bigger ones, are observed to be involved in aggressive advertising for students the year round, but especially in the spring of each year when newly arrived Japanese expatriate families find themselves settling into their new homes in Singapore. Such advertisements are commonly found in fashionable expatriate magazines and newsletters published for distribution within the Japanese community. In the narrated stories found in this chapter, the Japanese mother’s bespoken commitment to her child’s education is recognized as part of the way Japanese society is instrumentally if cynically structured for economic production. Chapter 5 concludes with ironic observations of how Japanese families go about their after-school tutoring activities, as an expression of their aspirations toward a ‘good’ education and bright future. The earnest and beavering manner in which these families busy themselves with after-school cram tutoring activities belies the

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fact that cram tutoring centers are actually businesses that thrive on the (1) sheer intensity of the type of teaching and learning they impose on their young charges; and the (2) closed, cloistered, and insular(ized) nature (see Peters & Roberts, 2012) of the community that these businesses cater to. Set in cosmopolitan Singapore where things Japanese are much admired and where there is a large following of Japanophilia, the cloistered inner world of Japanese cram tutoring is contrasted skeptically with the favorably popular public face of Japan-in-Singapore, epitomized by outward trappings of Japan, Inc. (big businesses fronted by posh offices) and Japanophilia (manga, anime, Zen, karate, and sushi). Japanese cram tutoring in Singapore, in this respect, draws attention to stark contrasts between the public and private faces of Japan-in-Singapore as a bifurcated phenomenon. Chapter 6 concludes with an ideological critique of how a ‘Born-in-­ Japan’ form of neoliberal mercantilism is cleverly (and tellingly) superimposed on a ‘Made-in-Singapore’ transformation of Japanese after-school cram tutoring. Observations are made regarding this cram tutoring’s dependence, pedagogically speaking, on monolithic methodologies that feed on narrow and static understandings of knowledge, meaning creation, and learning, in this particular case, to prepare the children of Japanese expatriates for reintegration into the homeland Japanese system. Such narrow understandings of knowledge, meaning, and learning are the alter ego of the elaborate system of entrance examinations, which feeds parasitically on the former’s essentialisms and reductionisms, and ultimately into neoliberal and nation-statist regimes of human capital production. For the clutches of such living and learning arrangements to appear decent and acceptable, an embellished and belabored (if hackneyed) narrative surrounding education and personal success has to be spun and sustained rhetorically through an elaborate mythology of promised rewards and false generosities (Freire, 2000; Yung, 2021). Superimposed onto, and played out in, a non-Japanese location like Singapore, such ideological enactments of social regularization in teaching, learning, and being are noticeable for their evocations of Japaneseness, particularly their legitimation of depersonalized and insular(ized) subjectivities among Singapore’s Japanese population. While it is ironic that just one seemingly innocuous aspect of education can exert such a controlling effect on the way the Japanese conduct themselves (and their lives) overseas, one is reminded in this chapter that artifacts like workbooks, worksheets, and past-year papers have long been part of a larger homeland

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socio-disciplinary regime in which cram tutoring is allocated a key structuralizing if homogenizing and numbingly de-conscientizing role. Further superimposed on Japanese cram tutoring in Singapore are the expatriate parents’ middle-class life trajectories, which obliges or compels them to buy heavily into the mythologies of success through ‘quality’ education, marked in the case of cram tutoring by the repeated drilling and overlearning of bankable and examinable facts, figures, and formulas (Kavanagh & Fisher-Ari, 2018; Yung, 2021). In terms of the economics of time allocation, education becomes not only an act of investment in a particularized form of human capital accumulation, but also an act of consumption of tutoring services tailored somewhat cynically to a middle-class expatriate clientele. In such instantiations of after-school tutoring, the obviously dehumanizing forms of indignity that come with long hours of laborious tutoring and exactions of the children’s physical bodily (somatic) compliance call to mind suggestions of their similarity to child labor, which while admittedly if perversely uncanny, may not be entirely unreasonable. Such forms of uncanniness are nonetheless possible and believable given subtly naturalized ideologies hidden behind the veil of education working in collusion with entrepreneurialism and a powerfully normalizing cultural politics of Japaneseness. This latter concern is the subject of discussion in the next chapter.

References Allen, D. (2016). Japanese cram schools and entrance exam washback. Asian Journal of Applied Linguistics, 3(1), 54–67. Appadurai, A. (1990). Disjuncture and difference in the global cultural economy. Public Culture, 2(2), 1–24. https://doi.org/10.1215/08992363-­2-­2-­1 Apple, M. (2005). Education, markets, and an audit culture. Critical Quarterly, 47(1–2), 11–29. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.0011-­1562.2005.00611.x Aspinall, R. (2013). International education policy in Japan in an age of globalisation and risk. Global Oriental. Ball, S. J. (2016). Subjectivity as a site of struggle: Refusing neoliberalism? British Journal of Sociology of Education, 37(8), 1129–1146. https://doi.org/10.108 0/01425692.2015.1044072 Befu, H. (2001). Hegemony of homogeneity. Transpacific. Befu, H. (2003). The global context of Japan outside Japan. In H.  Befu & S. Guichard-Anguis (Eds.), Globalizing Japan: Ethnography of the Japanese presence in Asia, Europe and America (pp. 3–22). Routledge. Behar, R. (1996). The vulnerable observer: Anthropology that breaks the heart. Beacon.

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Nishino, H., & Larsen, R. (2003). Japanese adolescents’ free time: Juku, bukatsu, and government efforts to create more meaningful leisure. New Directions for Child and Adolescent Development, 99, 23–35. https://doi.org/10.1002/cd.64 Noblit, G. W. (2004). Reinscribing critique in educational ethnography: Critical and postcritical ethnography. In K. DeMariass & S. Lapan (Eds.), Foundations for research: Methods of inquiry in education and the social sciences (pp. 181–201). Lawrence Erlbaum. Peters, M. A., & Roberts, P. (2012). The virtues of openness: Education, science, and scholarship in the digital age. Paradigm. Rivers, D. J. (2013). Institutionalized native speakerism: Voices of dissent and act of resistance. In S. A. Houghton & D. J. Rivers (Eds.), Native speakerism in foreign language education: Intergroup dynamics in Japan (pp.  75–91). Multilingual Matters. Rivers, D.  J. (2019). Walking on glass: Reconciling experience and expectation within Japan. Journal of Language, Identity and Education, 18(6), 377–388. https://doi.org/10.1080/15348458.2019.1674149 Roberts, P. (2012). From west to east and back again: An educational reading of Hermann Hesse’s later work. Sense. Roesgaard, M.  H. (2006). Japanese education and the cram school business: Functions, challenges, and perspectives of the juku. Nordic Institute of Asian Studies. Rosenzweig, M., & Evenson, R. (1977). Fertility, schooling and the economic contribution of children in the rural India: An econometric analysis. Econometrica, 45, 1065–1079. https://doi.org/10.2307/1914059 Rudolph, N. (2016). Negotiating borders of being and becoming in and beyond the English language teaching classroom: Two university student narratives from Japan. Asian Englishes, 18(1), 2–18. https://doi.org/10.1080/1348867 8.2015.1132110 Rudolph, N. (2020). Identity as/in language policy: Negotiating the bounds of equipping “global human resources” in Japanese university-level (language) education. In A. Al-Issa & S. Mirhosseini (Eds.), Worldwide English language education today (pp. 85–101). Routledge. Rudolph, N., Yazan, B., & Rudolph, J. (2018). Negotiating ‘ares,’ ‘cans,’ and ‘shoulds’ of being and becoming in English language teaching: two teacher accounts from one Japanese university. Asian Englishes, 21(1), 22–37. https:// doi.org/10.1080/13488678.2018.1471639 Russell, N. U. (1997). Lessons from Japanese cram schools. In W. K. Cummings & P.  G. Altbach (Eds.), Challenges of East Asian education: Implications for America (pp. 153–172). State University of New York. Simon, R. I., & Dippo, D. (1986). On critical ethnographic work. Anthropology and Education Quarterly, 17(4), 195–202. https://doi.org/10.1525/ aeq.1986.17.4.04x0613o

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Yung, K. (2021). Shadow education as a form of oppression: Conceptualizing experiences and reflections of secondary school students in Hong Kong. Asia Pacific Journal of Education, 41(1), 115–129. https://doi.org/10.108 0/02188791.2020.1727855 Zhang, W., & Bray, M. (2017). Micro-neoliberalism in China public-private interactions at the confluence of mainstream and shadow education. Journal of Education Policy, 32(1), 63–81. https://doi.org/10.1080/0268093 9.2016.1219769 Zhang, W., & Yamato, Y. (2018). Shadow education in East Asia: Entrenched but evolving private supplementary tutoring. In K.  Kennedy & J.  Lee (Eds.), Routledge international handbook of schools and schooling in Asia (pp. 323–332). Routledge.

CHAPTER 2

Ideologies of Japanese Education Within a Normalizing Cultural Politics of Japaneseness

Superimposed on an evolving Japan with its growing number of mixed marriages and a diversity of peoples of different origins earning their livelihood and making their home on Japanese soil is a Japan that betrays a different face. This is the face of a Japan that asserts and fiercely defends its nationalistic claims to racial homogeneity and cultural uniqueness, supported in part or whole by an education system that is structurally and systemically rigid and marked by continued competition for places in the supposedly better reputed institutions at key transition points across a child’s twelve or more years of schooling. After a survey of literature on the current state of the education system, I explore the ontologies and cultural politics of a homogeneous monocultural Japan and the types of contestable identity discourses and hegemonies that seek its reification and perpetuation.

Examinations and Stratification in the Japanese Education System Japan has a single-track comprehensive school system that is modeled broadly on the American system with the first to ninth grades (six years of elementary school and three years of middle school) being made compulsory. After middle school, students attend high school for another three © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 G. Toh, Cross-border Shadow Education and Critical Pedagogy, Palgrave Studies on Global Policy and Critical Futures in Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-92832-2_2

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years, either pursuing an academic or vocational track, before university (see Fujihara & Ishida, 2016; Entrich, 2018). Decision-making on the part of students and their families at key transition points over the twelve  years of school education present challenges tied to high stakes examinations and options for schooling at the next level. The system is planned such that students ‘have only one chance to progress’ through it and must therefore ‘assure (sic) they achieve as much as possible during their journey’ (Fujihara & Ishida, 2016, p. 27). Stratification or differentiation in type and quality in Japan’s formal education system and increasing levels of selectivity become areas of concern beginning at middle and high school levels (Stevenson & Baker, 1992; Fujihara & Ishida, 2016; Entrich, 2019). Decision-making at these key transition points both contributes to and is shaped by the challenges and discourses surrounding the realities of such stratification. While the system is said to be generally whole-child-oriented, equitable, nonselective, and relatively free from tracking in the lower grades (Stevenson & Baker, 1992; Fujihara & Ishida, 2016; Yamato & Zhang, 2017), the entrenched practice of ranking the high schools that students enter is one that plays a considerable part in determining future opportunities for these students, both in university and eventually in the choice of professions made available to them (Entrich, 2019). The period of school enrollment based on a family’s place of residence in what are fairly standardized schools (Fujihara & Ishida, 2016) providing a ‘relatively homogeneous education’ (Stevenson & Baker, 1992, p. 1641) is believed to end upon a student’s reaching high school. High schools are generally subject to being ‘ranked by prestige’ as a matter of widespread practice (Stevenson & Baker, 1992, p. 1641). Adding a superimposing presence to this practice of ranking and stratification has been the introduction, in comparatively recent times, of an element of marketization in the late 1990s, which according to Dierkes (2013) has brought changes to what was once supposed to be ‘an egalitarian education focused on collective achievement’ (p. 8). These changes took place at a time when the country was in the midst of dealing with ‘manifestations of the post-bubble … malaise’, one outcome of such dealings being that ‘schools increasingly became targets of necessary reforms’ (Dierkes, 2013, p. 8). As will be seen in subsequent discussion, these were changes that played to the insecurity of parents (Dierkes, 2013), who, in increasing numbers, turned to cram schools for the educational solutions they were believed to offer.

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Language Considerations in Education The Japanese language is the medium of instruction in the school system, while English as a foreign language is said to be taught principally for test taking rather than communication purposes, continuing from teaching methods dating to the years after the last world war and an examination system that continues to encourage the teaching of grammar and structure (Aspinall, 2003; Mogi, 2017). Entrich (2018) notes that some aspects of the educational reforms proposed by Japan’s postwar Allied occupiers that were strongly resisted by Japanese educators were those to do with the Japanese language, particularly with regard to the learning of kanji characters. These proposed reforms were thought of as ‘a major interference into Japanese culture and identity’ (Entrich, 2018, p. 32), based on the assumption that the Japanese people were supposed to ‘constitute a single entity’ and the Japanese language was indeed ‘one unit of language’ (Doerr, 2014, p.  64). In similar vein, concerns have been raised over whether the teaching and learning of English in the school system would create problems for the maintenance of a strong Japanese national identity, debates over which have also involved matters relating to the use of the flag as well as the national anthem (Aspinall, 2003). While the teaching and testing of English continues to be a target of criticism for reductionist professional conceptualizations and outmoded pedagogical practices (see, e.g., Aspinall, 2003, 2011; Dierkes, 2013; Toh, 2019), it has also been argued that policies to identity English as being the language of a foreign or alien Other (see, e.g., Kubota, 2002; Rivers, 2013; Rudolph, 2020; Rudolph et  al., 2018; Toh, 2019) remains part of an underlying ideological strategy to maintain and assert Japanese identity as well as ‘preserve traditional values’ (see Kennedy & Lee, 2008, p. 56).

Nihonjinron and the Engenderment of Ideologies of Insularity, Purity, and Uniqueness An area of ideological discourse that seeks to capture or represent Japanese culture, character, and society, or simply what it means to be Japanese, has commonly been referred to by scholars and commentators as nihonjinron (principles or tenets of Japaneseness). Nihonjinron is one framework of thinking that keen observers turn to when they need an explanation of why, for example, a line of reasoning like all ‘Japanese should speak Japanese because they are born Japanese’ (McVeigh, 2002, p. 124, italics original)

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is not likely to sound illogical, facile, or reductionist to minds that are inclined (or conditioned) to reason in this way. Similarly, when dilemmas arise as to whether Japanese Americans are ‘Japanese’ (nihonjin) or ‘foreigners’, Self or Other in Japanese society (Yamashiro, 2011; Kawai, 2020), nihonjinron may also be alluded to as a way of showing up the delicately sensitive nature of such dilemmas. Nihonjinron’s lineage and origins as a nationalistic ideology of homogeneity date back to late Tokugawa, the feudal period that ended in 1867, where discussions of Japanese character and self-identity took place through kokugaku or National Learning scholarship (Befu, 2001). In kokugaku, virtues thought to be linked to pure indigenous Japanese culture like yamato-gokoro or the Japanese ethos and mono no aware or melancholic empathy with nature, were lauded (Befu, 2001). Claims were staked at about this time about the superiority of Japanese culture over Chinese culture, while with the recent arrival of ships of formidable Western navies, Japan’s weakness and eventual forced opening from a long period of self-isolation would help define one of its ‘basic modes of identity discourse until the present time’ (Befu, 2001, p. 125). Owing to its particular history, nihonjinron’s tenets are fundamentally and inherently monolingual, monoracial, and monocultural in nature, resorting to primordiality as a basis for affirming essentializing notions of uniqueness and homogeneity (Befu, 2001). A Lack of Awareness or Recognition of Cultural Diversity While policy-makers are conscious of the challenges to policy-making that come with the presence of ‘oldcomer’ populations like the Koreans and the Chinese, and the more recent arrivals from South America, not all Japanese residents are ‘necessarily conscious that there is [in fact] ethnic diversity in their midst’ (Tsuneyoshi, 2011, p.  115). According to Tsuneyoshi (2011), the general tendency among local Japanese residents is to be unaware of the presence of other ethnicities, while matters concerning ethnic diversity itself generally do not ‘reach the level of national attention’ (p. 116). Among the reasons for this lack of awareness are the fact that Chinese and Koreans are visually hard to distinguish in terms of looks and that some have since adopted Japanese names (Tsuneyoshi, 2011). Another possibility is one that suggests that a degree of discrimination (non-admission and denial) may exist due to the fact that cultural nationalism in modern Japan has mostly been ‘directed at China and

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Korea’, a matter that ‘resonates deep within Japan’s historical construction of identity’ (Inoguchi, 2009, p. 343). Remaining vestiges of prejudice against people of Korean descent have carried on from the time when Korea was colonized by Japan and when ethnic Koreans were subsequently denied their Japanese citizenship. This took place after World War II when the San Francisco peace accords were signed between Japan and (principally) the United States (Lee, 2002). Enduring prejudices have made it such that many Korean children have had to be raised as if they were Japanese (Lee, 2002). An interesting piece of irony in this connection is the fact ethnic and cultural diversity were at their zenith when Japan occupied a large stretch of territories in the Asia-Pacific during World War II: the ‘Japan’ of that epoch was ‘probably the most multi-ethnic and multicultural in Japanese history’ (Befu, 2009, p. 24). This fact, however, did not stop Japanese politicians and intellectuals from proclaiming a Japan of homogeneous culture and people. That is, Japanese in the ‘core area’, and their culture, were considered to embody the essence of Japan. (Befu, 2009, p. 24)

As for China and also the West, Befu (2001) notes that nihonjinron, ‘to the extent that it tries to prove Japan’s superiority over the West’, also seeks to ‘demonstrate the superiority of Japanese culture over its referent China’ (p. 125). Much of what must then be a very essentialized form of Japaneseness has thus been constructed by the frequent use of ‘two significant discursive Others: Asia [particularly China and Korea] and the West’ (Kawai, 2020, p. 27). With reference to the West moreover, there remains also a part of history that would call to mind what were once manifestly bitter feelings—the forced opening of the country by Western powers and the subsequent exactions by which were foisted on Japan its lack of autonomy in the setting of tariffs, not to mention the introduction of fairly humiliating extraterritoriality laws (Inoguchi, 2009). Present-Day Concerns Japan’s economic growth in the postwar period was not fueled by immigration, due, according to Goodman et al. (2003), to ambivalent attitudes toward the importation of foreign labor. As for the present-day newcomers who among the Japanese are thought to practice different customs, speak a different language, believe in a different religion, or who are of a

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different skin color, their presence is one that tends to be somewhat more ‘keenly noticed’ (Tsuneyoshi, 2011, p. 116). Aspinall (2011) captures in his description of the employment of non-Japanese English teachers in Japanese schools the general aversion to having too many foreigners around as causes of ‘disruption’ (p. 134). The education ministry’s priority over readily welcoming native English-speaking teachers to Japanese school campuses was ‘to avoid the disruption in schools it believed would follow from a sudden influx of a large number of foreigners’ (Aspinall, 2011, p. 134). In such instances, nationality and ethnicity related issues often demonstrate how the ‘bifurcated social classifications’ of ‘Japanese’ and ‘foreigner’ are ‘assumed to be mutually exclusive and diametrically opposed’ (Yamashiro, 2011, p.  1503). Such issues may also become a topic for debate where both ‘pro and anti opinions surface’ (Tsuneyoshi, 2011, p. 116).

Nihonjinron as Civil Religion According to Befu (2001), nihonjinron in Japan may function in the role or even hold the status of a civil religion, a situation where a political entity, in this case, a state, becomes piously ‘one undivided religious community’ (p. 112). This idea is supported by the observation that ‘no other body of discourse can claim any higher degree of consensus in Japan’ than nihonjinron (p. 118): As an overarching worldview of Japan, nihonjinron has no rival. No other worldview of the Japanese society, culture and nation has a wide enough acceptance to compete successfully … Nihonjinron writers do their best to portray it as if it were the only worldview of the Japanese. (Befu, 2001, p. 118)

Expressing his concerns over the characteristically homogenizing discussions of Japaneseness and Otherness, Befu (2009) cautions that ‘what is Japanese’ is, to be certain, ‘not necessarily what Japan is in an absolute, objective … sense’ (p. 25). He makes it clear that nihonjinron’s ‘conventional understandings of Japanese culture’ (Befu, 2009, p. 25) are replete with essentialisms. Such essentialisms and exceptionalisms are said to cover ‘the whole gamut’: from more extreme forms of belief in unique biological makeup, language and aesthetic qualities, human relations, social organization to extreme attempts at stereotyping personal character traits (Befu, 2009, p. 25).

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As a more extreme example, Ezrati (1999) cites the case of certain views expressed by one of Japan’s more powerful prime ministers, Yasuhiro Nakasone, pointing out at the same time the type of cultural stereotyping that is liable to take place even among people in the higher echelons of society. The prime minister claimed that as Western principles of individualism proceeded from ‘the desert culture’ of the Middle East, individuals adhering to Judeo-Christian beliefs could be likened to ‘hard separate grains of sand’ (Ezrati, 1999, pp.  184–185). The Japanese, in contrast, had come from what he called a rice-eating, rice-planting ‘monsoon culture’ characterized by the tendency for people to ‘stick together like the glutinous rice of which they [were] so fond’ (Ezrati, 1999, p. 185). From the prime minister’s descriptions, it would not be difficult to conclude that notions of obligation and subordination to a larger group carried over even to ‘notions of race’, which for the Japanese held meanings of ‘organismal’ and ‘familiar’ solidarity (p. 185). A Series of Caveats and (Dis-)qualifiers What is also important to mention by way of caveat is the fact that many characteristics attributed to the Japanese being purportedly the way they are said to be can actually be traced either to recent events in history or to certain very situated or particularized ideological practices that can, ultimately, be linked to business or money-making agendas. In other words, what nihonjinron claims as innate or ‘cultural’ or ahistorical, while far from being so, can actually be accounted for by very explainable historical accountings or earthy banalities. One is reminded by two long time scholars of social identity construction of its very fluid and historical nature: Identity is a term that tends to carry a burden of hard reality, something like a rock, a forest, an entity. Being true to this identity, being true to oneself, is often thought to be a virtue. Yet, from the narrative point of view, identities have histories. (Connelly & Clandinin, 1999, pp. 94–95)

In the case of postwar Japan, history unfolded in the following manner. At the cessation of hostilities that marked the end of World War II, defeated Japan was occupied by the Allied forces led in person by General Douglas MacArthur, the Supreme Commander for the Allied Forces (SCAP). The Allied occupiers came with the expressed aim to neutralize the power of

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Japan’s powerful prewar rulers and elite groups that comprised the wizened industrialists, sworn militarists, and monied landowners (Dower, 2010). In seeking to ‘demilitarize and democratize’ Japan and to reinvent it as a ‘peaceful and reasonably democratic nation’, SCAP saw the need for the victorious forces ‘to be completely free to promote a root-and-branch agenda of reform without any restrictions once hostilities ended’ (Dower, 2010, p. 236). This lofty aim was somewhat complicated by a very real fear on the part of the Americans that the ‘ordinary Japanese were inherently incapable of governing themselves’ and Japan was therefore vulnerable to falling either ‘into chaos or communism’ (Dower, 2010, p. 235). With the advent of and soon to be intensified Cold War, the Americans, in the person and position of SCAP, would soon ‘back away from [their] initial agenda’ to see Japan demilitarized and democratized (p. 240). This turnaround from democratic ideals that the Japanese at all levels of society had shown sufficient receptivity to took place in 1948 alongside ‘the rise of anti-Communism in the United States, and a conservative backlash in Japan’ (Christensen, 2000, p.  132). While the occupation’s anti-­ Communist stance was ‘applauded by the conservative elite in Japan’s government and big business’ (Christensen, 2000, p.  133), ‘reformist policies were [being] rolled back’ accordingly (Dower, 2010, p. 240). A policy of reconstruction quickly took the place of democratization, meaning that by 1952 when the Allied occupation came to an end, the political economy was once again ‘largely dominated by conservative old-guard civilians’ (p. 240) and Japan was already well on its way to being rearmed. What had happened was that the Americans, ‘[d]riven by Cold War considerations’ took to aligning themselves ‘more and more openly with the conservative and even right-wing elements in Japanese society, including individuals who had been closely identified with the lost war’ (Dower, 1999, p. 525). As charges against those who were arrested for war crimes were quickly dropped, the economy itself was ‘turned back over to big capitalists and state bureaucrats’ (p. 525). Just as the Japanese Emperor was ultimately ‘absolved of wrongdoing or war responsibility’, the alleged war criminals were ‘implicitly forgiven’, and as Dower (1999) would point out, by those ‘who had not felt the impact of their acts – for whatever they might have done in the cauldron of war’ (p. 518). Another piece of irony was that the Cold War itself was supposed to have begun much earlier than in the late 1940s or early 1950s as Dower (2010) argues too that the haste to drop the two atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki was actually part of a less-known plan to use them as ‘a form of diplomatic intimidation

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vis-à-vis the Russians’ (p. 244), as if they were ‘the first major operation’ of the Cold War (p. 243). What Can Be Learnt from the Allied Turnaround The lesson to be learnt from this account is that modern-day conservative Japan and present-day myths affirming nihonjinron truths (oxymoronic as it may sound) may not be as culturally primordial in nature (Befu, 2001) as might be propounded or made to be believed. SCAP’s turnaround meant that conservative politicians who were initially ‘purged for supporting the war machine’ were duly rehabilitated at about the same time as the war crimes trials held for their counterparts and cronies were abandoned (Dower, 2010, p.  240). Indeed, the ugly side of ensuing Japanese economic development including long working hours and death from overwork, while sometimes attributed to ‘loyalty’ and the Japanese penchant for self-sacrificial hard work may also be traced back to the severe weakening of the labor movement during the time when SCAP adopted its turnaround in policy (Sugimoto, 2010; Dower, 2010). The present-day ‘docility of Japan’s labor unions, which often put corporate business imperatives ahead of workers’ rights’ would not be entirely isolable from events that unfolded during the postwar occupation (Sugimoto, 2010, p. 115).The endurance of conservative Japan and the frameworks of Japaneseness that it preserves and epitomizes, may in fact be an artifact of SCAP’s policy changes, or ‘the folly of a naïve interlude’ (p. 240) on the part of Japan’s Allied occupiers. Similarly, certain aspects of the US-Japan alliance that was in fact ‘the sheet anchor of Japan’s security for half a century’ after World War II (Miller, 2006, p. 34) actually played into the hands of a ‘pacifist-isolationist creed’ that not only allowed Japan to remain averse to military force, but also to indulge in a form of cultural ‘exceptionalism’ that bolstered her ‘sense of being a nation apart’, following ‘a different star than others’ (Miller, 2006, p. 35). Such exceptionalism suggests that history, ‘denied as such’, can be ‘turned into nature’, words that Bourdieu (1977, p. 78) uses in his observant description of the habitus. The habitus, with its ‘endless capacity to engender … thoughts, perceptions, expressions, actions’ (p. 95), then becomes a matter of ‘coherence and necessity’ fashioned out of ‘accident and contingency’ (p. 87). Herein, Japanese exceptionalism and uniqueness are not as ‘cultural’ as might be thought, in the sense that they were only made possible because of Japan’s close security cooperation with the United States,

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which allowed Japan the free hand (ride) to keep to itself while it sought ambitiously to become an economic superpower (Miller, 2006). Closer to the present, the economic crisis of the 1970s beginning with the oil shock of 1973 was responsible for bringing about certain ‘economic imperatives’ that ultimately ‘overshadowed the cultural rhetoric of [Japanese] companies as families’ (Sugimoto, 2010, p. 121). With the loss of the lifetime employment system, employees being made redundant ‘or simply fired’, the ‘alleged Japanese culture of group harmony’ became one of ‘little substance’ (p. 121). Politeness as It Is Treated as a Commodifiable and Monetizable Item In the same vein (or irony) of things, it has been cogently argued that the branding of politeness that the Japanese are supposed to be known for, or the idea of courtesy and civility as the sine qua non of Japaneseness, may in fact be only an obligatory by-product of business interactions involving Japanese businessmen and their esteemed clients, interactions that are also mediated by exchanges of goods, services, and money. Far from being about an internalized (and very much externalized) attribute of an innately occurring form of heartiness or amenableness, McVeigh (2002) traces Japanese forms of politeness and displays of pleasantry to the particularities of Japanese nation-statism, nationalism as well as capitalism. Japanese civility, as McVeigh (2002) argues, has to do with it being a lubricant for business deals. Beyond playing a big part in business dealings, politeness and civility are said to be even more far-reaching in their roles and influence, being ‘heavily promoted within diverse social arenas’ driven by ‘politico-economic motivations’ (McVeigh, 2002, p. 122). Kawai (2020) notes that Japanese neoliberal nationalism is exemplified in the way political motivations are almost never independent of economic ones. Formal exchanges of gifts, according to Sugimoto (2010), is a good example. While being commodified and monetized in this fashion, civility also serves as a way of having the Japanese identify (or portray) themselves as being part of a decent, honorable, modern, forward-­looking, and outward-looking nation-state. Elsewhere, I have argued that the outward nature of such forms of politeness may ultimately suggest a form of complaisance that places great importance on a means of conformity that plays to externalized images of regularity (Toh, 2021). The engenderment of such externalized forms of behavior begins at an early age. Japanese

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schoolchildren are taught the way to bow respectfully as well as to stand, sit, and walk correctly (Sugimoto, 2010). As young adults, the companies that employ them will teach them the right way of greeting and ingratiating themselves to customers, deferring or subordinating themselves to superiors, and exchanging name cards. With this type of repeated training, many Japanese acquire a disposition to attend to details. In controlled situations, they tend to give heed to such matters as how to wrap gifts, how to present meals, and how to blow their noses. (Sugimoto, 2010, p. 300)

If nihonjinron qualifies as a civil religion, civility as it is practiced in all its exquisiteness (or contrivance) would certainly be one of its more frequently observed rituals or well-rehearsed sacraments.

Subtle and Surreptitious Forms of Policing and Regulation What may by far be the most convincing kind of evidence that nihonjinron’s characterizations of Japaneseness are reductionist generalizations is the fact that Japanese society actually relies on a plethora of regulatory mechanisms that work to ensure individual compliance and conformity, values that are held as important for the maintenance of a semblance of societal harmony. Forms of social control in Japanese society are characteristically subtle rather than blatant or forceful, seeming as if the superintendents of power prefer not to appear to be outrightly oppressive in their behavior. According to Sugimoto (2010), these forms of social policing (see Chap. 6 for discussion on the panopticon and on policing in another context) can be captured in the use of the term, ‘friendly authoritarianism’ (p. 290), a manner of social control that makes it seem as if the tendency toward uniform group behaviors is one that is both totally unforced and hence innately natural to the Japanese. The truth of course is that various forms of regimentation exist in ways that help to reify characteristics of Japaneseness espoused as tenets of nihonjinron (Sugimoto, 2010). Such reification is achieved in such a way that both these tenets and the regimental strategies that help to legitimate them are able to converge as one to objectify a naturalized form of Japaneseness that can be packaged for purposes of social control in different contexts.

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With relevance to capitalist modes and means of production, friendly authoritarianism can take place by means of mutual surveillance taking place within small groups that are ‘often pitted against each other’, while each group exacts from its own members ‘maximum compliance with … dominant norms’ (Sugimoto, 2010, p.  292). The total quality control movement or TQC is an example of ‘human control through mutual surveillance’ to which has been attributed Japan’s economic success (p. 292). The basic unit of the quality control or QC movement is a gathering of ten or more members, which forms a group or circle (Sugimoto, 2010). Readers are told that the primary objective of QC circles is work and product improvement even though there is also a centripetal element of worker loyalty that is promoted subtly through voluntary aspects of devotion and self-control rather than through outright coercion (Sugimoto, 2010). Devolution into small groups is used as a way of discouraging deviant behavior and free individual action through unspoken forms of intra-­ group competition and monitoring among members. At the same time, these QC circles help to propagate an ‘ideology of equality’ as well as ‘the notion of a unique national homogeneity’ (p.  291). Within such an arrangement, psychological compliance as a powerful tool of self-­ regulation in the workplace is exacted through the idea of seken, which works like an imagined community ‘that has the normative power of approving or disapproving’ (p. 301) individual behavior, through ‘socially constructed images of a community that exercises sanctions against acts of deviance’ (p. 300). According to Makino (2002), seken is related to the suppression of egos and the ‘hyper-social sensitivity of many Japanese’ that they are being watched or judged by others, and the resultant need for ‘the keeping-up of appearances’ (p. 38). The outcome is a semblance of order and harmony, where undercurrents of rivalry and jealousy are kept hidden behind a façade that portrays congeniality, cordiality, and productiveness (Sugimoto, 2010) as norms of Japaneseness. Here again, the collocation of Japaneseness and capitalist production are taken for granted as if they are meant naturally or cozily to coexist in collusion. Ironically, QC circles have been one aspect of Japanese work culture (or ‘ethic’) that both the Singapore government as well as Singaporean companies have been very keen to learn about (Thang & Gan, 2003), as a Japanese formula or secret for sustained economic success. Singapore’s ‘learn from Japan’ drive saw the newly independent country seeking eagerly to understand Japanese-style management systems and techniques in its determined bid to grow its fledgling economy (Thang & Gan, 2003).

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Considering their eagerness to learn from a more experienced partner, the Singaporean side would have given allowance to the fact that QC circles were in fact tied in their origin to regimes of self-monitoring and social control—a concern that probably did not matter much to the Japanese side when it came to repackaging the QC framework for their overseas clients. The Singaporeans, keen as they were to grow as phenomenally as their Japanese mentors, would have seen in the QC framework clear benefits for their drive toward greater quality and productivity. Transplanted in this manner to an overseas situation, it was perhaps the notion of ‘quality’ in the ‘Q’ that would have made the framework that popular among the Singaporeans, probably more than the ‘controlling’ aspect that the ‘C’ stood for. The notion of a super-efficient Japan with a naturally excellent work ethic was, of necessity, one that also attested to Japan’s widely reputed penchant for fineness in export packaging. Policing Gray Areas Through Applications of Situational Ethics The use of milder or more subtle regulatory tactics is of course not a matter of accident. Sugimoto (2010) puts on record that more draconian forms of control are equally possible in situations where the friendlier elements of control need to be abandoned. While Japanese organizations are organized on principles that accord importance to democratic principles, there remains a lingering suspicion that ‘the Japanese system [itself] is arranged to downplay the human rights’ that are fundamental to democracy (Sugimoto, 2010, p. 292). In any case, the subtler forms of discipline which, as noted, are not by any means accidental, serve another important purpose. They are put in place to allow the powers that be the ‘use of ambiguities to their advantage’ such that ‘arrangements couched in vague terms [can] allow power-holders to reinterpret them as the occasion requires’ (p. 291). Opportunities to strategically reinterpret prior arrangements make for a situationally based ethics where morality is allowed to not be taken absolutely but to be dependent on what appears publicly acceptable at any preferred moment (Makino, 2002). Morality in this case possesses a degree of ductility and manipulability that allows it to be applied across a range of situations, depending on what appears to be fairly palatable or acceptable in public (the soto or omote aspects of a person or matter) and yet situationally expedient or surreptitiously advantageous behind the scenes (the uchi or ura aspects of a person or matter) (Makino, 2002; Sugimoto, 2010). Sugimoto (2010) reveals that in a culture that

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discourages ‘transparent and forthright interactions between individuals’, behavioral ‘double codes’ (p. 32) allow people to not only be vague, indirect, and ambiguous in their expression, but also to have in their repertoire two sets of equally acceptable behavioral codes. One set of behaviors pertains to the construction or portrayal of an external front that is acceptable and palatable publicly, regardless whether it is genuine or not genuine. This set of behaviors finds expression in terms that recognize the soto (external face) or omote (surface) dimensions that are maintained through efforts at tatemae (erecting or contriving a front). Another set of behaviors pertains to an actual or truly felt inner reality that at most times needs to be dissembled or hidden away from public attention. This is the uchi (self-oriented or self-referencing) or ura (inner) conscious dimension that constitutes the honne (or true feelings) that often cannot be expressed openly (Makino, 2002; Sugimoto, 2010). Christensen (2000) provides a clear illustration of tatemae and honne behavior in the relationship between Japan’s ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) and the opposition parties. The LDP’s power and incumbency has meant that opposition parties have had to enter into political compromises with it in order to gain certain amounts of influence (Christensen, 2000). Such forms of cooperation and compromise are ‘influenced by Japanese cultural notions of what is acceptable’, which is a style of compromising that maintains ‘all the trappings of confrontation’ (p. 129). Christensen (2000) argues that the cultural aspect of such compromise lies in ‘the extreme degree to which the hypocrisy of the situation is tolerated’ (p. 129). Here, tatemae is not simply ‘a façade or a lie’ but ‘an accepted framework or principles under which [the] system operates’ (p.  129). Indeed, the question of the ‘believability of … tatemae’ is actually not as important as its acceptance ‘as a framework for action’, as the Japanese are said to ‘have a greater tolerance for a tatemae-­ like deviation from reality’ (p. 130) as long as it is a deviation that is based on a prearranged set of operating principles. Rather importantly too, Befu (1984) notes that an appreciation for and a sensitivity toward tatemae can in fact be regarded as a mark of a person’s social cultivation or sophistication. Reinterpreting and Rebottling Reality Such frameworks of morality and behavior provide the leeway needed for what may apparently be overwork and overlearning (long hours of schooling and after-school cram tutoring) to be ingeniously reinterpreted as a

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much-valued form of diligence. In this way, what may in fact be experienced as repetitive or laborious study can be rebottled as a challenge or opportunity to demonstrate one’s appetite or capacity for hard work (see Chap. 5). Gray areas that are left wide open for interpretation, reinterpretation, or misinterpretation may also be opportunities for forms of oppressiveness in educational contexts to be passed off as ways of inculcating qualities such as diligence, obedience, conformity, and fortitude from a young and impressionable age. Resultant discrepancies between deceptive appearances and harsh reality are meanwhile viewed tolerantly by virtue of the influence of unwritten rules that the Japanese are supposed to accept tacitly and understand intuitively (Befu, 1984). In this sense, schooling and after-school tutoring may potentially be allowed to operate as useful tools of opportunism, especially if such opportunism happens to coincide with unwritten agendas that promote the virtues and merits of nihonjinron.

Schooling as a Site for Essentialization of Identity, Japaneseness, and Otherness Japanese culture as it is rendered and reified through Japanese schooling is notably homogenizing and convergent in nature, ‘biased in favour of central Japan – a region from Kansai (Kyoto-Osaka) to Kanto (Tokyo)’ (Befu, 2009, p. 22). In terms of language and cultural histories at least, Japanese children all across Japan are encultured into the norms and narratives of central Japan even though clear variations in Hokkaido in the north and Okinawa in the south would render such centralizing narratives clearly inconsistent with the real-life experiences of children in these regional margins (Befu, 2009). Japanese cultural narratives are dominantly predisposed to ‘evok[ing] a country of four seasons: spring with cherry blossoms, a summer of sweltering heat, autumn with beautiful foliage colours and a bitterly cold winter’, but such evocations are only true from the vantage point of central Japan (Befu, 2009, p.  22). Schoolchildren in Okinawa are nevertheless found memorizing ‘what they do not experience as prescribed in textbooks: namely that cherry blossoms are viewed in March-April’ (p. 22). In subtropical Okinawa, cherry trees are seen in full blossom as early as January while central Japan is still experiencing wintry weather. In terms of language standardization, ‘standard’ Japanese is said to resemble the Tokyo dialect more than the dialects of any other region, and

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since the establishment of the Meiji government in 1868, it has been used by the state to define ‘“proper” Japaneseness’ (Befu, 2009, p. 23). While schoolchildren are thus expected to learn and speak ‘standard’ Japanese rather than the dialects commonly used at home, Ainu and Okinawan children are ‘prohibited from using their native tongues, which are totally different languages from Japanese’ (p. 23). Where nihonjinron’s group-oriented ideologies impinge on school culture, the idea of ‘equality’ is liable to be interpreted reductively as the need to treat everyone in the same manner, and where having students engage cooperatively in activities is very much valued (Tsuneyoshi, 2011). In such an ethos that brings to bear what Tsuneyoshi (2011) calls ‘collective communalism’ (p. 114), Japanese teachers themselves are said to find it difficult to adapt to newcomers from outside the local community, for example, families with children from South America, mostly new arrivals who have come to Japan because of foreign labor shortfalls. Such teachers find it a challenge to ‘justify differential treatment of the newcomer children’ and are often caught between the special (but no less real) needs of these children and the pressure from Japanese school culture ‘not to treat newcomers differently’ taken to the extreme (Tsuneyoshi, 2011, p.  114). Tsuneyoshi (2011) describes the situation in schools with many newcomer children as one in which ‘every day is a lesson in the coexistence of cultures’, especially for Japanese residents (p. 114). Befu (2009) points out that it was during the time when imperial Japan either colonized or occupied distant territories and archipelagoes that the nation was the most diverse, even though, as seen earlier, it was not the many ethnic and racial groups that were thought to be the embodiment of Japan. People in the outer territories, be they in the Korean peninsula or maritime Southeast Asia, were considered ‘second-class Japanese at best’ (p.  24). Nearer the present, Yamashiro (2011, p.  1511) relates how Japanese Americans are a ‘conceptual dilemma’ in Japan, often ‘mistaken for people from other parts of Asia’ once their lack of familiarity with Japanese language and culture is discovered. Questions like ‘Are you Chinese? Korean? Filipino?’ (Yamashiro, 2011, p. 1512) not only demonstrate the ‘hierarchical treatment of foreigners’ (p. 1511) but also the difficulty that Japanese society faces in placing Japanese Americans, who look Japanese but have not been schooled to meet society’s expectations of Japaneseness.

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Inculcating Rules of Polite Behavior in School Schools are regarded as an important site for the inculcation of manners as a regime of morality, and for promoting a ‘morality of manners’ (McVeigh, 2002, p. 127). Good manners are regarded as a sign of moral behavior and to this end, a great amount of time and effort is dedicated in helping young people internalize externalized forms of civility as a sign of moral temperance. McVeigh (2002) relates the instance of how an internal document on good manners was compiled for teachers in a middle school in Japan. This document reveals that good-mannered behavior encompasses a student’s posture, attitude, gaze, demeanor, dressing, and facial expression as well as appropriate speed (pace) of speech. Students are also taught the right ways of bowing, sitting, standing up from a sitting position as well as masculine and feminine gendered ways of moving and behaving (McVeigh, 2002). When meeting people, students are taught the use of honorific language and other important details that must be followed meticulously. Under “How to Use Honorific Language,” students are warned “not to mix up” exalting language (sonkeigo) with humble language (kenjogo). Under “Manners at School,” students are reminded that “When you wear your clothes neatly, you feel steady and give a good feeling to those you meet” and that good manners give “a delightful feeling to those around one.” They are also told to carry their book bags in their left hand and umbrella in the right (which should not be “pointed at people”). (McVeigh, 2002, p. 128)

Other directions like how to receive, welcome, and see off a guest or how to answer the telephone are also provided in detail, in earnest anticipation of a time when these students will join the workforce, making for what McVeigh (2002) describes as ‘a wall of dense ritual’ that exists in Japanese society. What seems to be preferred by way of this sort of moral disciplining of young people in civil behavior is not individuality and independent thinking by any means, but a modality of standardized ways of thinking and speaking that can in turn be superimposed on a sequenced choreography of contrived robotic externalized behaviors. Superficial renditions of a conformist demeanor are treated as a mark of integrity and fine temperament. Although children in such instances are allowed to be seen and heard, the manner in which they are seen and heard is also considered to be an area where adult intervention and careful management are needed.

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Regulation and Monitoring of Textbook Content by the Education Ministry Fears of the gradual resurgence of neo-conservatism in education and the fact that it may lead ‘inexorably to a more nationalistic education system’ or one that would be ‘reminiscent of the pre-war and war-time periods’ have led to revived debates around the content of Japanese history textbooks (Rose, 2006, p. 131). The move to cultivate ‘love for the country’ (Saito, 2017, p. 112) and to restore elements of ‘patriotic education’ on the part of the government has led to what Rose (2006) describes as a tightening up of the curriculum, and in particular the processes involved in the screening of textbooks. At stake in the heated debates on textbook content (of the 1950s, 1980s and 1990s) is the question of how both the nation and its history can be represented and taught to Japanese children, bearing in mind the fact that since the 1980s, increased emphases have been placed by the education ministry on ‘inculcating Japanese children with a greater sense of patriotism and self-awareness of their “Japanese-­ ness”’ (Rose, 2006, p.  134). Tensions that have arisen in view of this particular aim have in the main been over textbook screening controversies: In the area of textbook screening, passages referring to the acts of the Japanese Forces during the Asia-Pacific War became points of contention between the generally progressive textbook authors on the one hand and, on the other, the Ministry of Education … and its conservative, for the most part imperialist and right-wing nationalist, textbook examiners. (Nozaki, 2008, p. 72)

Also, rather tellingly, this emphasis on engendering greater awareness of Japaneseness among Japanese children is discussed in relation to the expressed aim of helping a future generation of Japanese to ‘function well in international society’ (Rose, 2006, p. 134). Ambivalent Responses to Internationalization on the Part of Policy-Makers Statements or pronouncements of this rather paradoxical or inverted nature suggest the influence of two underlying assumptions. The first is that internationalization may be a cause of the erosion of Japanese values (see Kubota, 2002; Ben-Ari, 2006; Aspinall, 2011) and the second is that

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the only way to be successful internationally is to be somehow anchored in a conservatively grounded understanding of Japaneseness including the love for one’s country (see Aspinall, 2011). Found embedded within such kinds of assumptions is an inescapably ‘unproblematic notion of the distinctiveness of societies, nations and cultures’, in turn reductively ‘predicated on the power of the nation-state as an entity with clear social and cultural boundaries’ (Ben-Ari, 2006, p. 237). Kubota (2002) observes in this regard that it is difficult for discussions about internationalization in Japan to be able to break free from nationalistic preoccupations, especially since internationalization of a sense particular to nihonjinron influences is one that is imbued with convergent rather than divergent values. Kubota (2002) illustrates this paradox in her description of the way in which the teaching English as an international language to Japanese students can often be infused (confused or conflated) with the expressed purpose that English is to be learnt for purposes of using it to explain Japanese culture to international audiences and for the rest of the world to better understand Japanese ways of doing things (see Toh, 2021, for a storied account of such behavior on the part of a Japanese English teacher in Singapore). According to Ben-Ari (2006), when Japanese expatriate managers in Singapore discuss internationalization, such discussions are invariably predicated on Japan and Japanese culture as points of reference. Among these discussants, there can as such be no other way of understanding internationalization unless it is one that is Japan-centered. Living or going overseas is for these people ‘not so much a process of going “international” as it is one of “going national”’ (Ben-Ari, 2006, p.  237). Such paradoxical forms of reasoning are not different from the sort of ambivalence described in Saito (2017) where initiatives to promote cosmopolitanism among Japanese young people are always to be balanced with (perhaps hamstrung by) arguments that Japanese young people need to be anchored in a version of history that would make them proud of their nation and culture. Such forms of equivocation can be seen to extend upward to the country’s top administrators and thinkers: [t]he nationalism of Japan’s ruling elites in the political world, bureaucracy and business [has] caused the dominant response to the challenges of globalization to be one of defending national identity rather … then embracing cosmopolitanism. (Aspinall, 2011, p. 137)

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Additionally, what comes across as being quite clear in such debates is the acceptance of static understandings of Japanese identity and monolithic understandings of Japaneseness, yet again evincing the influence of nihonjinron ideology. Basing their arguments on such static and monolithic understandings of identity, conservative thinkers have been seen to express their concern that a new generation of Japanese young people should be taught a history that would engender pride and confidence in themselves as Japanese (Saito, 2017). In curricular terms, this would mean learning about ‘the heroes and heroines of Japanese history’ and to be given a chance to engage with what might be subtly or not so subtly impressed upon them as a form of ‘healthy nationalism’ (Rose, 2006, p. 138). Effects on Attitudes Towards Children Returning to Japan from Overseas A matter of concern that is relevant to the present discussion is the problem of adaptation and acceptance faced by returnee children whose parents have been sent overseas for work. Aspinall (2011) notes that these children are subject to extreme pressures to readapt and conform to homeland norms. Their experience gained overseas is generally not valued, to the extent that some returnee children are obliged to hide, for example, their English ability. Children returning to Japan with a good command of English may find themselves having to disguise their language ability through ‘faking a strong Japanese accent in order not to stand out’ from those around them who do not share their overseas experience and language exposure (Aspinall, 2011, p. 138). While the view of powerful nationalist elements is that ‘impressionable young minds’ need to come under ‘the protection of the mother country’, the resultant conundrum for educators is the need to put in place ‘mechanisms whereby Japanese students can become good at English’ and yet remain ‘“immune” to deeper cultural contagion’ (Aspinall, 2011, p. 138). The felt need by policy-makers for returnee children to quickly readapt to homeland ways as a type of ‘immune response’ (Aspinall, 2011, p. 137) has meant too that these children are deemed to be in need of a sort of ‘special attention’ that can only be provided by ‘special schools known as ukeireko (reception schools)’ (Aspinall, 2011, p. 138). Seen by critics as ‘de-contamination chambers’, the idea of having these schools was that of not allowing returnee children ‘to contaminate other children with

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foreign habits and ideas’ (Aspinall, 2011, p. 138). The education ministry, according to Hashimoto (2013) is noticeably selective in the manner in which returnee children are characterized. An old fashioned term is used when such children are referred to: the ‘combination of the two characters ‘child’ and ‘woman’ means ‘son and daughter’ in old Japanese, but for some reason the term is still used in current policy documents’ (Hashimoto, 2013, p. 22). The use of such an outdated label betrays the fact that more up-to-date understandings of the experiences and identities of these children have not been explored or, as Hashimoto (2013) notes, are not ‘properly recognized or valued’ (p. 22). What seems to be selectively highlighted for notice are the negative aspects of their having lived their lives overseas and their (presumed) lack of knowledge of Japanese renders them liable to be spoken about as if they were ‘the same … as foreign children’ (p. 22). Moreover, no priority is given to the enhancement of the bilingual abilities that many of these children may already possess, while their ‘foreign language skills are not even mentioned’ in the ministry’s documented releases (Hashimoto, 2013, p.  23). In sum, these children’s identified characteristics ‘are assumed to be a product of the fact that they have lived overseas, and not a result of their innate capabilities’ (Hashimoto, 2013, p. 23). Here again, it can be observed that matters that concern internationalization are discussed in tandem with (and in the narrow terms of) their possible erosive effects on nationalism and the protection of Japanese culture and identity. According to Hashimoto (2013), bilingualism as well as other forms of hybridity are rejected in Japanese society. It is not a little ironical that such pressures that are put on returnee children find their parallels in the adult world of work. Ben-Ari (2006) notes that one reason for Japanese business executives to be stationed overseas for only short three- to five-year terms is the fear that some of them may become ‘too localized’ (p. 229) if they were to be away from Japan for too long a time. Over the course of an overseas posting, Japanese executives are called home for periods of reeducation as ‘international business is perceived to pose certain threats to one’s “Japaneseness”’ (Ben-Ari, 2006, p. 230), which leads to the belief that adult employees returning home after an overseas posting are normally in need of being put through a period of cultural rehabilitation. Such rehabilitation is deemed to be necessary in case their thinking and reasoning may have changed or become deviated from the ‘normal people that work in the main office in Japan’ (Ben-Ari, 2006, p. 230). In other words, it is not only the children who have to undergo culturing training and

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refamiliarization with the homeland; their fathers too are thought similarly to be in need of the same treatment.

Consequences of Inclusion and Exclusion for the Adult World of (Over)Work and Ostracism Evident from the above discussion is the fact that both perception and policy-making on the part of the Japanese education ministry demonstrate (betray) a general tendency toward supporting or advancing conservative or nationalistic causes. The ministry’s expressed support has been for a greater emphasis to be placed on the fulfillment of ‘social and national responsibilities’ over ‘guarantees of individual rights’ as an important pillar of Japanese education (Ezrati, 1999, p. 184). Issues arising from obligations toward fulfilling group responsibilities, which can also be played out as matters of inclusion and exclusion, similarity and difference, or acceptance and rejection, are ultimately liable to exact their social costs or result in ramifying social consequences, at different times. As emphases on the ‘cultural reverence for the group’ continues to ‘remain a staple of the public postures of politicians, bureaucrats, and most social commentators’ (Ezrati, 1999, p.  184), concerns have been raised over the unmitigated commitment of some Japanese workers to group ethic. Among dangers that come with over subordination to a corporate cause, unmitigated groupism has for example given rise to cases of death from overwork or karoshi (Sugimoto, 2010). On the surface, Sugimoto (2010) notes that Japanese-style management ‘has greatly contributed to the omote dynamism and achievements’ of Japanese institutions and the Japanese economy (p. 111). Success, however, has come with ‘a number of social costs on the ura side’, with such costs ‘impinging not only on individual rights but also the health of many workers’ (Sugimoto, 2010, p. 111). Moreover, a recent but unsurprising variant of difficulties with accepting difference came in the form of a spate of bullying and ostracism incidents when the spread of the corona virus reached one of its several peaks in mid-2020. Patients who were infected with the corona virus as well as medical workers and members of their families encountered experiences of being shunned by society. People working in grocery stores and in parcel delivery jobs were subject to the same sorts of discrimination as they too were linked indirectly with the spread of the virus. Yamaguchi (2020)

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notes that these types of behaviors are linked to notions of purity and cleanliness, supposedly part of a culture that rejects things that are deemed to be foreign, alien, unclean, inconvenient, or troublesome. Such forms of prejudice are in turn thought to be traceable to feudal times when leather tanners and butchers were shunned because of the supposedly unclean nature of their work. Even in recent history, according to Yamaguchi (2020), nuclear bomb victims and those who had moved away from areas affected by the tsunami and subsequent nuclear meltdown in 2011 were subject to similar forms of prejudice and ostracism. With reference to earlier discussion about friendly authoritarianism and such a way of keeping workers in line through mutual surveillance within small groups (Sugimoto, 2010), work-from-home arrangements as a consequence of the pandemic also gave rise to new if even more intrusive forms of monitoring. As workers and other team members were away from the watchful eye of each other, it became not so unimaginable for supervisors to make it a habit of sending messages through mobile phone applications to regularly check on what people under their charge were doing at any moment of the day (see Bizspa, 2020, for example). This matter came up for notice as some workers who were constantly bombarded with messages from their supervisors voiced their objection to being contacted multiple times a day, as it affected their ability to concentrate. It will be seen in Chap. 4 that Japanese group behaviors are capable of taking on an ideological dimension as a hidden form or tool of capitalistic production and investment. Like the way politeness and civility can be shrewdly or cynically monetized as a ‘social lubricant’ for ‘the machinery of capitalism (McVeigh, 2002, p. 122; also discussed earlier in this chapter), Japanese group behavior assumes a key role in the cultural dynamics and politics of Japanese capitalism, especially as it is played out in a non-­ Japanese overseas location like Singapore, where reasons for the Japanese presence are overwhelmingly to do with trade and big business procurements.

Nihonjinron in Broader Perspective Despite nihonjinron’s claims (or pretentions) to being a discourse of uniqueness, its tactics, practices, and strategies can actually be put in perspective if the following observations in Bourdieu (1977) reveal its commonalities with other generative schemes of social regulation and societal regularization. Resonating Bourdieu or to use his very words,

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nihonjinron’s ‘generation and structuring of practices and representations’ to perpetuate mythologies of Japaneseness are duly rendered in ‘objectively “regulated” and “regular”’ terms without them being strictly or in any way ‘the product of obedience to rules’ (Bourdieu, 1977, p. 72; see earlier discussion on seken and social control). As will be seen in the way Japanese white-collar expatriate families subscribe to cram tutoring routines for their children (Chaps. 5 and 6), both the constitutive structures and ‘the material conditions of existence characteristic of a class condition’ collude to produce habitus systems that are both dispositions as well as ‘structured structures’ (Bourdieu, 1977, p. 72), which work in this case to reproduce Japaneseness. Attesting to how the inner workings of nihonjinron ideas are conveyable in Bourdieuan language, its ‘objective homogenizing of group … habitus’ resulting from blatant reifications of the ‘homogeneity of the conditions of existence’ is precisely what ‘enables practices to be objectively harmonized [often] without any intentional calculation’ (Bourdieu, 1977, p.  81, italics added). It will be seen in Chap. 5 how Bourdieu’s understandings of the homogenization of group habitus can shed light on why Japanese families are especially vulnerable not only to the advertising practices of cram school establishments but also the way their cramming practices play to parents’ predisposed expectations of what high pressure exam preparation should look like. Rudolph’s (2020) description of the employment and deployment policies of an English department in a Japanese university echoes Bourdieu’s (1977) observation of how certain ‘structured structures’ are ‘predisposed to function as structuring structures’ (p. 72), once again in the interests of reinforcing particularized constructions of Japaneseness. The ‘generation and structuring of practices and representations’ (Bourdieu, 1977, p. 72) can be seen in the ways in which the roles and habitus of ‘Japanese’ versus ‘native speakers of English’ are fashioned toward the perpetuation of a status quo of intransigence. What may be noticed, as Rudolph (2020) points out, is how departmental policy negotiations ‘reflect and give shape to the discursive bound of who teachers and students “are/are not”, and “can/cannot”, and/or “should/should not” be or become’ and ‘how notions of Japaneseness and Otherness’ are reified in such negotiations (p. 85). Woven into departmental discussions concerning English native-­ speaker teachers are notions of their foreignness or non-Japaneseness, meaning that a foreign teacher who speaks Japanese fluently may ‘never be assigned any duties, nor afforded any value’ related to their Japanese

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ability (Rudolph, 2020, p. 96). As one such teacher notes, “I spend the majority of my life in Japanese society … Yet, I’m supposed to check my identity and experiences at the departmental door’ (Rudolph, 2020, p.  96). The material realities that contribute to a non-Japanese native-­ speaker of English habitus is seen to be fashioned by departmental policy vis-à-vis the way the teaching of English must be pegged to the maintenance of Japaneseness. One of the department’s expressed goals, according to Rudolph (2020), is to teach ‘idealized “Japaneseness” and “Japanese culture” implicitly and explicitly, through the juxtaposition of “Japan” and the “West”’, the heart of the matter being, according to one Japanese English teacher, that there was actually ‘no way to talk about other things’ without first ‘talking about ‘Us” (p. 94). Speaking in agreement, another department member says that: “the department is not trying to produce an American person who used to be Japanese” but rather that [it reinforces] the notion of distinct, essentialized categories of identity, including Japanese/not Japanese and Japanese/ Western. (Rudolph, 2020, p. 94)

Practically in similar fashion, Stewart and Miyahara (2011) describe the way in which teachers of English in a university well-known for its law faculty are categorized divisively. The taught-in-Japanese reading classes that form two-thirds of the law faculty’s English courses are taught by Japanese teachers. The academic literacy, discussion and presentation classes designed by non-Japanese native-speaking English teachers, which form the other one-third, are taught in English. According to Stewart and Miyahara (2011, p. 67), it is the separation of the taught-in-English and taught-in-Japanese classes that is the ‘most striking feature’ of the English department as ‘the way the curriculum has been divided into two … is surprisingly marked’, with ‘no coordination and little communication … between the two sides’ (p. 67). It is then revealed that this clear line of division was a result of the faculty’s response to calls by the university to ‘internationalize’. Instead of instituting substantive changes across the entire department, the introduction of the taught-in-English courses and the hiring of native-speaker teachers to teach them was precisely a way of avoiding the need for the former. The hiring of the native-speaker teachers was a ‘token gesture of change’ (Stewart & Miyahara, 2011, p. 69), thus allowing the taught-in-Japanese classes to remain untouched by any calls to ‘internationalize’. The conflation of native-speaker of English and

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foreigner habitus in this case results in their marginalization given an institutional culture that remains ‘extremely conservative and resistant to change’ (p. 72). As would thus be evident, the tactics, practices, and cultural strategies inhering and enamoring ideologies of Japaneseness are in fact uncannily reminiscent of Bourdieuan descriptions of the way certain forms of human action may be directed toward cultural reproduction, almost as if nihonjinron is in possession of a Bourdieuan alter ego— however much nihonjinron adherents would subscribe to its claims to Japanese (and its own) uniqueness.

A Well-Told Story on Culture and Identity and Then a Conclusion To help bring together the issues concerning Japaneseness discussed thus far in this chapter, I turn to a particularly well-told story on culture and identity investment written for a children’s publication by a well-known Japanese nonfiction writer, Etsuko Shindo. Very interestingly with respect to the present discussion, the story is not set in Japan, but in the ancient middle eastern city of Istanbul where one of the main characters, Ai Yamano, spends several years of her childhood studying at the Japanese school (Shindo, 2015). This story, as will become apparent, resonates with the ‘adult-world’ concerns raised throughout this chapter as they would in turn relate to young and innocent Japanese children growing up outside of Japan—not to mention the discussions in the coming chapters on those being schooled in an equally foreign situation like Singapore’s. Ai Yamano is the younger child of a Japanese history professor specializing in the history of Islamic architecture. She finds herself in the city of Istanbul because of her father’s work as a visiting researcher. While Ai is happy to be with her father in Turkey, her mother is in Japan because she has to be on hand to help Ai’s elder brother, who is studying hard for his entrance examinations (a matter that foreshadows the discussions in Chap. 5 on the role played by mothers in helping their offspring prepare for important high-pressure entrance examinations). At the nihonjin gakko or Japanese school in Istanbul, Ai has a good friend by the name of Mirai Hasegawa. Like many Japanese growing up outside Japan, Mirai has had a different sort of childhood from Ai. Both of Mirai’s parents are successful

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professionals and global highflyers. Before coming to Istanbul, Mirai spent two years in England and five in the United States, but only two years in Japan. She has more than once said to Ai that her ambition is to be someone local and not someone global, which is opposite to what her parents want for her and for themselves. Her ambition is to go back to Japan and settle quietly into a local lifestyle. Not wanting anymore to do with anything global, finding her roots in Japan has been nothing but a longed-for wish for Mirai. When she returns to Japan, Mirai says that she wants to run a guesthouse that provides bed and breakfast at a reasonable price. Her guesthouse will welcome people, especially returnees to Japan from overseas looking for a friendly place to readjust, resettle, and reacquaint themselves with the country. Whenever Ai hears Mirai speak like this, she is always reminded of a classmate of hers back in Japan. When Yukiko, Ai’s classmate who had grown up in Thailand, came back to Japan, she was fluent in Thai but could hardly write in Japanese. As Ai could remember very well, when the other children found out that Yukiko could hardly write in Japanese, they said to her that she should return to Thailand. At that time, Ai felt very sorry for Yukiko as she was made to feel different by the other children. If ever Mirai started her friendly guesthouse that would welcome returnees, someone like Yukiko would be given a chance to enjoy a much better reception than when she was caught unawares among those unwelcoming children. A Mysterious Note Left in the Istanbul Japanese School Library One day, Ai and Mirai find a mysterious note left in their school library. This note was written by a boy called Hayato. On the note, Hayato posed a question to whoever found the note, asking whether they would like to see a very special type of cat, a Turkish cat with eyes of a different color, called the van cat. The note had this to say: ‘My name is Hayato. I am a student in the supplementary school. Do you know this neko (which means cat)? If you want to know about it, please come to the bottom of the spiral staircase’. After reading Hayato’s note, Ai and Mirai are very excited, and the two girls decide to find out who Hayato is. As was said in the note, Hayato was not a student in the Istanbul Japanese school. He was a student in the Japanese supplementary school, which provided weekend tutoring in the Japanese language to children of Japanese parents who did not know how to speak the language (see Toh,

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2021, for a similar type of weekend cultural school in Singapore). Hayato’s father was Turkish and his mother was Japanese. Educated in a local Turkish school, he was totally fluent in the language, but not in Japanese, which was why he had to go to the supplementary school on Saturdays to brush up on his Japanese. Writing the note was his way of saying that he wanted to make some Japanese friends. In his own school in Istanbul, Hayato was always referred to by the other children as the ‘Japanese’ boy, even though it was apparent that he had never lived for any length of time in Japan and hardly knew enough of the country and language. After reading Hayato’s note, both Ai and Mirai decide to find a way of meeting Hayato. Turning up at the main gate of their school on a Saturday, Ai and Mirai ask around for Hayato. There was already a group of parents waiting for their children to finish their language and cultural lessons at the supplementary school that day. Mirai finds herself speaking to some of the mothers, asking them whether they knew a boy called Hayato. Then she runs into Jason, one of the fathers, whose son Tommy, goes to the same aikido class as Hayato. Ai hears Mirai speaking in perfectly fluent English to Jason, who is from England, and married to Tommy’s mother who is Japanese. Thinking to herself, Ai had once in time seen herself as being particularly good in English, but that was back in Japan, where few children ever spoke any English. Here in Istanbul, the people she hears speaking English are the truly fluent ones, her friend Mirai included. Jason and Tommy kindly offer to help the two girls find Hayato. They go to a place called the Atolye Kedi where Hayato’s Japanese mother teaches painting. Hayato tells the girls that the van cat has not been seen for days and may have been taken away by someone. The three children, while going around to look for the van cat meet a boy by the name of Erkan who is a friend of Hayato. Erkan said that many foreigners were fascinated by Turkish van cats and would like to keep them and the one at the Atolye Kedi may have been taken away by one of these people. After meeting Erkan, the children follow other leads to look for the missing van cat. These leads take them into Istanbul’s old city and past its many exotic shops. After the old city, the children come to the wharf area, intending to take a ferry. There at the wharf, the children again run into Erkan who was with another boy called Abdullah. Abdullah was fishing by the wharf area and told the children that he knew where the Atolye Kedi’s van cat was. He had seen it in the hands of a foreigner who was trying to hail a cab and managed to lure it away by spreading his catch of fish on the pavement. Abdullah said that he had deposited the lost cat with someone he knew,

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and if the children wanted to see the cat, he would show it to them the next morning. The story ends with an illustration of a small boat arriving at the wharf with Abdullah and the much sought-after van cat. Moral of the Story and Its Relevance to Subsequent Discussion The moral of this story is that children, young as they might be, are human beings with feelings, emotions, and aspirations. The lost van cat, special as it was, actually had a name. Hayato revealed its name very early on in his note left in the school library. The cat’s name was ‘Mirai’, namesake of Ai’s faithful friend. Allegorically, readers would be led to identify certain similarities between the lost cat and Mirai’s feelings of lostness that led her to constantly think about wanting to resettle in Japan and live a more rooted localized life. This yearning to return to Japan also brings to light the traumas of having to return to a society that is fundamentally unaccepting of hybridity and difference. These are precisely the same traumas that Yukiko suffered when she was at the receiving end of the bullying that took place because of her lack of knowledge of the Japanese language (see Hashimoto, 2013, for expectations and pressures put on returnees by Japanese society). The fact that the lost cat was one that had different colored eyes speaks clearly of the way hybridity in identities—Hayato, Yukiko, Mirai, Tommy—may be an area of concern that needs to be addressed by people around them, including parents and teachers. However much their parents (and the parents of the children in Chap. 5) may or may not realize that children think, feel, aspire, and have opinions, likes and dislikes, the truth of the matter is that decisions concerning the way children are educated are ones that are made on behalf of thinking and feeling subjects who, not quite so unbelievably, entertain their own dreams, curiosities, and aspirations, whether local or global in trajectory. In the present case, it will be argued that after-school tutoring in Singapore for Japanese children, apart from being both time and energy consuming, may in fact be an undertaking that exerts unduly on these children homogenizing pressures to conform to a certain mold (mode) of being, behaving, learning, and achieving.

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CHAPTER 3

The Japanese in Singapore: A History of Trade with a Habit of Transplantation and Transposition

I begin this chapter with an overview of the history of the Japanese presence in Asia and then in Singapore. In Singapore, the Japanese presence is made visible in the trading firms, big as well as small and medium-sized businesses and industries, cultural organizations as well as the shops, supermarkets, facilities, and amenities serving the needs of Japanese personnel and their families stationed in the city state. The sheer range of businesses and cultural organizations linked to the community’s healthy size of some 30,000 is a reminder of its role and success in contributing to the steady growth of the Singaporean economy. This overview will be followed by a discussion of the system of Japanese schooling and the cram tutoring industry in Singapore. In these discussions, it will become apparent that big business and education exist in a symbiotic relationship that also attests to the contribution of Japan, Inc. (see Reischauer, 1988, p.  334 for an explanation of the origins of the term) to the long-term viability of Japanese business investments and undertakings overseas.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 G. Toh, Cross-border Shadow Education and Critical Pedagogy, Palgrave Studies on Global Policy and Critical Futures in Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-92832-2_3

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Understanding the History of the Japanese Presence in Asia and in Singapore Japan’s presence and involvement in Asia has traced historical changes in policy that have marked Japan’s shifting priorities between focusing on transforming itself ‘into a Western-style nation-state’, on the one hand, and establishing an influence in Asia, especially East and Southeast Asia, on the other hand (Miller, 2006, p. 22). In the feudal Japan of premodern times, power was vested in the hands of military aristocrats or samurai. Miller (2006) notes that the effects of Japanese feudalism are important in explaining Japan’s relationship with the rest of Asia, chief among which was ‘to heighten the Japanese sense of uniqueness  – of being a people apart from their continental neighbors’, which also subsequently helped to foster among the Japanese a ‘consciousness of national distinctiveness’ (p. 20). In the mid-nineteenth century, Japan looked to the West as part of its ambitions to build a modern industrial base and only subsequently to Asia as part of its hegemonic ambitions to establish a ‘Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere’ (Miller, 2006, p. 29). Since the end of World War II, Japanese national consensus has been one to recognize ‘the need to maintain friendly and cooperative relations with the rest of Asia’ and to ‘provide development assistance’, despite the continued tendency for the Japanese to see themselves ‘as an island of modernity in a less advanced Asian sea’ and their apparent lack of any feeling of ‘solidarity with other Asians’ (Miller, 2006, p. 34). The Japanese Presence and Involvement in Singapore Since the mid-1800s, there have been Japanese people treating Singapore either as home or temporary domicile. The arrival of the first Japanese settlers took place about forty years after Singapore became a British colony in 1819. Coming prior to their arrival were Japanese travelers (mostly scholars or people on diplomatic missions) who took Singapore mainly as a stopover point on their journeys to and from Europe. Among subsequent arrivals of Japanese into the colony, there were a significant number who stayed on to make a living as traders, shop owners, inn keepers, doctors, and dentists, but also as prostitutes and brothel keepers (Lee, 2005; Tsu, 2006). For three years and eight months of World War II, Japan occupied Singapore after the British forces surrendered the island to the Japanese military forces in February 1942. As Singapore became part of

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the Empire of Japan, it was renamed Syonanto by its new rulers. While a more detailed treatment of this part of Singapore’s history can be found in Toh (2021), I endeavor here to provide a summary of developments that are salient to understanding Singapore’s postwar and postindependence relations with its erstwhile wartime occupiers. After the war, Singapore returned to being governed by its British colonial rulers who would eventually grant independence to the young nation less than two decades later. Independent Singapore’s initially struggling economy grew healthily, and particularly in the 1970s, with the help of Japanese technical expertise and investment. As the economy grew significantly from that period ‘spurred by strong government support’, the island republic also stood at the ‘forefront of Japan’s move into Southeast and South Asia’ (Ben-Ari, 2003, p.  117). Singapore would eventually come to host, according to Ben-Ari (2003) ‘a plethora of Japanese production facilities, headquarters, and sales and financial centres’, while a significant part of its GDP would be generated by the presence of Japanese companies (p. 117). Present-day Singapore is a financial, communications, conferencing, cyber, trading, and transportation hub. It has also become a favored stop for visitors and businesspeople because of its highly rated airport and up-­ to-­date facilities for ocean-going cruise liners. Being relatively clean, safe, and enjoying efficient airlinks with major neighboring cities like Bangkok, Hanoi, Kuala Lumpur, Manila and Jakarta, Singapore fits nicely into the role of ‘beautiful downtown Southeast Asia’ (Trocki, 2006, p.  154). Trocki (2006) captures Singapore’s convenience, safety, and central location in the following manner. For ‘[a]ffluent, ignorant and impatient Europeans’, it is ‘Singapore’s efficiency, its use of English, the relative ease of movement around the island and the lack of harassment from beggars, street peddlers and unscrupulous taxi drivers’ that makes it attractive or even ‘just like home’ (Trocki, 2006, p.  154). Slightly more dubiously, however, as the mecca for shopping for Asia’s rich, it has also earned the reputation of being an ‘attractive destination for the wives, concubines, and children of Southeast Asia’s crony capitalists’ (Trocki, 2006, p. 154). Japan’s speedy and impactful return to postwar Singapore was, to be sure, not entirely a matter to do with business and investment (which it most undoubtedly was) per se, but also one that was strategically weighed and politically weighted in terms of intent and innuendo (Shimizu & Hirakawa, 1999). This was due to its being part of the realization of America’s ‘Far Eastern Strategy’ that would see Japan being positioned as

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an industrialized nation and Asia’s major economic powerhouse standing at the forefront of the fight against communism (Shimizu & Hirakawa, 1999). Indeed, the subsequent development of closer economic ties between Japan and the Southeast Asia that it occupied during the war, and even ‘a degree of political cordiality’ (Miller, 2006, p. 33), was in part ‘a logical outcome of American Cold War strategy’ that basically assigned to Japan ‘the role of “industrial workshop” in noncommunist Asia’. On the part of Southeast Asia, Japan’s attractiveness was lined by both ‘its deep aid pockets’ as well as by ‘the success of its export-oriented industrialization and system of close government-business collaboration’, very much sought to be emulated by many East Asian countries (Miller, 2006, p. 33). At present, Singapore is home to some 30,000 Japanese people, and is therefore considered a city with a relatively large and established Japanese population (see Befu, 2003). The Japanese population in present-day Singapore consists overwhelmingly of white-collar expatriate families (Ben-Ari, 2003, 2006). Their presence is a sign and symbol of the magnitude of Japanese economic globalization (Befu, 2003). While in the initial years of Japan’s entrepreneurial expansion overseas most Japanese businessmen and business executives ventured abroad without their families, this was an old trend that saw gradual change. It has now become the norm for wives and children to be similarly relocated when their husbands and fathers are sent away on overseas postings (Befu, 2003). Such a change, according to Befu (2003) has been one of the more visible outcomes of Japan’s increased economic affluence and influence and has come alongside the presence of Japanese multinational corporations in different parts of East and Southeast Asia. In this respect, it is also the preference of Japanese companies to send married men on overseas postings as marriage is considered a sign of maturity (Ben-Ari, 2003, 2006). An elaborate network of schools, or as Chew and Thang (2006, p. 240) have called it, ‘an educational enclave’, set up to educate the children of these expatriate families, has been in existence in Singapore since it became an independent nation in 1965.

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The Exemplary Nature of Japan’s Bilateral Relations with Singapore Japan’s Free Trade Agreement (FTA) with Singapore, known officially as the Japan–Singapore Economic Agreement for a New Age Partnership (JSEPA) was historically the first bilateral FTA to ever be signed between two countries in Asia that covered the elimination of tariffs and liberalization of investment rules (Terada, 2006). According to Terada (2006), the FTA was historic because conservative politicians in Japan had all along bowed to domestic protectionist lobbies that sought protection for Japan’s agricultural sector. The signing of the FTA was in part due to the fact that Singapore had no agricultural sector to speak of and the fewness of its sectors that needed outright protection. This paved the way for negotiations to proceed more smoothly than would otherwise have been possible, taking into account Japan’s critical view of FTAs as being ‘discriminatory against non-members’ and thus ‘the last trade policy option that Japan would take’ (Terada, 2006, p. 150). Singapore’s relations with Japan have been described as being exemplary, notably by Singapore’s Minister of Foreign Affairs (see Balakrishnan, 2016). Independent Singapore looked actively to an already affluent and industrialized Japan as a role model for economic success. Helping to set these good relations in motion were the contributions of expertise that Japan made to Singapore’s initially struggling economy. At the time of independence from British rule, Singapore benefited heavily from capital investments from Japan as well as from its willing and sustained provision of technical knowhow. Singapore’s productivity movement to improve overall economic productivity was largely inspired by Japan’s own productivity model (Balakrishnan, 2016). Singapore’s FTA with Japan was the earliest to be signed between Japan and a Southeast Asian country (see Terada, 2006), while the Japan–Singapore Partnership Programme for the 21st Century (JSPP21), Singapore’s largest joint training program with another country, provides funding and expertise for training personnel in various emerging areas of Southeast Asia, Africa, and beyond (Balakrishnan, 2016). Japanese–Singaporean bilateral relations have been based on expressions of mutual trust (shinrai) as well as bonds of friendship (kizuna) at very high government-to-government level (Balakrishnan, 2016). While Japan–Singapore relations have been built up principally through business channels and interactions, social exchanges at a people-to-people level too have been made possible by way of organized programs like

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sports days and festival celebrations that have provided opportunities for people to interact socially (Lim, 2017; Toh, 2021). Present-day Singapore has a considerably large following of Japanophiles, avid fans and consumers of Japanese pop culture, cuisine, anime, manga, and even Japanese sweets and snacks in both their strong and subtle tastes. Such a level of interest in things Japanese is capturable in the use of the word otaku in Lim (2017), which speaks of people who demonstrate an intense and consuming interest, used in this case with reference to Japanese popular culture and artifacts of Japan’s creative economy. The Japan Creative Centre in Singapore organizes film festivals, seasonal fairs, concerts, exhibitions, storytelling competitions, and speech contests on a regular basis. Set up in 2007, the Japan Creative Centre has a comprehensive range of programs throughout the year to disseminate the latest information on developments of a cultural nature as well as technological value. The website is itself a repository of up-to-date information appropriately complemented by background accompaniments of Japanese traditional music (JCC, nd). While some of these activities had to be scaled back during the peak of the Covid 19 pandemic, many like flower arrangement workshops were conducted online, while continued contact with avid followers was maintained via an e-magazine. At the other extreme are the more colorful types of music performances represented by pop stars like Kyary Pamyu Pamyu (real name, Takemura Kiriko), which also enjoy a large following in Singapore. Such performances, according to Lim (2017) tend to be more unconventional in their display of fancy costumes, high-pitched singing voices, occasionally unconventional lyrics, and even deliberate mistakes. This facet of Japanese popular culture is different from the more conventional images of Japaneseness that nihonjinron advocates try their hardest to legitimate and reify for their followers, even though, in its being part of the exporting of a popular and monetizable commodity, the promoters of such forms of culture would certainly not be entirely innocent of the entrepreneurial aspects of Japanese capitalism. In 2016, Singapore and Japan celebrated fifty years of diplomatic relations (Balakrishnan, 2016). Official rhetoric represents both countries as sharing a geopolitical relationship that is ‘intertwined with the common interests of the East Asian region’, principally centered on the securing of peace ‘for economic development’ (Lim, 2017, p. 248). While it was the case that over the initial years Japan was seen as the side that assumed the role of mentor and benefactor, it is foreseeable that Japan–Singapore

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relations will witness the development of ‘a more equitable partnership’ (Lim, 2017, p.  252). Singapore has earned for itself the reputation of being a ‘nimble and fast-mover promoter of free trade agreements in East Asia’, while Japan has an established role as a ‘major builder of production networks in Southeast Asia’ (Lim, 2017, p. 248). Singapore has in recent years also evolved from being a learner economy that adapted ideas from Japanese management practices and economic features. Lim (2017) notes that in areas concerning the attracting and indigenization of migrants and foreign talent, Singapore is potentially able to share its experiences with Japan. Given too that Japan may still be identified as primarily a ‘homogeneous society’ as opposed to Singapore’s multicultural heterogeneity, possible solutions to cope with the problems of an aging society in urgent need of a larger pool of human resources may indeed come from a heterogeneous society like Singapore (Lim, 2017, p. 252).

Japanese Business Ventures and Operations in Singapore Singapore is regarded by Japanese companies as an important overseas location to do business, which accounts for the fact that Singapore was placed at the forefront of Japanese commercial operations in Asia (Ben-­ Ari, 2003), leading to favorable comparisons being made between Japanese operations in the island republic and those in London and New  York (Ben-Ari, 2003). The manager of a Japanese city bank was once known to have acknowledged that apart from London and New York, Singapore was the only other place where the bank had a data processing center that had direct connections back to Japan (Ben-Ari, 2003) According to Ben-Ari, this was said as part of wanting to draw attention to a sophisticated ‘network of communication and information centered on Japan’, while also portraying the importance of the bank’s network of activities in renowned key locations (Ben-Ari, 2003, p. 120). The nature of Japanese business ventures has, since the start of the new millennium, taken an experimental turn toward the creative and innovative. Yokoyama and Birchley (2020) describe the exciting rise of the SIEE (self-initiated expatriate entrepreneur) phenomenon among men and women with business acumen who have ventured into Southeast Asia, where previously, working outside Japan was more about expatriate business executives being sent to company subsidiaries to work for fixed

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periods of time (also see Ben-Ari, 2003, 2006). According to Yokoyama and Birchley (2020), the growth of this type of self-initiated entrepreneurship across national borders—which remains underexplored—provides fresh insights not only into entrepreneurship itself, but also ‘migration studies, international business and management, and [even] education’ (p. 2). The increased evidence of such self-motivation may also be an early sign of Japan’s relatively late efforts to develop global jinzai or global human resources, consisting of self-directed and globally savvy risk takers with a hunger for new challenges and an eye for business opportunities (Yokoyama & Birchley, 2020). Similarly, not averse to ideas bordering on the avant-garde, East Japan Railway’s operations in Singapore are particularly interesting given its long-standing reputation as a stolid and conservative establishment. The Singapore Business Directory states the following: Registration No. / Unique Entity Number: T15FC0083A EAST JAPAN RAILWAY COMPANY SINGAPORE BRANCH (the “Entity”) is a Foreign Company Registered In Singapore, incorporated on 11 June 2015 (Thursday) in Singapore. The address of the Entity’s registered office is at the TWENTY ANSON building. The Entity current operating status is live and has been operating for 6 years. The Entity’s principal activity is letting of self-owned or leased real estate property except food courts, coffee shops and eating houses (e.g. office/exhibition space, shopping mall, self-storage facilities) with restaurants as the secondary activity. (Singapore Business Directory, n.d.)

In recognition of the value of tapping into Singapore’s global business connectivity and to help establish linkages between Japanese business ventures and local Singaporean companies, East Japan Railway opened a coworking space in Singapore’s central business district (Choo, 2019). The coworking space occupies a 13,000 square foot area accommodating 275 people across private meeting rooms, well-furnished offices, and workstations. This unique space for meeting and interaction was a new idea and seen by East Japan Railway as a way of creating a platform for Singapore-based Japanese businesses to forge closer connections both locally and globally, exchange technology and ideas and to generally help lower barriers as both sides seek to enter each other’s markets (Choo, 2019). Yet again demonstrating its readiness to explore new ideas, East Japan Railway has seen itself in partnership with high-end stores in Singapore to

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promote the sales of Japanese wine (Businesswire, n.d.). Wines from Yamanashi prefecture, dubbed the birthplace of Japanese wine, have been promoted at eleven specially chosen stores. Singapore’s local and expatriate community and other discerning wine consumers are among the targeted customers of wine that is reputedly made only from grapes grown in Japan (Businesswire, n.d.).

Transplantation and Transposition in the Schooling of Children of Japanese White-Collar Expatriates The setting up of the Japanese education machinery in Singapore is seen to reflect its successful transplantation and transposition into a situation that is as socially and culturally divergent as might be from that of the Japanese homeland. This success comes despite (or perhaps because of) the fact that Japanese homeland styles of education are highly administerial, systematized, and subject to a form of top-down policy-making and regulation that make the introduction of creative reforms a notably long-­ drawn process (see McVeigh, 2000; Goodman, 2003; Aspinall, 2013). The elaborate arrangements in terms of curriculum implementation and the secondment of teachers from Japan (see Toh, 2020, 2021) that have been put in place to educate the children of Japanese expatriate residents are not accidental by any calculation but are well-planned and precisely executed. Chew and Thang (2006) note that Japanese-medium education in Singapore has been put in place ‘for Japanese, by Japanese’ much like an ‘educational enclave’, comprising ‘a comprehensive range of educational institutions including both formal schools and supporting institutions such as cram schools’ (p.  240). In addition to this enclave is the presence of necessary ancillary services including ‘supermarkets, clinics, clubs, restaurants and bookshops’ that typically allow the Japanese to feel as ‘familiar’ as life in a foreign country can be (p. 241). In Chap. 2, reifications of Japaneseness were seen to be that much part of the ideological aspect of Japanese schooling, particularly through the way in which nihonjinron beliefs have been allowed to exert a homogenizing and convergent effect on curriculum and pedagogy. Regional variations within Japan of different cultural histories and life experiences have been either marginalized or suppressed in view of the felt need to normalize ideologically or officially sanctioned versions. These versions have

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tended to affirm the dominance of sociopolitical power centralized in the Kanto-Kansai areas (Befu, 2009). In an overseas location like Singapore, Japanese school-going children are once again exposed to ideologies of Japaneseness as they would be in the homeland (see Toh, 2021). Both curricular and pedagogical strategies are liable to be deployed as part of the promotion and reification of these ideologies. Curricular content and textbooks used in Japanese-medium schools in Singapore are those that have received the Japanese education ministry’s stamp of approval (Toh, 2021). In tropical equatorial Singapore, the rhythms of central Japan’s four-season climate are reinforced through classroom activities that promote ‘sensitivity to nature and seasons’, a trait that is regarded typically as a mark or characteristic of Japaneseness (Chew & Thang, 2006, p. 249). Institutional Oversight of Japanese-Medium Education in Singapore Japanese-medium schooling in Singapore is conducted solely under the aegis and auspices of a larger overseeing nongovernmental body or bureau that may be referred to here as Institution A. Institution A was originally set up to oversee the affairs of Singapore’s Japanese population. Its existence as a bureau, being historically and materially traceable to its linkages with the growth of Japanese businesses and commercial ventures in Singapore, implies too the close links between the Japanese educational institutions it oversees and the highly commercialized undertakings that adduce its importance (see Toh, 2021). Paying the joining fee to become one of its members and the institution’s monthly subscription is a nonnegotiable prerequisite to having one’s child receive Japanese-medium education in any of the specially set up Japanese schools (nihonjin gakko). These schools follow the Japanese state curriculum just like any public school in homeland Japan. Being a current member of Institution A is also compulsory for Japanese nationals in Singapore who need to take the English proficiency tests (Eiken or Test in Practical English Proficiency) authorized by Japan’s education ministry and conducted by the Japanese Eiken foundation. On finely made wooden panels in Institution A’s spacious main lobby area are not only the names of its past presidents dating back to its founding, current dignitaries, and office holders, but also the names of people who are on the institution’s education committee,

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including the names of current school principals heading the Japanese-­ medium schools operating under its oversight and patronage. While the stories of the parents of children enrolled in Japanese-medium schools and cram school tutoring will be discussed in detail in Chap. 5, it is important to mention here concerning Institution A that there are parents who feel that its joining fee and monthly subscription are an added burden to a family’s finances. Some have felt that these charges are tantamount to being an obligatory tax that is exacted on those in the Japanese community who wish to have their children educated in the Japanese-­ medium in Singapore or who need to have their English proficiency tested by the Eiken foundation. The nearest comparison that Japanese residents sometimes make is to another obligatory (compulsory) fee that Japanese families pay to one of the principal television broadcasters in the homeland, whether or not they are regular viewers of its television programs. While Institution A’s premises provide its subscribing members access to a host of up-to-date recreational facilities and lifestyle programs, its joining fee amounts to a fairly large sum of money, not much less than what it costs to join one of Singapore’s colonial or country clubs, in the neighborhood of which, Institution A’s well-designed clubhouse too is fashionably located. One parent (more details regarding the other parents can be found in Chap. 5) who ran his own cosmetics and fashion business in Singapore found Institution A’s entrance fee and monthly subscription quite expensive and burdensome. Unfortunately, after becoming a member of Institution A but before his children had completed their education, the entire family had to return to Japan because the father’s business had failed to make enough money and had to be bought over by another investor. When his business was generating enough profit in better times, well-heeled customers from neighboring cities in Indonesia and oil-rich Brunei Darussalam would take the 75-minute or 90-minute flight to Singapore on a day trip to patronize his shop. In good times, ‘the Singapore shopping stop’ is known to be a popular one for an increasing number of those belonging to the ‘affluent classes of neighboring countries’ (Trocki, 2006, p. 154).

‘Exporting’ Japanese Cram Tutoring to Singapore As discussed in Chap. 1, the private tutoring industry in Japan plays what is regarded as a vital role in Japanese society, given an examination system for high school and university entrance that tests ‘factual knowledge [and]

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memorization, rather than analytical abilities’ (Roesgaard, 2006, p.  2). The common belief among parents is that examinations to enter the next level of schooling ‘cannot be passed by receiving only formal schooling’ (McVeigh, 2006, p. 172). It is also common knowledge that even high school teachers pay visits to cram schools to observe the test-taking techniques that are taught to students solely for the purpose of passing entrance examinations. When comparing different high schools, parents often consider the fact that some high schools have cram tutoring inbuilt into their after-school programming, where cram tutors are allowed into school campuses to run their tutoring classes. Concerning entrance examinations, Kikuchi (2006) observes from his research on the patterns in which university English language entrance examinations are set that students may do well not because they are proficient in the language, but because examination formats commonly lend themselves to measuring students ‘test-­ taking ability’ (p.  94). According to McVeigh (2006) and as noted in Chap. 1, the education ministry in Japan has harbored an ambivalent attitude toward the private tutoring industry in its repeated shifts from ignoring the existence of tutoring schools (state of denial) to subsequent attempts at working more closely with them (also see Dierkes, 2013; Watanabe, 2013; Yamato & Zhang, 2017; Entrich, 2018). The industry, while legitimating an inherently capitalist narrative of education being a commodity to invest in (see, e.g., Entrich, 2015, 2018) and still more, to consume, exists on the surface as a means by which aspiring students who wish to gain highly coveted places in better high schools or universities receive the sort of disciplined preparation needed for passing entrance tests and meeting specific entry requirements. However, this matter of stringency too has been called into question as certain institutions, especially universities, have been seen to offer other ways of accepting students besides ‘formal, sit-down written examinations’, usually through alternative arrangements among affiliated institutions (elementary, middle, and high schools as well as universities), which are part of the same gakko hojin or school foundation (McVeigh, 2006, p. 174; also see Chap. 5). Singapore’s Japanese ‘education enclave’ includes, as noted, not only well-established Japanese-medium schools but also cram schools providing after-school private tutoring (Chew & Thang, 2006, p.  240). The Japanese private tutoring industry in Singapore is predominantly made up of corporate players that serve a well-defined niche or clientele carved out of the white-collar business community. The industry’s close links to this

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particular niche of customers is one that makes possible its associations with a ‘conservative mercantile class’ (Clammer, 2000, p. 216), much as such forms of association would run foul of the supposedly (or avowedly) egalitarian nature of Japanese homeland society (Lie, 2003; Aspinall, 2013). The tutoring business in Singapore is not just a business-as-usual form of business (which it is in a commercial sense), but one that at a deeper level makes possible subjectivities associated with a Japanese form of ‘bourgeois capitalism’ (Clammer, 2000, p. 216), seen precisely in the way the clientele it targets is identified. In this respect, the Japanese cram school industry in Singapore provides a fine instance of the way ‘Japanese capitalism indeed profoundly shapes subjectivities’, and quite clearly in this case, ‘does so in distinctive ways’ (Clammer, 2000, p.  216). What draws attention to this particular form of distinctiveness is the way that a decidedly non-egalitarian form of education (see Matsuoka, 2015; Dierkes, 2013; Entrich, 2015, 2018; Zhang & Yamato, 2018), which may be hard to accept alongside beliefs that Japanese society is avowedly egalitarian in character (Lie, 2003; Aspinall, 2013), is able to take root in an overseas location like Singapore. The truth to be told here is that egalitarianism may not be that ‘egalitarian’ given a capturable audience of children of an aspiring mercantile class. This becomes a case in point that calls to mind Entrich’s (2015, p 197) observation made in the course of his discussion on social background and cultural capital—that the cram school industry ‘contributes to social reproduction’, in this case, of a white-collar mercantile class. In the same vein of things, Matsuoka (2015) duly observes that students of higher socioeconomic status are more likely to take shadow education lessons, and even more so if the schools they attend have students of an equally high socioeconomic status. The fact that cram tutoring businesses themselves have ventured into overseas markets like other big Japanese corporations tellingly reveals that both the free market and consumer anxiety (Dawson, 2010; Dierkes, 2013) readily support their very presence. Singapore is regarded as a place where the stoical if superficial rules of egalitarianism can be bent or broken even more blatantly than they might be in homeland Japan, with due reference to the power and influence of mercantilist entrepreneurship. Thanks not least to its distant location, an urbanized and urbane culture, and blasé attitude to free market competition, Singapore provides enough of a camouflage for it to be treated as a base for a uniquely un-egalitarian form of education to be carried out not so clandestinely for a mercantile class of Japanese domiciles.

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Final Comments I have sought in this chapter to provide readers with the necessary social and historical background relevant to Japan’s presence in East and Southeast Asia, with particular attention to Singapore. I have also endeavored to examine the various ways in which Japan has contributed to Singapore’s success and development through the economic activity that has been generated and to Japan’s exemplary government-to-government relations with Singapore since the latter’s independence from British colonial rule. In the concluding part of the chapter, issues relating to Japanese cram tutoring with Singapore as its backdrop were discussed with respect to the way neoliberal and mercantile ideologies and identities can be perpetuated through the cramming practices germane to the former. In Chap. 4, I will focus on epistemological and ideological considerations concerning work, human capital, education, and identity investment, especially ones that enact and reify the particularities of a Japanese–Singaporean neoliberal ideological narrative.

References Aspinall, R. (2013). International education policy in Japan in an age of globalisation and risk. Global Oriental. Balakrishnan, V. (2016). Message from the Minister of Foreign Affairs of Singapore. In History of friendship and cooperation: The 50th anniversary of Japan-Singapore diplomatic relations (p. 3). SG50 and JICA. Befu, H. (2003). The global context of Japan outside Japan. In H.  Befu & S. Guichard-Anguis (Eds.), Globalizing Japan: Ethnography of the Japanese presence in Asia, Europe and America (pp. 3–22). Routledge. Befu, H. (2009). Concepts of Japan, Japanese culture and the Japanese. In Y.  Sugimoto (Ed.), The Cambridge companion to modern Japanese culture (pp. 21–37). Cambridge University Press. Ben-Ari, E. (2003). The Japanese in Singapore: The dynamics of an expatriate community. In R. Goodman, C. Peach, A. Takenaka, & P. White (Eds.), Global Japan: The experience of Japan’s new immigrant and overseas communities (pp. 116–130). Routledge. Ben-Ari, E. (2006). The culture of Japanese business in Singapore. In Y. H. Tsu (Ed.), Japan and Singapore: A multidisciplinary approach (pp.  219–239). McGraw Hill Education. Businesswire. (n.d.). East Japan Railway Company: Sample superb Japanese wines in Singapore! Retrieved May 5, 2020, from https://www.busi-

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nesswire.com/news/home/20200311005847/en/East-­J apan-­R ailway-­ Company-­Sample-­Superb-­Japanese Chew, D. K., & Thang, L. L. (2006). The Japanese kindergarten of Singapore: ‘internalization’ and ‘internationalization’. In Y.  H. Tsu (Ed.), Japan and Singapore: A multidisciplinary approach (pp.  240–258). McGraw Hill Education. Choo, Y. T. (2019). Japanese rail giant East Japan Railway Company opens co-­ working space in Singapore. The Straits Times, August 26, C1. Clammer, J. (2000). Received dreams: Consumer capitalism, social process, and the management of the emotions in contemporary Japan. In J. S. Eases, T. Gill, & H.  Befu (Eds.), Globalization and social change in contemporary Japan (pp. 203–223). Transpacific. Dawson, W. (2010). Private tutoring and mass schooling in East Asia: Reflections of inequality in Japan, South Korea, and Cambodia. Asia Pacific Education Review, 11, 14–24. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12564-­009-­9058-­4 Dierkes, J. (2013). The insecurity industry: Supplementary education in Japan. In J. Aurini, S. Davies, & J. Dierkes (Eds.), Out of the shadows: The global intensification of supplementary education (pp. 3–21). Bingley. Entrich, S.  R. (2015). The decision for shadow education in Japan: Students’ choice or parents’ pressure? Social Science Japan Journal, 18(2), 193–216. https://doi.org/10.1093/ssjj/jyv012 Entrich, S. R. (2018). Shadow education and social inequalities in Japan: Evolving patterns and conceptual implications. Springer. Goodman, R. (2003). The why, what and how of educational reform in Japan. In R. Goodman & D. Phillips (Eds.), Can the Japanese change their education system (pp. 7–30). Symposium. Japan Creative Centre, Singapore. (n.d.). About Japan Creative Centre. Retrieved June 13, 2020, from https://www.sg.emb-­japan.go.jp/JCC/about_jcc.htm Kikuchi, K. (2006). Revisiting English entrance examinations in Japanese universities after a decade. JALT Journal, 28(1), 77–96. Lee, G. B. (2005). The Syonan years: Singapore under Japanese rule, 1942–1945. Nation Archives. Lie, J. (2003). The discourse of Japaneseness. In M. Douglass & G. S. Roberts (Eds.), Japan and global migration: Foreign workers and the advent of a multicultural society (pp. 70–90). University of Hawaii. Lim, T.  W. (2017). The Merlion and Mount Fuji: Fifty years of Singapore-Japan relations. World Scientific. Matsuoka, R. (2015). School socioeconomic compositional effect on shadow education participation: Evidence from Japan. British Journal of Sociology of Education, 36(2), 270–290. https://doi.org/10.1080/0142569 2.2013.820125

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McVeigh, B. (2000). Education reform in Japan: Fixing education or fostering economic nation-statism? In J. S. Eades, T. Gill, & H. Befu (Eds.), Globalization and social change in contemporary Japan (pp. 76–92). Transpacific. McVeigh, B. (2006). The state bearing gifts: Deception and disaffection in Japanese higher education. Lexington Books. Miller, J. (2006). The outlier: Japan between Asia and the West. In Y.  Sato & S. Limaye (Eds.), Japan in a dynamic Asia: Coping with the new security challenges (pp. 19–36). Lexington. Reischauer, E. (1988). The Japanese today: Change and continuity. Harvard University Press. Roesgaard, M.  H. (2006). Japanese education and the cram school business: Functions, challenges, and perspectives of the juku. Nordic Institute of Asian Studies. Shimizu, H., & Hirakawa, H. (1999). Japan and Singapore in the world economy: Japan’s economic advance into Singapore 1870–1965. Routledge. Singapore Business Directory. (n.d.). East Japan Railway Company Singapore Branch. Retrieved June 26, 2021, from https://www.sgpbusiness.com/company/East-­Japan-­Railway-­Company-­Singapore-­Branch#Overview Terada, T. (2006). Japan-Singapore economic partnership agreement: Origins and implications. In Y.  H. Tsu (Ed.), Japan and Singapore: A multidisciplinary approach (pp. 149–185). McGraw Hill Education. Toh, G. (2020). Schooling (for) Japanese children in cosmopolitan Singapore: Building bridges and erecting barriers. International Studies in Sociology of Education, 29(3), 274–292. https://doi.org/10.1080/0962021 4.2020.1770621 Toh, G. (2021). Japanese schooling and identity investment overseas: Exploring the cultural politics of ‘Japaneseness’ in Singapore. Routledge. Trocki, C. A. (2006). Singapore: Wealth, power and the culture of control. Routledge. Tsu, Y. H. (2006). When “Advancing South” meets “Looking East”. In Y. H. Tsu (Ed.), Japan and Singapore: A multidisciplinary approach (pp. 1–19). McGraw Hill Education. Watanabe, M. (2013). Juku: The stealth force of education and the deterioration of schools in Japan. Create Space. Yamato, Y., & Zhang, W. (2017). Changing schooling, changing shadow: Shapes and functions of juku in Japan. Asia Pacific Journal of Education, 37(3), 329–343. https://doi.org/10.1080/02188791.2017.1345719 Yokoyama, K., & Birchley, S.  L. (2020). Transnational entrepreneurship in Southeast Asia: Japanese self-initiated expatriate entrepreneurs. Springer. Zhang, W., & Yamato, Y. (2018). Shadow education in East Asia: Entrenched but evolving private supplementary tutoring. In K.  Kennedy & J.  Lee (Eds.), Routledge international handbook of schools and schooling in Asia (pp. 323–332). Routledge.

CHAPTER 4

Issues and Epistemologies Concerning Education, Work, Labor, Human Capital, (Identity) Investment, and (De) Humanization

Epistemological connections between education and human capital have been studied by scholars of human capital theory as well as by educators seeking to bring together issues concerning academic study, schooling, skills, work, labor, human capital, human subjectivity, and humanization in education. In this chapter, I turn to studies within the education–human capital nexus to examine the ways in which relationships between the two areas are able to inform understandings of time invested in education (in the present case, schooling and cram schooling), perceived returns or benefits from such investment by way of productive consumption (Becker, 1965), scholarly theorizations of labor, and ultimately their concerns with questions to do with humanization and dehumanization in educational practices. In these discussions, I continue to keep in mind the types of ideologies that are reified (or even magnified) given the different cultural and political narratives that come into confluence or conflict with each other in Singaporean and Japanese interactions. I am reminded too of earlier discussion in Chap. 1, where it was noted that Singaporean and Japanese cultural and discursive spaces are also historical and ideological sites that potentially spawn, sustain, reify, and magnify fresh narratives. These are the sorts of narratives that imbricate issues of social practice,

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human social relations, investments, and identities. As has been seen previously and will be further observed here, these sites and spaces are marked by the compounding of both their mercantile and entrepreneurial discourses, histories, and impulses.

Appreciating the Ideological Narratives Animating a Japanese–Singaporean–Cooperative Partnership In connection with the said mercantile and entrepreneurial discourses and continuing earlier discussion in Chap. 1 on a narrativized Singaporean– Japanese discursive setting, Lim (2017) notes that Singapore and Japan have in recent years found new commonalities in terms of business opportunities and synergies. These are the types of synergies that will see ‘their respective roles as nodes within the East Asian economies’ become bigger and more impactful (Lim, 2017, p. 248). According to Lim (2017), the common aim of the two countries is to ‘promote free trade by institutionalizing structures and regulations to break down barriers’ (p.  248). Oxymoronic as this may sound, this would only be the case if one is not ready to accept the fact that neoliberalism comes with paradoxes that its ardent supporters will only see as normal and unproblematic. The sorts of conditions that are deemed to be necessary for free trade, not incidentally, require for their production a slew of purposeful or deliberate if underlyingly violent policy actions that work to institutionalize, structure, regulate if finally, to isolate, constrain, divide, displace, and dehumanize (see Kavanagh & Fisher-Ari, 2018). A Singapore–Japan partnership or more so, a capitalistic apostleship, is one that reifies certain forms of reality and materiality convenient and natural to the free market. The two countries have struck a cooperative note in the charting of a long-term relationship that not only sees them as partners in commerce, but also as apostolic promoters of the free market. The common narrative behind such apostolicism is one that naturalizes not only the benefits of capitalistic free enterprise but also its attendant outcomes for the way human beings are subjectively constructed and deployed. The ‘economic developmental training to other economies in the [East Asian] region’ jointly provided by Singapore and Japan is set up to be of the type that will ‘stimulate technological cooperation’ toward the formation of a ‘loose, open, market-driven regionalisation’ (Lim, 2017, p. 248).

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Japan and East Asia Versus Japan and the West Japan’s newfound enthusiasm in East and Southeast Asian regionalization and prosperity may seem a little ironic if one were to consider the fact that Japan had time and again alternated in its priorities between its focused attention on the West and somewhat less wholeheartedly, on the East (see Chap. 3). This would have been despite America’s Cold War strategy mentioned earlier, which basically assigned to Japan the role of being noncommunist Asia’s economic powerhouse and industrial workshop. However, it was during the Cold War, as noted in Kawai (2020, p. 42), that Japan’s ‘neglect [of] Asia’ was most noticeable. As it ‘look[ed] largely toward the West’, Japan was at the same time able to ‘[take] advantage of the war as a key U.S. ally’, the result of which was that it gained for itself ‘the upper hand over Asia economically’ (p. 42). Even in the post-Cold War era, the possibility or ‘likelihood that Japan would again swing away from the West toward Asia was never very great’ (Miller, 2006, p.  34)—making the nature of a partnership between Japan and Singapore a curious matter for seasoned observers, notwithstanding the sorts of benefits that both sides would stand to reap. Kawai (2020) astutely observes that Japan has shown a tendency to be ‘simultaneously more interconnected with and disconnected from its neighboring East Asian countries’ (p.  101). The reality, if all things are considered in balance, is that most of Japan as a nation has in recent decades tended to be too ‘satisfied with the affluent, Westernized lifestyle’ to realistically have any ‘great interest in Asian leadership’, and still less to open the country ‘to “disruptive” Asian imports and immigrants’ (Miller, 2006, p. 34). For all intents and purposes, Japan would still be the same Japan that had all along been visibly involved in regional trade and aid but one that would at the same time be quietly aloof and comfortable with ‘being distinctly Japanese’ (Miller, 2006, p. 34). Here again, it had to take America’s ‘Far Eastern Strategy’ (discussed in Chap. 3) and influential superintendent hand to make possible the active role that Japan eventually played in providing economic development training to people in the East Asian region. Japan’s part in this American-brokered arrangement became one in which it would be nestled as an industrialized nation and major economic powerhouse in Asia (Shimizu & Hirakawa, 1999). This aspect of American policy that called for recognition of America’s continued role in the region could be seen the more clearly in the rejection of a 1991 Pan-Asianist proposal that would allow Japan to ‘lead an East Asian bloc’,

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in favor of a version of ‘“Asia-Pacific” regionalism that would include the United States’ (Miller, 2006, p. 34). Be this the situation that it has been, Japan’s growing economic and financial synergies with Asia especially in places where Japanese businesses exist and thrive is not contradictory to its earlier interests in the region as a hinterland for trade, natural resources, and economic influence (see Ezrati, 1999; Befu, 2000; Lebra, 2004; Smith, 2006). Neither were these earlier interests in embracing the idea of Asia as hinterland entirely devoid of exploitative intentions and meanings: humans, territories, and natural resources especially those under Japanese influence or control were systematically exploited as sources of capital (Befu, 2000). Pragmatic Aspects of Japan–Singapore Cooperation In more recent form, what appears to be unfolding is a version of market-­ driven regionalization envisaged to foster ‘greater economic interdependence between different economies in East Asia’ (Lim, 2017, pp. 248–249). Current undertakings in regional partnership are ones that are characteristically tied to bilateral histories in which Japan has mainly assumed the mentor role by dint of its earlier start as well as its technical and first mover advantage. Singapore in its earliest years of independence benefited from Japan’s role as ‘mentor’ and ‘trainer’ in practical and material terms (Thang & Gan, 2003). Not to be discounted in the nature and conduct of such training and cooperation has been Singapore’s calculated and businesslike approach to education and training, neoliberalized approach to human resource capitalization, and intentioned ‘alliance[s] with international corporate capitalism’ (Trocki, 2006, p. 144). Not irrelevant too are Japan’s pragmatically utilitarian ideo-institutionalized understandings of education and training and equally strategic deployment of resources (McVeigh, 2006).

Mobilizing Identity as a Form of Pragmatic Investment in an Overseas Situation In Toh (2021), I discuss the collusive role of investments in Japanese identity as part of an educational ideology that seeks to instill and preserve traits of Japaneseness. In this present discussion, and bearing in mind my concerns here with work, education, and training as well as with neoliberal

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capital investment and wealth creation, I seek to expand on this discussion in relation to both humanizing and dehumanizing aspects of human subjectivity. In an overseas non-Japanese location like Singapore, investment in an essentialized form of Japanese identity (see Chap. 2) as an important aspect of Japanese capital investment and creation is arguably or ultimately an investment in (and simultaneously, an affirmation and assertion of) capitalistic power. Investment in group identity and the powerful symbolisms of group solidarity is about investing in a well-hidden but no less precious and best-to-be-preserved asset. In this regard, registered bodies and fraternal societies set up by the Japanese community in Singapore, the designated buildings and clubhouses complete with Japanese décor where they are housed, the private meetings and exclusive lunch and dinner gatherings that are regularly organized (see Toh, 2021, for more details; also see description of Institution A in Chap. 3) are not fashioned or set up to be viewed as passingly or banally as they might possibly be. In all their subtle and not so subtle attempts at pomposity and ostentation, they qualify as material (ultimately monetizable) investments in Japanese identity and exclusivity, where ‘social position is [necessarily] objectified in physical space’ (Bourdieu, 2018, p.  107). They are also visible signs of a deep-­ seated and deeply held-to belief in the power of reified identity as a form of material and cultural capital, being unspoken hints of the coveted value of the very same. Among those groups in the Japanese community given to promoting such forms of social symbolism, the existence of cozy ‘relations between images and commodities’ is not only made possible but also ‘reinforced by cultural and economic forces’ (Clammer, 2000, p.  214). Ezrati (1999) notes in as many words that: [f]ew of the uncertainties created by Japan’s rise to power are as unpredictable as those built into her remarkable and singular group culture. While on the surface Japan resembles any other Western society, few could deny that she has always reacted differently to success and adversity than Western cultures have. In assessing the special risks implicit in this difference, the issues revolve around the intense need in the Japanese culture for concerted group actions. (p. 182, italics added)

The collocation of words and phrases like ‘implicit’, ‘power’, and ‘difference’ with ‘on the surface’ is not something to be viewed incidentally,

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not least because it supports the position that Japanese group culture is ultimately an (albeit) implicit assertion of power and difference, even though such assertion is not easily perceivable or detectable on the surface. When identity, image, and commodification are brought together as a potent concoction, their potential for monetization is much higher than if they were to be left separate from each other. Considering Japanese Groupism as a Form of Capitalistic Investment Following Ezrati (1999), one may note here that such detailed attention to face or ‘surface-ness’ only to be accompanied by an equal amount of subtlety and implicitness has a lot to do with the window-dressing of what in reality are assertions of (as well as investments in) the power of image and identity construction, and ultimately, wealth and capital. These are by no means inane forms of cultural capital accumulation that would be poor excuses or alibis for the elaborate sorts of choreographic arrangements that need to be made when power, money, and self-interest are precariously at stake. Group identity itself needs to be regarded as an implicit (but certainly not to be disregarded) capital resource. That groupism as an investment in identity capital is so difficult to detect (or fathom) can be explained by the fact that such a form of investment is easily palmed or dissipated away as a banal cultural trait (or trick), in this case, quite harmlessly as a tendency to be seen around in groups. The reality, to be sure, is that Japan has had a history of turning to the extremities of eugenics as both a science and art of preserving Japaneseness, ‘in order to generate the human capital with which to fund nation- and empire-­ building’, and in so doing, motivating ‘agents of the Japanese state and private sectors alike’ to focus their attention on bodily constitution (Robertson, 2002, p. 199). The quest to ‘change’ the Japanese body was regarded as indispensable to implementing fukoku kyohei or to ‘enrich the country and strengthen the military’ (Kawai, 2020, p.  7), as part of Japanese state policy for military and economic growth. In so rationalizing (group) identity as a form of investment, fresh life is given to the proverb, ‘unity is strength’, while ‘unity is money, capital and power’ becomes a compelling parody. Bearing in mind my concern with ideology, identity, and education in this book, the uneasy nature of social and power relations negotiated at the confluences of investment, entrepreneurialism,

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education, human bodily constitution, and subjectivism, here in a Singaporean-Japanese context, are matters for some attention.

Exploring the Confluences of Human Capital and Education and Concerns over Stealth or Subtle Enactments of Child Exploitation Economists with an interest in human capital theory have sought to understand education as a form of investment where investors, for example, parents, children (i.e., households), not to forget the state (see McVeigh, 2000; Williams, 2010), can be regarded as having to weigh ‘return[s] on additional education investments against the costs [that] such investments entail’ (Edmonds, 2008, p. 3610). The accounting of such costs in terms of lost opportunity, according to Edmonds (2008) in his deliberations on issues concerning child exploitation, go even to the extent of considering foregone economic contributions of children while they are being educated. Becker (1965) moreover notes that schooling as nonworking time, the consequent delayed entry into the labor market and their implications for economic welfare, are salient (if dehumanizing) concerns that relate to the opportunity cost of a child’s time spent being schooled. Researchers in Japanese education and out-of-school tutoring participate in this type of discussion through the way they speak of education as not only an investment but also an expression of individual and household aspiration (see LeTendre, 1996; Dierkes, 2013; Entrich, 2015, 2018). In Entrich (2018), Japanese people are said to possess ‘high aspirations’ (p.  34), while in Dierkes (2013), parents are seen feeling ‘[i]ncreasingly insecure’ in their craving for results (p. 8). The setting up of two-year colleges to ‘decrease the run on universities’, apart from being a logical response to these insecurities and aspirations, was also about meeting ‘the demand for well-­ trained workers’ and ‘increas[ing] the pool of human capital’ (Entrich, 2018, p.  34). Thus unpacked, aspiration and human capital cannot be viewed innocuously or separately, thanks to the agentive role of government policy in having one (aspiration) transposed (transmigrated) onto the other (human capital). As for cram school education in earnest, Entrich (2015) found that parents’ aspirations exert a strong effect on ‘whether their child receives shadow education’ in cases where such parents ‘prefer that their child enters the labor market after graduation’ (p. 207). Thus

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unpacked, (shadow) education becomes an investment that is linked inextricably to the labor market, thanks to the contributory (collusive) role of parent aspiration and anxiety. Carefully sifted out in this way, the ensuing thought that shadow education then becomes a presumptuous and yet subtle form of (child) labor is all the more unsettling (see earlier discussion in Chap. 1) – but one that resonates precociously with assumptions of ‘“ tight linkages” between academic performance and later life opportunities in the “labor market”’ highlighted in Baker et al. (2001, p. 3). In this respect, in discussions of human rights and implications ‘for long-run growth and development through its interaction with education’, the troubling matter of child labor has been a long-time concern of economists and is an issue that has attracted greater interest in recent years, precisely ‘ow[ing] to rising trade and globalization’ (Edmonds, 2008, p.  3610). Unlike in examples of common parlance, Edmonds (2008, p. 3611) notes that academic studies of child labor are often viewed as ‘child time allocation studies’ and indeed argues that ‘research must consider as wide a scope of activities as data permits’ with the specific purpose of better ‘understand[ing] the dynamics of child time allocation’. For educators like Nishino and Larsen (2003), such time allocation should take into account the need to have time set aside for recreational activities that support what Zhang and Yamato (2018, p.  327) regard as ‘whole person development’. Concerning the balanced development of a whole person, one may bear in mind that not only cram school but also extracurricular (bukatsu) club activities like baseball and netball can be similarly pressurizing. Thus liable to be equally stressful, bukatsu is hardly to be regarded as discretionary time, certainly not when it is viewed (and directed) as a way of making an adolescent become ‘more robust’ and acquire ‘a spirit of public service’ as a way of ‘learning to identify with Japan’ (Nishino & Larsen, 2003, p. 26). One notes in this respect that Edmonds’ (2008) call to better understand the dynamics of child time allocation is not one to at all be missed or taken lightly, bearing in mind the concerns of the present discussion and those expressed in Nishino and Larsen (2003) regarding the stress that comes with Japan being a ‘competitive and hurried society’ (p.  23). In terms of the implications of the time and effort spent on education (here including cram tutoring), scholars like Becker and Edmonds help to establish the case for conceptual and epistemological links between investments of time put into studying and the expected returns on time so invested. Put in perspective, the physical and mental stamina involved in living out

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a 14-hour day in activities related to schooling become matters with implications that are explainable through studies in time allocation, capital formation by way of education, and ultimately, human capital accumulation (Schultz, 1960; Becker, 1965; Edmonds, 2008). The Double Deal(ing) of Education as a Contributor to Work and Consumption In his work on the economics of time allocation, Becker (1965) notes that the opportunity cost of time spent tends to be less for commodities that are deemed also to ‘contribute to productive effort’, making for an oxymoronic form of ‘productive consumption’ (p. 503). Education, according to Becker (1965), is said to be a fairly accessible example of an activity that is thought to contribute ‘to work as well as to consumption’ (p. 504). Such an observation is not as uncanny as may be assumed, being not unrelated to Apple’s (2005) observations about the conflation (confusion) of roles between consumer and production laborer, made possible by ways in which big businesses, by sheer power or sleight of hand, are able to make consumers work (legwork) for them (see Chaps. 1 and 6). Schultz (1960) similarly argues that education can be in service of both purposes, investment as well as consumption, even though he quickly adds a cautionary word that calls for some attention to be paid to ‘the moral issue’ of treating human beings as objects of investment, particularly where it relates to education (Schultz, 1960, p. 572). Additionally, in his work, which focuses on education and capital formation, Schultz (1960) regards education as an undertaking of investment in people, one consequence of which is that it can thereby be treated as a form of capital, even or especially where—as Apple (2005) would put it—its intersections with people’s ‘dreams and desires’ will make it an exploitable resource for businesses (p. 13). Such dreams and desires are invariably also subject to market realities and relations, and vulnerable to the masterminding hand of ‘neoliberal policy prescriptions’ wholly committed to the ‘revival of homo economicus’ subjectivities (Peters & Roberts, 2012, p.  76). If allowed to be considered as a part of a person who is placed at the receiving end of it, education can in this manner be rewritten as human capital that ‘renders a productive service of value to the economy’, with rises in national income being ‘a consequence of additions to the stock of this form of capital’ (Schultz, 1960, p.  571). Conclusions from the work of Schultz (1960) concerning resource allocation and

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capital formation by way of education and Becker (1965) concerning time allocation and productive consumption are then drawn upon by Edmonds (2008) in his study on child time allocation for work and schooling. In these situations of interest to scholars like Schultz, Becker, and Edmonds, the time, effort, and productive contribution of children are involved, and all too often, exacted. Matters of Moral and Ethical Concern Edmonds’ (2008) in-depth study follows earlier studies adopting similar frameworks used by Schultz and Becker to examine ways in which schooling, time allocation, and work participation are part of contestations relating to investment and ultimately the economic contribution of school-going children (e.g., Rosenzweig & Evenson, 1977). With respect to concerns of humanization and decency, it remains not to be forgotten what Schultz (1960) registers as being ‘degrading’ or ‘repugnant’ the matter of considering education—which would generally be considered as ‘basically cultural and not economic in its purpose’—as ‘a way of creating capital’ or as an activity that ‘add[s] to the stock of human capital’ (p. 572; see next section for how this concern relates to Japan). Similarly, concerns may also be registered over considerations of ‘“rate of return” on investment in education’ or ‘economic benefits from education that may be appropriately treated as capital’ (p. 572). Not unrelatedly too, Schultz (1960) fundamentally considers the time and effort of students as part of the input of resources that has to be made to enable them to be schooled. Even more sobering are the differences in outcomes and consequences that can be possible between Schultz’s (1960) assumption that there can be ‘no earnings [that need to be foregone] on the part of children who attend elementary schools’ when he writes about children in 1950s America and the serious consequences of such an assumption when Rosenzweig and Evenson (1977) write about working children in 1970s rural India. The implications for the above understandings of time allocation, student effort, and capital formation with respect to investment in education will become clearer when cram school tutoring is discussed in relation to the life trajectories of Japanese white-collar expatriates in Singapore and the education of their children, in Chap. 5. Suffice to say that aspects of the way in which cram tutoring is conducted among these children strongly suggests that concerns over the sorts of double-dealing made

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possible by a production and consumption circuitry may actually be much more than a manner of speech or speculation. The possibility that intense forms of investment of time and energy in activities that simulate a form of education may, not just in theory, involve a form of exploitation wherein out-of-school education becomes implicated as form of money-making that involves the output of children.

Regarding Work, Human Capital, and Education in Japan There have been areas of Japanese culture and work-based practice that have attracted attention from outside of Japan, particularly the ways in which the Japanese have been successful in infrastructural planning as well as in experimenting with advanced technologies (Mouer & Norris, 2009). Japan has also drawn attention on account of what has been thought to be its ‘across-the-board successes in creating a society of highly motivated citizens’ (Mouer & Norris, 2009, p. 352), even though interest shown in Japanese management styles and fact-finding missions to learn ‘the secrets of Japan’s superior economic performance’ (p. 353) have both waxed and waned in recent history. In Singapore, the ‘learn-from-Japan’ drive centered on positive perceptions of Japanese efficiency, work ethic, and product quality control. Top performing students and civil servants were regularly sent to Japanese universities for training by Singapore’s highest commissioning authority for public service, meaning too that Japan was regarded as the place to send the smartest and the best among promising students. Singapore’s successful system of neighborhood policing drew inspiration from the Japanese model of community policing and was set up in consultation with senior advisors deployed from Japan (Thang & Gan, 2003; Lim, 2017). Discussing how the idea of work in Japan has largely revolved around the mobilization of people to generate surplus ‘in ways that allowed it to be “raked off the top” and channeled into growth’, Mouer (2009, p. 114), notes that such surplus has characteristically been reinvested both in physical capital, human capital, and in the maintenance of systems of management. With respect to investment in human capital, Mouer (2009, p. 114) further notes that this has generally been achieved by means of ‘education, training and indoctrination’ of workers, thus injecting into the former a strong ideological element. In this way, it might be seen that work, human

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capital investment, education, and training are neither neutral nor independent undertakings, but are about ‘generating (or maintaining) an ideology and/or cultural outlook validating the sacrifices made in serving the nation, the family, and the individual’ (Mouer, 2009, p. 114). Such validation or enshrinement of sacrifice is moreover instantiated and reiterated ‘through the [powerful] medium of corporations, other business establishments and entrepreneurial activity’ (p. 114). If one then uses the same type of language that is found in Becker (1965) in this context, such sacrifice is the sort that is needed if contributions to productive effort are to be made for economic gain. Similarly, in recent history, investments in eugenic marriages toward the creation of well-constituted human bodies have seen strong emphases being put into bodily improvements (Robertson, 2002). Being concerted undertakings in the cultivation of uniquely strong bloodlines, their successes are thought to accrue in social and economic benefits for the entire country (Robertson, 2002, p. 199). Not incidentally, cram school businesses are part of the same sorts of entrepreneurial fervor that interpolate young learners in the processes of production and consumption, while ostensibly having them groomed to become ‘scholarly and wise’ (Nishino & Larsen, 2003, p. 26). That cram schooling of itself has ‘developed into a significant service sector industry’ (Dierkes, 2013, p. 9) speaks of its growing associations with big business, not least in the ‘manifestations of corporatization’ seen in the ‘increasing dominance of franchises and regional and national chains’ (p.  10). In a society given to a form of ‘hyper-education’ that is driven by a strong belief ‘in the efficacy of effort in education’, cram school education ‘capitalizes on this ideology’ in such a way that the lives and learning of young people are invariably encroached and tapped upon (Dierkes, 2013, p. 20). Change in Education Hamstrung by Politico-Economic and Historical Considerations The point of the matter is undoubtedly that education in the sense that it is treated and used in the manner above, has hardly ever been free from its underlying links to politico-economic considerations and inherent institutionalizations of work and training. McVeigh (2006, p.  206) acknowledges that while adjustments may be made in Japanese education as a result in periodical changes in demographics, technology, or other prevailing circumstances, ‘core ideo-institutional arrangements’ defining the country’s ‘politico-economic and education-employment systems’ remain

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intact. These are protected domains that have to be carefully guarded such that while superficial adjustments can be made (acceptable) structurally, they are never ever of a reformative let alone transformative nature, prompting McVeigh (2006) to identify the former as ‘rhetorical’ rather than ‘real’ attempts at reform (p. 206; see below). With respect to my present concerns, the apparently unremarkable or even nonchalant manner in which work, eugenics, education, extracurricular training (bukatsu), investment, and entrepreneurial activity are collated (and collocated) is indeed not one to be taken for granted. Equally unsurprising must then be McVeigh’s (2000) observation with respect to education that the meaning of education ‘reform’ for the Japanese is one that is skewed toward ‘orchestrated … statist capitalists interests, to maintain a certain status implicated in elitist definitions of Japanese identity and nation-state power’ (p. 77)—the longer history of which can be traced to the powerful influence of conglomerate-type businesses before World War II (Dower, 2012). These conglomerates or zaibatsu, which were duly suppressive of nascent labor movements were extensively supported in their activities by bureaucrats and technocrats responsible for upholding the necessary institutional structures that promoted a business and political environment that was ‘very hospitable to aggressive privatization’ (Dower, 2012, p. 268). As for the possibility of substantive changes taking place, any decent hope for ‘realness’ to be part of different aspects or outworkings of ‘reform’ have historically been extremely limited. McVeigh (2000) points out that there would always be a need to properly distinguish between ‘fundamental change and modification’ as ‘the latter is periodic, while the former has [ever] happened only twice’ in history (p. 77). Thus, according to McVeigh (2000), it would only be realistic to acknowledge that: (1) whatever types of hope or trust one may place in reform in Japanese education, what must be ‘worth noting [is] that the Japanese education system has witnessed fundamental change only twice, during the 1870s after the Meiji Restoration, and during the Allied occupation at the end of the Pacific War, both [in] times of extreme crisis’ (p. 76); (2) Japanese leaders have almost never ‘deviated from safeguarding the continuity of ideologies of identity’, meaning that schools have been used to instill a particularized version of knowledge that strongly ‘underpins Japan’s capitalist developmental state’ (McVeigh, 2000, p. 77). Both (1) and (2) mean that various knowledge forms including ‘literacy, numeracy and science’ are designed fundamentally to produce people who are ‘rational, diligent, and aware of

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the significance of being “Japanese”’ (McVeigh, 2000, p.  77). Bukatsu activities are similarly angled, as noted in Nishino and Larsen (2003), toward fostering national identity alongside ‘good personal habits’ (p. 26). In this way, Clammer (2000) very aptly registers the following observation pithily: ‘[e]ven as Japanese capitalism itself has its own distinctive features, so too do the subjectivities that it shapes’ (p. 215).

Concluding Remarks Alongside their sociocultural and educational implications, this chapter has directed its attention to the inner workings of power, investment, entrepreneurial prowess, neoliberal predation, as well as capital creation, accumulation, and amassment in relation to its concerns with ways in which young people are variously subjectivized in the name or guise of being schooled. Chapter 5 looks to examining different instantiations of cram schooling tutoring in Singapore for children of Japanese expatriates, based on which, relevant critical observations and inferences can be made by way of understandings gained from key discussions in this and earlier chapters.

References Apple, M. (2005). Education, markets, and an audit culture. Critical Quarterly, 47(1–2), 11–29. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.0011-­1562.2005.00611.x Baker, D. P., Akiba, M., LeTendre, G. K., & Wiseman, A. W. (2001). Worldwide shadow education: Outside-school learning, institutional quality of schooling, and cross-national mathematics achievement. Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, 23(1), 1–17. https://doi.org/10.3102/2F01623737023001001 Becker, G.  S. (1965). A theory of the allocation of time. Economic Journal, 75(299), 493–517. http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0013-­0133%2819650 9%2975%3A299%3C493%3AATOTAO%3E2.0.CO%3B2-­N Befu, H. (2000). Globalization as human dispersal: From the perspective of Japan. In J. S. Eades, T. Gill, & H. Befu (Eds.), Globalization and social change in contemporary Japan (pp. 17–40). Transpacific. Bourdieu, P. (2018). Social space and the genesis of appropriated physical space. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 42(1), 106–114. https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-­2427.12534 Clammer, J. (2000). Received dreams: Consumer capitalism, social process, and the management of the emotions in contemporary Japan. In J. S. Eades, T. Gill,

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& H.  Befu (Eds.), Globalization and social change in contemporary Japan (pp. 203–223). Transpacific. Dierkes, J. (2013). The insecurity industry: Supplementary education in Japan. In J. Aurini, S. Davies, & J. Dierkes (Eds.), Out of the shadows: The global intensification of supplementary education (pp. 3–21). Bingley. Dower, J. (2012). Ways of forgetting, ways of remembering: Japan in the modern world. The New Press. Edmonds, E. V. (2008). Child labor. In T. P. Schultz & J. Strauss (Eds.), Handbook of development economics (Vol. 4, pp. 3607–3709). Elsevier North-Holland. Entrich, S.  R. (2015). The decision for shadow education in Japan: Students’ choice or parents’ pressure? Social Science Japan Journal, 18(2), 193–216. https://doi.org/10.1093/ssjj/jyv012 Entrich, S. R. (2018). Shadow education and social inequalities in Japan: Evolving patterns and conceptual implications. Springer. Ezrati, M. (1999). Kawari: How Japan’s economic and cultural transformation will alter the balance of power among nations. Perseus. Kavanagh, K. M., & Fisher-Ari, T. R. (2018). Curricular and pedagogical oppression: Contradictions within the juggernaut accountability trap. Educational Policy, 1–20. https://doi.org/10.1177/0895904818755471 Kawai, Y. (2020). A transnational critique of Japaneseness: Cultural nationalism, racism, and multiculturalism in Japan. Lexington. Lebra, T. S. (2004). The Japanese self in cultural logic. University of Hawaii. LeTendre, G. K. (1996). Constructed aspirations: Decision making processes in Japanese education selection. Sociology of Education, 69(3), 193–216. https:// doi.org/10.2307/2112729 Lim, T.  W. (2017). The Merlion and Mount Fuji: Fifty years of Singapore-Japan relations. World Scientific. McVeigh, B. (2000). Education reform in Japan: Fixing education or fostering economic nation-statism? In J. S. Eades, T. Gill, & H. Befu (Eds.), Globalization and social change in contemporary Japan (pp. 76–92). Transpacific. McVeigh, B. (2006). The state bearing gifts: Deception and disaffection in Japanese higher education. Lexington. Miller, J. (2006). The outlier: Japan between Asia and the west. In Y.  Sato & S. Limaye (Eds.), Japan in a dynamic Asia: Coping with the new security challenges (pp. 19–36). Lexington. Mouer, R. (2009). Work culture. In Y. Sugimoto (Ed.), The Cambridge companion to modern Japanese culture (pp. 113–129). Cambridge University Press. Mouer, R., & Norris, C. (2009). Exporting Japan’s culture: From management style to manga. In Y.  Sugimoto (Ed.), The Cambridge companion to modern Japanese culture (pp. 352–368). Cambridge University Press.

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Nishino, H., & Larsen, R. (2003). Japanese adolescents’ free time: Juku, bukatsu, and government efforts to create more meaningful leisure. New Directions for Child and Adolescent Development, 99, 23–35. https://doi.org/10.1002/cd.64 Peters, M. A., & Roberts, P. (2012). The virtues of openness: Education, science, and scholarship in the digital age. Paradigm. Robertson, J. (2002). Blood talks: Eugenic modernity and the creation of new Japanese. History and Anthropology, 13(3), 191–216. https://doi. org/10.1080/0275720022000025547 Rosenzweig, M., & Evenson, R. (1977). Fertility, schooling and the economic contribution of children in the rural India: An econometric analysis. Econometrica, 45, 1065–1079. https://doi.org/10.2307/1914059 Schultz, T.  W. (1960). Capital formation by education. Journal of Political Economy, 68(6), 571–583. https://www.jstor.org/stable/1829945 Shimizu, H., & Hirakawa, H. (1999). Japan and Singapore in the world economy: Japan’s economic advance into Singapore 1870–1965. Routledge. Smith, A. L. (2006). Japan’s relations with Southeast Asia: The strong silent type. In Y. Sato & S. Limaye (Eds.), Japan in a dynamic Asia: Coping with the new security challenges (pp. 179–198). Lexington. Thang, L.  L., & Gan, S.  K. (2003). Deconstructing ‘Japanisation’: Reflections from the ‘Learn from Japan’ campaign in Singapore. New Zealand Journal of Asian Studies, 5(1), 91–106. Toh, G. (2021). Japanese schooling and identity investment oversea: Exploring the cultural politics of “Japaneseness” in Singapore. Routledge. Trocki, C. A. (2006). Singapore: Wealth, power and the culture of control. Routledge. Williams, G. (2010). The knowledge economy, language and culture. Multilingual Matters. Zhang, W., & Yamato, Y. (2018). Shadow education in East Asia: Entrenched but evolving private supplementary tutoring. In K.  Kennedy & J.  Lee (Eds.), Routledge international handbook of schools and schooling in Asia (pp. 323–332). Routledge.

CHAPTER 5

Ethnographic Insights into the Culturalized Routines and Regimes of After-School Tutoring for Japanese Expatriate Children

At the end of any typical school day, it is not at all unusual to find privately hired minibuses waiting immediately outside the school gates of a Japanese school in Singapore. These air-conditioned minibuses will convey their passengers to their after-school tutoring centers on days they are scheduled to be tutored. They are specially chartered by the tutoring centers themselves to ensure that their clients are conveyed comfortably and punctually to their next destination. Expanding their businesses, which are headquartered in homeland Japan, Japanese cram tutoring centers in Singapore are actually overseas branches of big chains or major players in the industry (see Russell, 1997; Yamato & Zhang, 2017) besides a minority of small businesses that too have gravitated to Singapore for the money to be made. As has been seen in Chap. 3, opportunistic businesses of many kinds have a tendency to see in Singapore the image of ‘beautiful downtown Southeast Asia’ (Trocki, 2006, p.  154) where the footfall of potential customers is high in frequency. Larger market players epitomizing the involvement of private enterprise in education seek aggressively to spearhead technological innovation, new business methods, and new products (see, e.g., Russell, 1997; Zhang & Bray, 2017; Yamato & Zhang, 2017). Of this type, there at least ten in number that regularly pay for expensive advertisements to keep the market apprised of their services, especially families who have just arrived in Singapore on their new postings. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 G. Toh, Cross-border Shadow Education and Critical Pedagogy, Palgrave Studies on Global Policy and Critical Futures in Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-92832-2_5

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Advertising Aggressively Advertisements put up by Japanese tutoring centers typically describe the types of tutoring offered, in small groups or on an individual basis, and at the peak of the corona virus outbreak in Singapore (and even subsequent to it), one-on-one lessons online. The subject areas included in the tutoring programs are the same as those that are taught in Japanese schools, with Japanese (or Kokugo), English, Mathematics, and Science being extremely popular with parents keen for their children to perform well in these areas. As would be observable from the frequency and sophistication of these advertisements in fashionable expatriate magazines and newsletters, the industry’s bigger players are unsparing in their efforts to profit from Singapore’s Japanese after-school tutoring market as the Japanese population is large enough from the standpoint of revenue generation. Some advertisements take to catch words or phrases to name their programs. There may, for instance, be a ‘Numbers Wizard’ or ‘Power Kids’ (in katakana script) program for the younger children or a ‘Super Scientist’ or ‘Brainy Brains’ program for their older siblings. A typical advertisement would include some photographs of trendily furnished classrooms complete with the latest media and IT equipment or ones that capture a tutoring center’s well-lit lobby or spacious common areas. There can also be photographs of high-achieving students, especially those who are successful in gaining entry into prestigious institutions back home in Japan. Certain prestigious Japanese institutions or those that hope to admit a large number of returnee students have cooperative arrangements with famous tutoring chains operating branches in Singapore. Such arrangements allow these institutions to place their own advertising literature in the reception areas and on display shelves. When representatives from these institutions conduct their yearly recruitment drives, prior arrangements with the jukus will make it easy for them to hold parent briefing sessions using the juku premises, portals, or facilities. Jukus gain from such mutually beneficial arrangements especially if their students are accepted in good numbers by the more prestigious institutions. When this happens, jukus readily put the favorable admission statistics to good use in their own advertisements for even more students.

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Strategic Use of the Symbolisms of Space In terms of choice of location, some of the ‘big names’ in the cram tutoring industry have branches located in the more expensive areas of the city center where rentals for prime office space are generally high. Those with several branches may have ones in high-end suburban shopping malls near condominium clusters where Japanese families are generally to be found (see Toh, 2020, 2021). In terms of floor area, tutoring centers may occupy several thousand square feet of prime office space functionally but tastefully renovated for the purposes of creating the feel of a conducive yet exclusive learning environment. There may also be display boards on which awards, recognitions, certifications, and achievements are prominently displayed. Some centers have their own libraries, resource shelves, and cabinets, as well as study areas where students do their own quiet study or interact with tutors on duty to have their questions answered. Here as in Bourdieu (1996, 2018), physical spaces are accorded social meanings. Bourdieu’s understanding of a ‘locale’ is one of ‘a socially qualified physical site’ that ‘offers aggregate opportunities of appropriation of different material or cultural goods and services’, in this case by way of cram tutoring at exclusive high-end locations (Bourdieu, 2018, p.  111, emphasis added). The structuring of physical space becomes of itself an enactment of social space, which Bourdieu (1996) says is ‘defined by the exclusion (or distinction) of positions’ or a ‘juxtaposition of social positions’, for purposes of claiming exclusivity and asserting privilege (p. 12). Bourdieu’s work (1996, 2018) thus provides a way to appreciate the importance of what might arguably be called an epistemology of space. Such an epistemology taps on the material conditions that make possible the use of nice downtown buildings for high-end tutoring activities to fashion and produce particular ways of knowing and positioning, not forgetting the learning dispositions and habitus that help to reproduce the same spatially and positionally located ways of knowing.

Synchronization to Japanese Time, Rhythm, and Modes of Operation Japanese tutoring centers follow the trimestral calendar adopted by Japanese schools in Singapore, which closely parallels (shadows) the school calendar in Japan. Singaporean public holidays are generally not observed, not even the extended ones. For example, Lunar New Year holidays in

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Singapore normally coincide with examination preparation time for Japanese schools and are therefore normal working days for the tutoring centers, regardless the fact that the rest of Singapore is hardly thinking about work. Where the money is there to be made and high-stakes examinations taken, extended holidays can wait. Indeed, as I would discover by way of experience, certain recruitment briefings by Japanese high schools conducted online during the period of the corona virus pandemic were similarly synchronized to Japan Standard Time, one hour ahead of Singaporean time. In messages sent out to parents, presentation schedules, too, were set to Japanese timings, sometimes causing parents adjusted to Singaporean time to be late or absent. It has been said that Japanese-medium schools in Singapore form a veritable cultural enclave as much as Japanese-medium education in Singapore administered ‘by Japanese for Japanese’ (Chew & Thang, 2006, p. 243) comes across as an undertaking (or project) to socialize overseas Japanese children into Japanese culture (Toh, 2020). Japanese cram tutoring centers, too, may qualify as members of this same enclave, whether by (business) association, self-co-optation, or default. As for communication with parents, the tutoring centers schedule regular parent–teacher meetings and organize their own open days. Parents may also make appointments with tutors to discuss their child’s progress or even likelihood or potential of gaining a place in an elite institution in Japan. Regular newsfeeds are sent out to parents, either electronically or in print. Information about up-and-coming (summer and winter) courses, special holiday programs, online talks and seminars, student recruitment briefings for parents by high school representatives targeting returnees from Singapore, is disseminated in a timely manner. Student test scores for the regular in-house tests conducted across branches located in the major cities of East and Southeast Asia like Bangkok, Jakarta, Shanghai, or Taipei are likewise regularly fed back to parents. These tests, while conducted on-site at the various branches in each of these cities, are actually couriered back to Japan for marking. The results of individual students are put on color printed A3 spreadsheets complete with numbers, figures, ranking tables, and statistics that compare the entry requirements of selected schools with each student’s performance. The names of top-performing students are made known in the newsfeeds as a way of recognizing their well-deserved achievement, hard work, and brilliance.

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Ethnographies and Narratives The next part of the chapter is principally ethnographical in the manner described in Chap. 1. Japanese families in Singapore are of a fairly homogeneous makeup as it is typically on account of the fathers’ work that these families relocate to Singapore, while the mothers, in sacrifice of their own careers, take on the role of housewives and kyoiku mamas or ‘education moms’ (Chew & Thang, 2006; also see Dickensheets, 1996, and Chap. 6, for an explanation of kyoiku mamas). My own involvement as conscientious parent in my children’s education has led me to support my wife’s diligent lead in enabling the same, whatever my own serious reservations over the system’s undemocratic rigidities and unimaginativeness have been (see Hyslop-Margison & Sears, 2006). As is noted in Dickensheets (1996), a Japanese mother’s commitment to a child’s education is actually part of the way Japanese society is instrumentally structured for economic production (see Chap. 4) and in nearly all instances, the mother is the primary contact person where matters concerning a child’s education is concerned. Nevertheless, by way of visits on open days, parent–teacher days, sports days, and my time spent in a supporting role in one of the teams in a local Japanese softball league for young people, I too have in my own way learnt to understand the types of challenges faced by Japanese families as they try their best to educate their children in the ways that the system allows them to. Mine is what has been described by anthropologist and critical ethnographer, Douglas Foley, as ‘an intensive [and considerably extensive] experiential encounter with [the] people who live by [the particular] cultural constructions of reality’ (Foley, 2002, pp.  472–473) that I now find myself writing reflexively about. In so writing, I find myself in sympathy with the way some critical ethnographers may go to the extent of ‘situat[ing] themselves as characters in the text’ who undoubtedly have their own ‘personal and cultural histories’ (Foley, 2002, p.  480) as ‘constructed, conflicted’ people with admittedly ‘multiple sel[ves’ (p. 483). In so writing too, I am reminded by way of the following observation found in the work of a famed anthropologist and social commentator not to be too hard on myself if some aspects of the critical ethnography I engage in somehow involves my presence as conscientious parent as opposed to impassionate observer: It is far from easy to think up interesting ways to locate oneself in one’s own text. Writing vulnerably takes as much skill, nuance, and willingness to

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f­ ollow through on all the ramifications of a complicated idea as does writing invulnerably and distantly. I would say it takes yet greater skill. (Behar, 1996, p. 13)

As for my participation in the schooling and sporting activities I have mentioned, these activities have helpfully facilitated the establishment of the type of practical down-to-earth relationships that Martin-Jones et al. (2017) note to be important for ethnographic research, where human interactions in a range of different life-worlds and institutional spaces are an area of expressed interest for purposes of ‘truth-telling’ (see Ball, 2016). In this connection, the reflexive nature of my own positioning is borne out in how my subjectivities as father and educator invariably find their imprints in the negotiations that I too have had to have a part in, amidst being engaged with the said activities and life-worlds (see Behar, 1996; Fook, 1999; Foley, 2002; Noblit, 2004; Norton & Early, 2011). Moreover, like other educators who are also parents, I am all the more led to value the fact that my teacher role identity is one that evolves dynamically and reciprocally alongside the other role identities inhabiting my lived personal and professional landscapes (Beijaard, 2019). Through this backgrounding of the approach that I now set out to follow, I hope to recreate for readers the experiences of tutoring classes by families not unlike mine as they are administered in Singapore, as well as the exigent circumstances and surrounding realities that are that much part of the running of these classes. Part of what is involved with being engaged in (and with) the ethnographies in question relates to Flory and Iglesias’ (2010, p.  114) observation that ‘narratives and stories are extremely powerful rhetorical devices’ bringing to bear ‘reconstructed representations of experiences’. These are the very types of experiences that are crucial to a grounded understanding of the inner workings of organizational structures and their modes of operation. In addition, with regard to recognizing the performative nature of identities and social positionings, which are important for the reconstruction of storied representations of lived experiences, I am helped by Davies and Harre’s (1990) observation that people position themselves through (and are in turn positioned by) discourses and discursive practices that pertain to selfhood. As such, understanding the types and nature of the (inseparably external as well as internally generated) discourses that help position the parents and students in the following narrative accounts provides a way to appreciate the manner in which selfhood is negotiated in each of their varying

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circumstances. As is the case with Rudolph’s (2018) work that contests essentialized constructions of identity through a sociohistorical ethnographic account of a Japanese educational context, the ‘deconstruction of discourses of being and becoming’ and the ‘giving [of] shape to … lived experiences in context’ are ways in which real-life circumstances, in this case, those surrounding after-school tutoring among Japanese people living in Singapore, can be made visible. With regard to having Japan as a focus, detailed studies of storied accounts provided by stakeholders and participants have been used in scholarly research to better understand the way Japanese people engage with new environments, unfamiliar circumstances, or with matters implicating identity, culture, and behavior (see, e.g., Hall, 1998; Chew & Thang, 2006; Sedgwick, 2007; Kubota, 2011; Kubota & Fujimoto, 2013; Oda & Toh, 2018; Rivers, 2013; Rudolph, 2016, 2018; Rudolph et al., 2018; Toh, 2016a, 2017; Kawai, 2020; Yokoyama & Birchley, 2020). As for the Japanese population in Singapore, which owes its presence largely or overwhelmingly to the prosecution of Japanese big business overseas, Sedgwick’s (2007, p.  15) observation that at its best, work done by Japanologists or Japanese scholars that seek to recognize Japanese big business as a jointly produced phenomenon is a very useful one. Sedgwick (2007, p. 15) notes that Japanese big business is in fact ‘a co-production of economic, political, technological and cultural activities’, and that such a perspective is one that ‘naturally align[s itself] with approaches in anthropology today’. For the purposes of my discussion on the operations of Japanese after-school tutoring, I am led therefore to treat the types of activities it undertakes (ostensibly as a form of education), not only as technological and cultural ones, but ones that are substantively economic in nature, as well. This approach, which enables education to be seen in the (sometimes blindsiding) light of economic considerations, is not apart from the fact that the Japanese-Singaporean narrative is one that identifies economic growth benefits as one of its controlling motifs (see Chaps. 1 and 3). It would not be surprising therefore that the stories told by the parents in the next section are in many inescapable ways related to this larger narrative, almost as if they are a beholden part of the co-­construction and reinforcement of a compellingly and powerfully scripted story. What follows then are storied accounts of parents’ experiences with after-school tutoring classes, accompanied by a critical commentary of these accounts vis-à-vis their sociocultural and socioeconomic implications for education within a predominantly Japanese cultural-political ethos.

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Parent A, Juku Tutors, Test Scores, and In-Depth Treatment of Topics Being Taught Parent A’s 13-year-old goes to a tutoring center in an upmarket part of Singapore within the vicinity of foreign banks and embassies. She recalls how her son had been scoring poorly in his English tests and had returned home one day feeling dejected, causing her some stress. On that day, the boy had received another fail grade. In his disappointment, he complained that he had not been enrolled in a juku, unlike his friends. The boy claimed that his friends did better because their juku teacher taught ahead of what the school was teaching. Their teacher also prepared students to answer test questions according to the appropriate format. Parent A voiced her concern that the English conversation lessons in school did not prepare students for tests. Lesson times were spent on simple conversation structures, whereas tests items were more about grammar, vocabulary, or phonetic sounds. She recalled visiting the class of a Japanese English conversation teacher one school open day and did not find the lesson useful. Things that were important to know for term tests were not taught like they would be in a juku. She further said that the teaching style was too passive and would not meet the expectations of parents more inclined to trust their children’s learning to a juku. As school report cards reflected actual test grades, Parent A said that she had no choice, despite the cost, but to send her child to a juku to give him a chance to practice sample tests and hopefully score better. As for mathematics, Parent A said that the school tests were very difficult. Juku lessons were more comparable in depth to these tests than normal lessons in school. Parent A thinks that teachers were either not explaining mathematical solutions thoroughly or not teaching to sufficient depth. Juku tutors, in contrast, stayed back to explain difficult problems. Some juku tutors might have once been teachers in mainstream schools who preferred the challenge of working in a private juku setting. These tutors would have a good knowledge of the way schools assessed their students and the way examination questions were patterned or designed. Many parents value their knowledge of examination trends.

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Parent B and How Juku Lessons Are Not Necessary in the West Parent B, a mother who has studied and worked overseas in an English-­ speaking Western country, says that her daughter, who goes to one of Singapore’s Japanese-medium schools, is not in a juku. Having been educated in Japan until the end of high school, Parent B is familiar with the Japanese state system. Before being enrolled in an English-medium university overseas, she did an additional year of high school in the same country to improve her English skills. Parent B thinks that the reason for the popularity of after-school tutoring is that Japanese schooling is unlike the schooling in English-speaking countries where, according to her, the teaching takes place at a more reasonable and comfortable pace. Her experience overseas has left in her the impression that teachers in the English-speaking West tend to be more patient and generous with their time answering questions and clearing doubts of pupils after class. In Japanese schools, teachers do not address the learning styles of pupils or as she suspects, may neither be trained nor inclined to do so. Where pupils feel free enough to approach their teachers for additional help as she thinks is common in the West, there is very little need for tutoring among pupils in these countries. Children in the English-­ speaking West have more time to play and engage in sporting activities after school. They also tend to be more successful in life. While Asians study very hard, Parent B thinks from her experience of life overseas that Westerners are the ones who get the best-paid expatriate jobs in the bigger international companies in Singapore, not the Asians, despite the amount of work they put into their studies. Parent B’s impression of studying in Japan and the rest of Asia is that teachers are too busy to attend to slower learners. They may not have the time or energy to ‘push up’ the slower learners. Some slower learners may not understand a topic that is taught in school thoroughly enough to do well in difficult tests. As students who are not able to keep pace with lessons in school tend to fall behind the rest of their classmates, juku lessons become necessary because a juku teacher’s role is to ‘lend out’ (give out) energy to ‘push up’ the level of understanding of slower learners, as she would put it.

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Parent C and Juku Teachers as Charismatic Personalities Parent C relates how her teenage son became fond of a particular juku teacher whom he thought had the ability to teach better than the teachers he had in school. According to Parent C, this teacher did not actually have a teaching diploma or certificate and thus was not a licensed teacher. Even so, this teacher was said to be very good in explaining English grammar and solving mathematical problems. She also knew how to teach social studies well and was able to conduct her juku lessons effectively enough to win the confidence of a large following of students, year-after-year. After a number of years teaching in the same juku in Singapore, word of her outgoing personality and ability to make complex problems simple spread among Japanese parents in Singapore, as did interesting information about her ability to win prizes in computer games competitions. In Japan, she was reputed to have a recognized nationwide ranking as an expert computer games player. Parent C’s son also told her that this teacher was the head of a juku branch in Japan before she moved to Singapore. According to this mother, being in this teacher’s class helped her son overcome his listlessness, put his study routine in order and enabled him to become more organized time wise.

Parent D and the View that Juku Is Part of a Child’s Homeward Journey Parent D’s relatively short stint in Singapore lasted slightly less than three years. Besides spending long hours in his office located in one of Singapore’s industrial districts, his work required him to entertain clients, often joining them for golf games. His work allowed him very little time at home with his family. Meanwhile, his 15-year-old son was busy studying for his high school entrance examinations. This boy hardly knew or had the chance to learn more about the Singaporean environment he was fortunate enough to be spending three years of his life in as an expatriate family member living in a private condominium environment. With most of his weekdays starting at 6:50 in the morning (when he would be picked up by the school bus) and ending no earlier than 11:00 in the evening when he would finally reach home from juku, his life was all but centered around school and cram tutoring.

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As a result of long days spent in school and at tutoring, tiredness, and oversleeping set in. This boy was always missing his school bus, which led to frequent arguments and other problems with both his parents. Within the neighborhood of Japanese families, he hardly ever had the time or inclination to talk to people, preferring to keep sullenly to himself. Meanwhile, business was bad in the father’s company, meaning that the family would soon be sent home. However, even before this happened, the boy’s parents decided that he should be allowed to return home earlier. This was to give him time to readapt to Japan and to sit for the various entrance examinations required for high school entry. His mother flew home with him to his grandfather’s hometown in central Japan midway through his third year in junior high school in Singapore. Not long after, news came of this boy’s success in getting a place in a high school that accepted Japanese returnee children. This high school was affiliated to a good university in the same prefecture. When she talked about this piece of good news, Parent D’s wife expressed her gratefulness and said that she was glad that the boy went through juku in Singapore. However, due to long hours of study and lack of socialization, this boy encountered difficulties in his new school environment where many of his classmates were fluent and confident English speakers lately returned to Japan from America, the UK, and other English-speaking countries. While his time spent at juku in Singapore did help him gain a place in a high school, the overly examination-oriented juku style sapped away the boy’s energy and confidence, making him fatigued, passive, diffident and very poor in people skills (see Allen, 2016 for a similar observation).

Parents E and F and the Use of Juku Lessons to Keep Pace with the Japanese System Parents E and F are the well-traveled parents of a high-achieving 13-year-­ old girl. Parent E, the father and his wife, Parent F have always had high hopes for their daughter. They have taken it upon themselves to ensure that she should be given the right opportunities to excel in her studies as long as they can afford to do so. Being in Singapore has given them the opportunity to let their daughter learn and improve in English as Singapore has reputable English-medium international schools as well as Japanese-­ medium schools and jukus. For them, Singapore is an ideal situation for what they very much hope to see their daughter achieve.

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After having her study in one of Singapore’s Japanese-medium schools until her third grade, Parent F recalls that they decided to enroll their (then) ten-year-old daughter in an English-medium international school for the rest of her elementary school years. Their intension had always been to have her eventually return to being schooled in the Japanese system, but they also wanted her to be good in English. For them, the challenge was to make sure that their child would be able to keep pace with what she was missing in the Japanese system. With careful planning, they sent their daughter to a well-established juku for evening lessons, while she went to an international school. The idea was that the juku lessons would allow the child to remain in touch with Japanese-medium instruction. At juku, this girl excelled in her tests and her name was frequently published as one of the top scorers. At the end of three years, the child returned to being educated in the Japanese system. By that time, her level of English was well above most of her peers who had all this while remained in the Japanese system. As a result of her time in international school, Parent F now feels that her daughter has gained greater fluency in her spoken English and a lot of confidence in herself. Having had the best of both worlds, she also experiences no trouble readapting to Japanese schooling, all credit to the decision to let her attend classes in a juku.

Parent G and the Way Juku Can Help Overcome State School Mediocrity Parent G is of the view that the Japanese-medium school her two children attend is too much like a state school back in Japan. She willingly describes some Japanese state schools as places where teaching is done in an old-­ fashioned way only with the help of chalk and blackboard. In her view, these state schools provide a very plain and no-frills type of education. While parents are not charged school fees, school facilities tend to be either old or in poor condition. She thinks that children attending such schools need to go to juku classes to make up for the plainness of the teaching carried out by teachers who are basically civil servants. The Japanese-medium school in Singapore that her children attend, reminds her of a Japanese state school that teaches only from textbooks. With teachers being rotated once every few years, they will most likely not feel rooted in any school and may therefore not take that much pride in

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upholding the name of the school. In contrast, many private schools in Japan are starting to become more innovative in the way they run their activities and programs. Some more expensive schools have smaller classes with teacher assistants to answer questions and supervise creative project-­ based activities. Children in these schools generally do not have to go to juku classes because the programs offered are largely self-contained (which means that there is probably no need for juku lessons to make up for learning shortfalls). Fee-paying schools in Japan, according to Parent G, are becoming more creative in their approach than her children’s school, which she feels is quite behind the times.

Parent H, English-Medium High School Education and Doing Away with Juku Tutoring Parent H is Japanese while his wife comes from a Southeast Asian country. As they speak to each other in English, their son is well attuned to the language. The couple met while both were university students in the UK.  After graduation, Parent H found employment in his wife’s home country where their son was born. Until the age of ten, their son was educated in a Japanese-medium school in his mother’s home country. After finding himself a new job, the family relocated to Singapore where their then eleven-year-old child continued his studies in a Japanese-­ medium school. Upon arrival in Singapore, the boy was enrolled in a juku so that he could have additional hours of exposure to classes that were taught in Japanese, a language he was still not entirely fluent in. Parent H’s concern, however, was with the high cost of juku tutoring. Several sessions a week of after-school tutoring cost nearly as much as the monthly school fees. Parent H, an independent-minded person, questioned why jukus were in the habit of renting the premises of expensive buildings when the rentals in suburban neighborhoods were comparatively cheaper, even with Singapore’s reputation for high rental costs. Parent H thought that cheaper rentals would translate to cheaper tutoring, easing the parents’ financial burden. When the boy reached fourteen years of age, a decision had to be made about whether he would continue in the Japanese system for his high school studies or go to an international school. Continuing in the Japanese system meant the time and cost of having him attend juku classes. Parent

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H and his wife finally decided to try something different and put their son in an English-medium international school hoping for a more balanced and holistic education. As soon as this decision was made, their son was pulled out from his juku studies. Juku was no longer relevant. From then on, his studies would be in English. The time and energy saved allowed this boy to engage in more of his favorite outdoor activities including fishing and sport.

My Own Observations as Parent of Schooling and Tutoring During the Pandemic From my own observation, my children’s Japanese-medium school and the tutoring center that my son attended responded to the Corona virus pandemic quite differently. The virus had struck Singapore in late January 2020 and by early April the government had introduced the first of several island-wide lockdowns, dubbed the ‘circuit breaker’, which meant that schools had to be closed from early April until the early part of June. The month of April marked the start of the academic year for the Japanese schools in Singapore, like in homeland Japan. It stood to be observed that the tutoring center was indeed well prepared to meet the learning needs of its pupils (or clientele) during the outbreak. A Kokugo teacher who had come through Singapore’s international airport and had to be quarantined in a hotel for fourteen days taught all her lessons online from her hotel room. The seriousness of the situation was responded to in like manner by the juku and lessons proceeded with minimal interruption, despite the teacher’s time in quarantine. While it was not entirely the school’s problem, there were signs that things were not going so well by mid- if not early February 2020. The unexpected crisis appeared to have caught the school by surprise in the sense that teachers who were due to come to Singapore to replace those who would be returning to Japan did not manage to fly into Singapore before a general lockdown was imposed. In the ensuing period of national lockdown, teachers who were supposed to begin the school year in Singapore were left stranded in Japan. Interim arrangements necessitated that some classes at certain levels be merged, which meant much larger class sizes. Fortunately, some of the teachers who were stranded in Japan were, as the wonders of modern technology would make possible, able to communicate with their students in Singapore via online platforms and

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that helped to attenuate the challenges that came with the lockdown to some extent. Even daily homeroom sessions had to be conducted online, to maintain a semblance of what would ordinarily be done in a real classroom. In any case, forced into action by the extremity of the unprecedented situation, the school in question was fortunately resourceful enough to purchase recorded lessons thoughtfully produced by online tutoring companies in Japan (see Yamato & Zhang, 2017). In Japan, these online tutoring companies are typically part of larger education or job placement enterprises whose business it is to produce video resources for subscribers. Each modular teaching topic in a range of school subjects (Japanese, Mathematics, Science, etc.) is carefully divided into different chapters, and these chapters are followed by online quizzes. Students faithfully follow each modular topic online to attain mastery. Interestingly enough for an ordinary observer, the content, mode and manner of teaching adopted in these online tutoring videos used by the school are not at all unlike what one might also find in a juku. It became quite apparent that the corona virus pandemic brought about a situation where the dividing lines between schooling and tutoring videos became even less clear, if ever these lines did exist in earnest in recent history (see Yamato & Zhang, 2017). Ordinarily hidden from sight, it was the direness of the situation that exposed the fact that there might really be very little difference in approach between the two extremely similar tropes of what in fact is a banking approach to education (Freire, 2000, 2014) in service of Japanese capitalistic nation-statism (see Chaps. 1 and 2). Yamato and Zhang (2017) point out that increased instances of collaboration between schools and juku businesses are, not unexpectedly, for reasons to do with the influence of ‘neoliberal policy choices’ (p. 329). Recalling the earlier discussion in Chap. 2, the lesson to be learnt here is that something that may ordinarily be hidden or hard to recognize may come to surface in times of difficulty. In Chap. 2, it was the Cold War that motivated the occupation forces to jettison its earlier but short-lived leanings toward democratizing Japan’s postwar society and to reinstate the erstwhile powerful right-wing elements to their original positions of influence (Dower, 1999, 2010). It was the oil crisis of 1973 and subsequent economic problems that caused the abandonment of the once unifying metaphor that Japanese companies operated like close-knit families (Sugimoto, 2010). In this case, it is the pandemic that has brought to notice the fact school lessons and juku tutorials (especially online ones)

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might in fact be mutually substitutable ways of delivering a banking mode of education to young people. Both may well qualify as surrogate cultural agencies (see Toh, 2020, 2021) assigned the (un)written role of keeping overseas Japanese education within the straight and narrow confines of prescribed cultural and ideological boundaries. Born and bred of the call to serve the same capitalistic nation-statist master, their similarities uncanny as they are, may be much more than many so-called educators and policy-­ makers might be willing to admit, or parents to ever wish to know.

Discussion In previous work, I have expressed concern over the need for students to be afforded the academic literacy spaces that allow them to look at knowledge critically, contingently, and with a certain sense of agency in its formulation, articulation, and appropriation (Toh, 2016a, 2016b, 2017). A central concern in this regard is to be able to imagine a more democratic pedagogy ‘in which hope is central to agency’, and which comes with a better appreciation of the fact that ‘critical agency cannot exist without a hope that enables one to think otherwise in order to act otherwise’ (Giroux & Filippakou, 2020, p. 2089). Poza and Shannon (2020) similarly question classroom practices that only prepare students to conform to the dictates of standardized assessment systems when they argue for the promotion of critical engagement by having students look at knowledge more causatively, historically, and agentively. With direct reference to Japan, Murphey (2004) considers such heavily standardized forms of assessment, which ultimately may just be ‘an inefficient bureaucratic ritual’ as opposed to being truly educational, to be ‘unjust to Japanese youth, anti-educational and damaging to Japanese society’ (p. 707).

Not-So-Innocent Types of Irony In Adams and Agbenyega’s (2019, p.  662) discussion of the bounded landscapes presented by nation-state schooling, internationally mobile parents are seen to be doubtful and distrustful of the limited ‘futurescapes’ offered by systems and ideologies of their own nation-state curriculum. The ‘imagined and enacted aspirations’ of these parents are said to be one factor that leads them to immerse their children in English-speaking environments and to a conscious ‘avoidance of high stakes exams’ (p. 662). In Parent A’s case, the stress that she felt about her son’s low scores seems to

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suggest that English was to her a ‘study’ subject that had to be studied and tested, rather than a language for communication and learning (Parents E, F, and H). My own observation in Toh (2016a) is that the teaching of English in Japanese institutional contexts tends to be directed more toward having students sit for English tests (also see Kubota, 2011). The same thread of discussion concerning how English testing functions like a form of ‘panoptic surveillance’ or control (Toh, 2016a, p.  58) can be found in scholarly work concerning the way English testing in Japanese institutional contexts functions more like a measurement of disciplinary conformity or is more about buying into a neoliberal myth that reductively connects high test scores to human capital (Stanlaw, 2004; Kubota, 2011; Toh, 2013, 2016a). This assumption is problematized (debunked) in Kubota (2011) in the real-life narrative of someone like Daichi (pseudonym). Kubota (2011) relates from her study on linguistic instrumentalism and human capital that even though someone like Daichi was only a junior college graduate, he was thought by his superiors to be suitable enough to be sent on an overseas posting with his company. In Daichi’s case, the decision to have him deployed overseas rested with his outgoing personality, enthusiasm, personal initiative, and his ‘level of effort’ put into studying for his English language tests ‘rather than proficiency itself’ per se (Kubota, 2011, p. 258). In Takuya’s (pseudonym) case, test scores were actually not used to measure human capital, as he was only asked to go for his English proficiency tests after he was promoted (Kubota, 2011). Testing Them and Insularizing Them For the record, language testing done in a responsible and holistic manner is not just about testing discrete skills like grammar, vocabulary, phonetic sounds using decontextualized bit item or multiple-choice tests. Testing experts argue that valid and reliable tests of language ability (not to mention responsible language teaching) are amenable to the contextualized, contingent, and hybridized nature of language acquisition and use (see Toh, 2016a, for critique on language testing especially the TOEIC; and Toh, 2019, on language acquisition and teaching). McNamara (2001), by way of advocating for more principled (and less neoliberal(ized) or commercially placed and profit-making) testing practices, calls for some attention to be placed on less mechanistic and more enlightened approaches to language testing. Such approaches make the attempt to understand language testing as situated social practice (as much as language itself too is

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the same) and take into account the discursive and socially situated attributes of language performance and enactment. The fact that in Kubota’s (2011) case, the test that is being critiqued (TOEIC or the Test of English for International Communication) is a commercialized test that uses decontextualized discrete multiple choice test items is very telling of the way in which such ways of testing are reductively equated with proficiency and often mistakenly with human capital. According to Avineri and Perren (2020), across different testing contexts, recognition that socially grounded forms of language testing are important for less reductionist views of language and communication continues to be lacking among test designers and administrators. In the present case, it appears that such tests are prone to being used to stoke the demand for juku lessons, which in turn reifies the importance of both of these money-making industries. The irony here too is that English is the language of government, education, and business in Singapore. Adapting to life in Singapore, which involves being able to communicate in English rather than any ability to score well in tests, does not seem to be much of a priority among members of the Japanese population (cf. Toh, 2020, 2021). The emphasis on tests is perhaps understandable as their educational landscape and focus on capital accumulation for the long term are more to be aligned with a promising future back in Japan (despite Kubota’s (2011) findings to the contrary). The nature of what is educationally prioritized and what is not is consistent with the fact that a Japanese-medium education is never going to be part of a Japanese child’s better understanding of the Singapore they are growing up in. Neither is there any evidence that the learning of English is part of what might be a more democratizing or eye-opening move (see Hyslop-Margison & Sears, 2006) to help the children make meaningful as opposed to superficial connections with the surrounding environment of Singaporean young people, for whom English is the language for learning and social interaction. Juku lessons, testing, and the way English teaching is carried out combine and collude to keep these Japanese children within a social bubble where greater contact with the local multicultural environment is preempted, disincentivized, or impossible. Draconian Outcomes and Dickensian Subjectivities In this regard, the Japanese-medium schools mentioned previously appear to qualify as ones that Adams and Agbenyega (2019) would describe as offering a form of ‘nation-state schooling’ exemplified by their adherence

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to a national curriculum (p. 657). Such a curriculum may be supportive of ‘rote learning, competitive testing, [the] benchmarking [of] standards and assessment’ (p.  657)—which are the very reductionist ingredients of an oppressive system that plays into the hands of the juku industry. Adams and Agbenyega (2019) tellingly (given the present concerns) recognize that such a form of schooling may qualify as one that is directed toward the building of ‘a productive [and] profitable workforce’ (p. 657), which they, referencing Ball and Nikita (2014), note to be consistent with the dictates of neoliberalist agendas. This is again ironic as many of the parents here, being (the wives of) highly successful executives, would arguably, not be in any way thinking about their children as being fashioned or molded into productive or profitable neoliberal subjects as such (see Kubota, 2011, for the futility of taking this path). This, for any parent’s best or worst (most enlightened or most ignorant) of intentions, would never be the case, not especially when parents will only be too well-­ meaningly hoping to have their children score better. Adams and Agbenyega (2019, p. 657) note that with an overall focus that is centered on grades, it would be most unlikely for facilitations of ‘critical, creative thinking and interpersonal communication’ to feature at all as a priority, not in the tutoring centers (for whatever ‘academic’ benefits that might be gained from them) and perhaps not even in the children’s schools, for that matter (see Toh, 2021). Both institutions may ultimately have the makings of a well-disguised Dickensian workhouse operating under the influence of a yet more powerful but invisible neoliberal regime (of ‘truth’), within which are hidden both the myths and promises of neoliberal human capitalization (see Kubota, 2011, who exposes these myths for what they are; and Acciaioli’s (1981) discussion of Bourdieu’s work, for the similar use of a Dickensian metaphor to expose oppressive approaches to understanding social phenomena).

Claiming and Marking Out the Spaces of Exclusivity Spatially, a downtown Singapore location for a cram tutoring center is also tellingly connected with images of exclusivity and high status (see Parent H’s concerns over rentals). For parents of the Japanese mercantilist class who would certainly be very careful about where they rented and set up their homes, ‘[r]esiding in a condominium located nearer the jukus (Japanese cram schools located centrally downtown) is a veritable sign of status while residing in a condominium outside the central business

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district commands less prestige’ (Toh, 2020, p. 284). Indeed, Parent D’s son regularly returned home late at night after juku because his rental condominium was not within the prime business district but slightly out of town, nearer to Singapore’s famed zoological gardens. Japanese wives regularly compare the rents of different condominiums and as I observe in Toh (2020), this is done as a way of referencing or insinuating social status. Within this backdrop of social status consciousness, the irony is that the type of learning (competitive testing, standards bench marking) that is inflexibly enforced through tutoring centers (or Dickensian workhouses) is akin to a straitjacketing type of schooling more suited to the fashioning of subjugated identities. Cram tutoring in this sense, could qualify as an albeit precocious or presumptuous form of child exploitation, with parents unintendingly being its prime movers (colluders). In this case, institutional authoritarianism and parental obliviousness are found to be melded and embedded nicely into systems, structures, and ‘educational’ technologies that function as matters of commonsense. In Giroux and Filippakou’s (2020) view, such a situation makes possible a perfect case of a crisis of consciousness. Bourdieu (1977) too would observe that the ‘objective homogenizing of group habitus’ as an outcome of homogeneities in various ‘conditions of existence’, enable ‘practices to be objectively harmonized [almost] without intentional calculation’, and thereby ‘taken for granted’ (p. 80). The taken-for-granted belief is that ‘[a]ttendance at respected high schools improves a student’s chances for entry into a prestigious university, which in turn, enhances the student’s career opportunities and marriage prospects’ (Abe & Igawa, 1998, p. 23). This same belief extends into the practice of subjecting one’s children to cram schooling in a well-­ intentioned bid to ensure such a favorable future eventuality.

Whether Schools and After-School Tutoring Centers Operate Synergistically or Antagonistically Although ostensibly or superficially synergistic in nature in the sense that both types of institutions are involved in the teaching of young people, symbiotic relationships between school and tutoring centers are generally hard to observe or allowed to be too apparent or too cozy, certainly not to any extent to warrant any talk or rumoring of mutual interests in terms of business (see, however, section on juku businesses and their opportunistic

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behaviors in Chap. 1). In certain ways, the opposite seems to be true as parents like Parents A and B seem to feel that there are apparent points of disjuncture or disconnection between what is taught in school, how it is taught, and what supposedly takes place in jukus. Parent A is impatient because of the mismatch between the level of mathematics taught in class and how the subject is actually tested, which might quite simply indicate an internal problem or lack of coordination within the school itself. For Parent A, it is the juku that ostensibly promises the necessary focused drilling for her child to do better in tests at school. Parent B has the impression that teachers in regular schools are not as attentive, enthusiastic, or energetic as the ones that might be found teaching in the jukus. For this reason, Parent B thinks that juku lessons may be a way to make up for instances where there is a relative lack of energy and enthusiasm in school teaching. Concerning what they see as inadequacies in school teaching, Parents A and B appear to have similar views even though Parent B’s impressions would have been shaped and colored by her experience of life in an English-speaking Western country, where she had worked and studied. Both Parent B and Parent G highlighted their concerns over the ‘plainness’ or lack of enthusiasm in teaching styles. It is interesting that both have arrived at the same conclusion from two different directions. While Parent B looks to the teachers in the English-speaking West for comparison, Parent G likens the teaching in her child’s school to that of a ‘no-­ frills’ type school in Japan. Certain schools back in Japan, or so she says, have begun to offer challenging project-based programs and creative group-based activities as novel approaches to teaching, and do not face the problem of teacher turnover. In either of these cases, the Japanese-medium institutions in question are spoken of somewhat disadvantageously as regards what appears to be the shortcomings of lackluster teaching styles, resulting in the need for after-school tutoring programs to make up for these shortcomings. As businesses accountable to their shareholders, jukus are in the market to make a profit through the offering of tutoring services. For the purposes of increasing client satisfaction and maintaining stellar reputation, their status as businesses means that tangibly positive outcomes in terms of improved test grades are crucial contributors to the health of their financial bottom line. This important consideration obliges tutors to feel that they need to meet the expectations of fee-paying parents, and to even remain on the premises beyond working hours (sometimes past ten in the

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evening) to answer complex mathematical questions or those on English grammar. Good reputation by reason of tangible results matters very much when it comes to whether a tutoring business thrives or fails to. Parent A and Parent C similarly highlight a juku’s dependence on skillful tutors, some of whom may have once been schoolteachers with expert knowledge of the various ways in which examination questions are set (Parent A), and some who, while not actually licensed as teachers, are talented and inspiring people, in their own right (Parent C). Making Business Out of a Deficit Learning Model in the Shadow Education Sector Perhaps the lesson to be drawn is that schools as large organizations within larger monolithic systems, in and of themselves, may not be entirely equipped to meet the demands and expectations of individual parents and students. This latter group seems to want for themselves what must be to them a dynamic outfit like a tutoring center that can provide the additional turbo-boost that much needed for excellent scores in high-stakes examinations to materialize. For the parents, felt or perceived systemic or institutional limitations to ‘good’ teaching in school can be overcome by paying leaner and meaner cram tutoring centers to train, cajole, or drive their children to perform better. All too apparently, it takes a deficit approach to teaching and learning and a (mistaken) view of education that sees knowledge as static content that can be ‘banked’ into the minds of student-receptacles (see Freire, 2000), to make possible the unqualified trust that parents place in jukus. It is this sort of (arguably misplaced) trust that paves the way for jukus as businesses to establish themselves as creditable and hence profitable operations. It appears from these observations that a banking form of education that is geared toward the filling of learning deficits is one that is patently attractive to potential paying customers and thus exploitable as a form of business.

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Disguising Hopelessness While Advancing a Pejorative Form of Hope Cram tutoring for the elite as described touches on matters that concern societal inequalities and inequities (Giroux & Filippakou, 2020), while mimicking a perjured kind of hope. Typically, such kinds of ‘hope’ are mythologized within a neoliberal rhetoric of human capital, material gain, monetized rewards, and elevated social status. This crassly pejorative version of hope paints a diametrically contrasting picture to Freirean understandings of hope as a quest or promise for more transformed, democratized, humanized, and enlightened ways of meaning, being, and becoming (Freire, 2000). The merits of ‘mutuality, collaboration, cooperation, communication, and relationship building’ that critical educators believe to be crucial in the construction and negotiation of knowledge and relationships (Avineri & Perren, 2020, p. 70) are made to give way to narrow discrete monolithic understandings of meaning, relating, learning, (ac)counting, and numbering. Within such monolithic narrowness, Freire (2000) observes that any type of content that is taught, ‘whether values or empirical dimensions of reality, tend[s] … to become lifeless and petrified’ as long as reality is seen as if it were ‘motionless, static, compartmentalized, and predictable’ (p. 71). Similarly, when marks, grades, money, and status are made a priority, oppressive forms of measurement, classification, conformism, and control are liable to come in the way of more critically conscious and democratized forms of treating and educating people (Freire, 2000). In Murphey (2004), typical problems teachers face when preparing students for university entrance examinations in Japan are highlighted. Pre-service and in-service teachers tell of the difficulty of having lively student interactions in class, as they ‘need to train students to pass … entrance exams’ (p.  704). In other words, while an interactive style of teaching might be suitable for times when teachers come together for pre-­ service and in-service programs on how to teach interactively, Murphey (2004) notes from actual classroom observations that ‘exam-oriented teaching’, which may inspire ‘half the class to sleep’ (p. 704), is commonly given priority, especially in the spring of each year. Education institutions are invariably enmeshed in ‘a system-wide fixation with rankings – of prestige, status, and economic power’ (Kennedy, 2020, p. 53) from which it is difficult to disengage or escape. Within this system, both teachers and students are positioned disadvantageously.

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Design as a Form of Hope or a Futile Undertaking of Hopelessness Leading academic literacies scholar, Theresa Lillis, argues for the importance of situating knowledge creation within students’ own enacted histories as learners and as human beings in their own right (Lillis, 2003). A vital aspect of knowledge and meaning creation in this respect is for pedagogical discourses to attain a design mode whereby creative energies generated by meaning negotiation are enabled, to bring about fresh ways in which meaning can be configured and enacted. Within the ‘banking’ mode of teaching (Freire, 2000) tutor-led cramming, repetitive drilling and overlearning take place at the expense of design initiatives—which would effectively be all but disabled. For banking, cramming, drilling, and overlearning to take place unimpededly, reflexivity and design (Lillis, 2003) have to be superseded, suppressed, and held in abeyance. What Freire (2014) considers to be a contentistic and mechanistic form of education must instead prevail alongside a learning regimen that naturalizes what Giroux and Filippakou (2020) describe as ‘pedagogical disimagination’ (p.  2087). If education were to be likened to a chain of evolving life-forms, banking, cramming, drilling, and overlearning within a mode of juku tutoring that panders unmitigatedly to the free market and the narrowest of examination formats would be one of the lowest or most unevolved in the chain. In what may be an intentional way to frustrate genuine initiatives to make education the participative and reflexive undertaking that Freire (2005) thinks it should be, such forms of disimagination and contentism may be the very distractors that thwart well-meaning attempts to view action and reflection as necessary ingredients of true learning. The contextual histories of whatever is learnt (acontextually) must be obscured or hidden, as must the relationships that intrinsically exist between things, thoughts, and people, between ‘thinking subjects and knowable objects’ (Freire, 2005, p. 87). The replacement for more hope-filled forms of education is, in this case, a false generosity (Freire, 2000; Yung, 2021) that tempts and tantalizes with rewards those who believe that the ‘tireless hard work’ (Freire, 2005, p. 73) that goes into a particularly belabored form of learning opens the way to a dazzlingly bright future.

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Acontextuality as Both Control and Chimera The form of cramming encountered here may indeed be as acontextual as its standardized curriculum legitimizes a static form of learning and knowing and routinizes a prescribed form of student somatic behavior. In Bourdieuan language, such somatic behavior becomes a part of the bodily hexis, which expresses (and enacts) a habitus of social and behavioral dispositions. The meanings of such dispositions, which children are said to be ‘particularly attentive to’, are ‘acquired in the family’ and structured through schooling experiences, particularly the ‘reception and assimilation of … pedagogic messages[s]’ that help in the further ‘structuring of … subsequent experiences’ (Bourdieu, 1977, p. 87). Part of this same heavy-­ handedness comes from the essentializing of teaching content as static renditions of information unopen to further discussion or imagination. One rather ironic aspect of reality here is that such regimes of teaching and drilling are actually not as innocuously acontextual as the static nature of the content they set out to purvey seems to belie. Behind the existence of these cramming centers and the systemic strictures they perpetuate is an equally powerful and very much contextually situated (afforded) set of controls. This set of controls can be found existing within the white-collar Japanese community in question and, needless to say, its system of schooling. As noted in Chap. 3, this particular system exists and holds together in the form that it does owing to the strong presence of Japanese families whose fathers are deployed to Singapore by dint of their employment in white-collar jobs by Japanese business establishments. The fact that such a form of contextuality is easily overlooked speaks of the ability of capitalism, in this case Japanese capitalistic maneuvers into a Southeast Asian setting, to dissimulate or reconfigure itself. In similar vein, a static acontextual curricular regime can only be made possible by the very contextual realities that are conducive to its bid to be static and acontextual—invisibly so at that. This dissembled form of oppression and disempowerment sees to it that attempts to bring in more democratic forms of education are caught in a triple bind of hopelessness. The community sustains these curricular and ideological controls, the schools entertain them, and the tutoring centers get paid handsomely to maintain them. If it takes a whole village to raise a child, it also takes the ‘[g]enesis amnesia’ of a whole community to perpetuate the myths that naturalize a whole ‘community of dispositions’ (Bourdieu, 1977, p. 79).

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High-Stakes Examinations and Long Hours Spent on Studies as Hope or Futility On an even more paradoxical note, the sorts of hopelessness and futility described above does not prevent juku lessons from coming across in practice as hyper-energized forms of teaching (see Dierkes, 2010) with ‘good’ tutors providing convincing solutions to cryptic problems in mathematics or items of English grammar and structure. This unfortunately may only be one of the more ‘attractive’ parts of juku attendance. Judging by the hard work put in by Parent D’s teenage son, juku lessons can actually be a heavily routinized or robotized form of drilling that is geared toward the feeding of facts and information for high-stakes examinations. Like it certainly was for this boy, the experience itself can be a physically exhausting one. He endured fifteen-hour days several times a week and had little opportunity for sports and recreation (unlike Parent H’s child) or to socialize with his peers. This was perhaps the sort of meaningless pressure that Parent H and his wife were hoping that their son would not have to go through when they opted for a more holistic and balanced education in an international school. As soon as this decision was reached, the boy was taken out of the juku. As for Parent D’s son, evenings that were not spent at juku were spent completing the exercise sheets required by his tutors. McVeigh’s (2006) observation that this sort of ‘cramming education’ exacts its toll of negative consequences is proven here in the saddest of ways in that students like Parent D’s son ‘are socialized to cram’ (p. 173). As learning for these young people is ‘transmuted into preparation for one large, comprehensive test’ (p. 173), little consideration is given to how education might contribute to learner dignity, as Freire (2005) dedicatedly argues for. Watanabe (2013) notes that the after-school education business is not known for emancipatory or transformative views on education and very often ‘stands aloof from (sic) any such trends’ (p. 86). For the boy and his family, this was the price to pay for a place in a good high school, not apart from the frequent arguments he had with his parents due to sheer frustration and overwork. The very idea of ‘high stakes’ in the context of discussing testing and examination assessment extends beyond a matter of metaphorical allusion or turn-of-phrase—and is of course not new among academics and scholars when they write critically in the area (cf. McNamara & Roever, 2006; Allen, 2016; Winke, 2020). In the present case, what is putatively at stake in these examinations are a student’s future in education and employment,

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even if such examinations may in the first instance be ‘bleeding the life out of the youth of Japan’ (Murphey, 2001, p. 37). Fortunately for Parent D’s son, he did well enough to be admitted into a reputable institution in central Japan not far from his grandfather’s home, which according to his mother was due in large part to the help he received at the juku he attended. Stakes will be even higher when this boy competes for a place in a popular university faculty and when he, on coming of age, makes an entry into the job market. To achieve success in such an examination-­ oriented system, parents, tutors, and students have to co-labor as (‘high’) stakeholders, in programmatic fashion. Finding a place in high school and university and making (staging) a successful entry into the adult world of professional employment begins much earlier—when a child is obliged or prevailed upon to cram. Questions Raised About Admission Examinations Not as an aside, the matter of fairness and equity in the administering of university admissions procedures has been questioned by scholars studying the system in Japan. Murphey (2001) notes that the system itself is divided into subsystems. A place in university can in practice be gained in three different ways: ‘through formal examinations, self-recommendation, or teachers’ recommendations’ (McVeigh, 2006, p. 174). Entry into middle schools, high schools, and universities, can moreover be influenced by institutional affiliations, where students studying in institutions belonging to the same gakko hojin or school foundation may be given priority, an arrangement that McVeigh (2006) likens to the experience of riding up an escalator (also see Chap. 3). The question of equality and fairness comes in when entry to university by way of recommendation runs the risk of being thought of as a ‘clear example of favoritism’ and the application of ‘double standard[s]’ (McVeigh, 2006, p. 174) while the true ‘meaning of education in high school dies a little more’ (Murphey, 2001, p. 37). The problem here is that a student who enters university by way of recommendation may not be of a similar caliber as one ‘entering with the regular tests’ (McVeigh, 2006, p. 174), as schools making the recommendations may do so for students whom they think might have difficulty gaining admission by another route, but ‘are otherwise nice kids’ (McVeigh, 2006, p. 174). Students who are brighter and more academically inclined, who may not gain admission through recommendation would on this account ‘suffer the inanities of the education-examination system’, which in

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McVeigh’s view (2006, p. 174) is a form of unfairness, and in Murphey’s view (2001), unmeritocratic. In Murphey (2004), the author writes critically of the way Japanese university entrance examinations are set, highlighting questions of their validity and reliability. Providing an account of a professionally challenging experience on being asked to be part of an examinations committee in a Japanese university, the author relates how he sought to provide strong reasons for entrance examinations to themselves be evaluated for their validity and reliability. Specifically, test items needed to be evaluated for their discrimination and facility indices, which would reveal whether such items would sort out students who had or had not mastered what was being tested and whether certain items might be too hard or easy (Brown, 2003; Murphey, 2004). University policy-makers, however, were not easily persuaded about making the necessary changes to examination formats, or to include items with higher discrimination and facility indices. Kikuchi (2006) similarly observes that institutions, especially the more prestigious ones, are less likely to want to change their examination formats as there is normally ‘little perceived need to attract more applicants’ (p. 94), despite the demographic changes that have come with Japan’s low birth rate. Besides these valid concerns over fairness, McVeigh (2006) highlights the more worrying question of the way in which some Japanese universities are outsourcing the setting of entrance examinations to organizations in the private sector, including jukus. The fairness of this practice has been questioned as private-sector organizations setting these examinations also make it their business to sell sample questions to potential candidates (Abe, 2018). The other concern that comes with this arrangement is the fact that testing organizations may be motivated by profit, which means that there is a risk that test scores may be inflated (Abe, 2018) as different organizations compete for candidates. As for concerns over profit-making, McVeigh (2006) also highlights the fact that universities may not be entirely above the practice of regarding entrance examinations ‘[f]rom a purely economic perspective’ (p. 173), as testing a higher number of candidates can add to a university’s income. Concerns like the ones raised in this section point to inherent problems and contradictions within the heavily examination-oriented system that is the reason for parents to send their children to jukus It seems paradoxical that while the number of students attending jukus in Japan continues to be relatively high (Deguchi, 2018), the very examinations that they are hard at work in preparation for are themselves a subject of controversy

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vis-à-vis fundamental questions over their fairness and effect on students (Murphey, 2001, 2004). The fact that so much faith continues to be put into jukus begs the question of whether such faith may not in fact be unfounded or misplaced, as if parents would either be making decisions out of anxiety, self-deception, or buying credulously into a well-spun myth.

Parental Ambition and Design as Reasons for Juku Parents E and F are an ambitious and internationally savvy couple. This savviness allows them to support their daughter’s education resolutely and decisively, including enrolling her in an English-medium international school midway through her elementary school years. Theirs is a desire for the best of both worlds for their daughter and Singapore became for them the most ideal of situations, with its wide selection of English-medium international schools, but even more fortuitously, conveniently located branches of Japan’s most popular juku businesses. With both types of institutions on hand to cater to their wants and ambitions (for their daughter), Parents E and F were ready to put their well-charted plan into action. To be sure, wanting the best of both worlds for their high-achieving daughter meant the dilemma of having to make a temporary move away from the set path of the Japanese system, without this move being a total severance of ties. The move itself had to be carefully planned and executed as it involved deviating from the normal path mapped out for Japanese students. In any case, in seeking to instill greater confidence in their child (which they succeeded in doing) through having her achieve greater fluency in English, they were already unwittingly acting in conformity to another set of assumptions—governing the way social and cultural capital gained from the ‘wider’ exposure is presumed to be a necessary part of human capital accumulation. In essence, their daughter would have in her the makings of the same internationally savvy neoliberal subjects that they themselves already were.

Matters Which Implicate or Disable Agency and Individual Empowerment From the above observations, there seems to be little evidence of any sort of feeling among the parents concerned that there could be any leeway for them to think about matters relating to their children’s individual identity

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as an important part of their education (or future as human beings). The vaguely possible exception might be Parent H, who, as an independent-­ minded person himself, could have been wanting the same for his son when making the decision for him move to an international school, something apparently more holistic or at least different. As for considerations of individual identity as a way of promoting greater reflexivity, such a possibility seems to be much less of a priority (see Chap. 4). The need for cram tutoring classes is heavily dictated by considerations to do with school assessment and high school entrance criteria (notwithstanding Parents E and Fs’ adventuresomeness and Parent H’s decision to opt out), where assessment is highly structured and dominated by discrete item-based testing. More socially or pragmatically based forms of testing (see Avineri & Perren, 2020) are not possible given the traditional preference for positivist-summative approaches to assessment, reporting, and gate-keeping. Teachers too are said to be severely limited in their capacity to become agents of hope and reform as they may either not be in a position to bring about change or are already absorbed into institutionally defined and designated roles and cultures that do not reward teacher initiative (Murphey, 2001; Tsukada, 2010; see Ball, 2016). Teachers, despite all good intentions, may also become inadvertent agents of the status quo and thus end up reinforcing existing inequalities and social relations (Tsukada, 2010). Murphey (2001) notes that junior high school and high school teachers may also be part of the same circle of stagnation or complacency that preserves existing arrangements that allow jukus to basically take the lead and upper hand in examination preparation (see section on whether schools and jukus operate in synergy, and the views of Parents A, B and G on teacher passivity). There are moreover deeper concerns to do with the fact that parent and student subjectivities relating to people like those discussed here are essentially shaped or dictated by the discourses and cultural politics of the Japanese big business juggernaut. This is a juggernaut that holds sway over a narrow range of habitus and social positionings like those of the businessman, expatriate manager, accompanying wife and mother, or expatriate child. In finding ways of having their children move ahead in life or to do better than a neighboring child, it is ironical that parents may be unintentionally taking the wrong path, which deprives their children of the ‘freedom of academic thought and expression’ that a capitalistic neoliberal ethos invariably and severely restricts (Adams & Agbenyega, 2019, p. 657). The repetition and cramming that students are typically exposed

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to are said to be ‘far removed from the skills and attributes required for [coping well with] global/local shifts’, the sort of flexibility and dexterity that twenty-first-century living entails (Adams & Agbenyega, 2019, p. 657). Perhaps not nearly what Mirai’s worldly wise parents (in Chap. 2) were trying to do, Parents E and F might have been seeking a taste of these sort of skills for their daughter by sending her to an international school during the day, while making sure that she continued to be drilled and crammed at her juku in the evenings. Their actions, in reality, seem much like an undertaking in hopelessness or an admission of powerlessness if they were seeking an alternative pathway to bring to birth a ‘different’ world for their daughter (see Kennedy, 2020)—which in other circumstances might speak more of their possession of true agency. As if predestined to be so, the child was invariably returned to the original fold after a hiatus of three years away from Japanese-medium education (save for her evening classes). Destiny wise, by giving a detailed account of the ways in which Japanese children are cradled, mentored, and tutored by their mothers from kindergarten all the way to high school into conformity in thought and behavior, Dickensheets (1996) makes the point that ‘Japanese schoolchildren, in a sense, are actually salarymen (sic) in training’ and just as ‘the salaryman dedicates his life (sic) to the company, so do children devote themselves to the school’ (p. 76). Meanwhile, testing and assessment that appear to be tools of panoptic surveillance used for the engenderment of conformity (McNamara & Roever, 2006; Toh, 2013, 2016a) give credence to the assumption that students are in a state of deficit and learning remains a matter of making-­ good this deficit condition (Freire, 2000). Thus, even if one wished to, one would hardly be able to take comfort in Parent C’s observation that juku attendance helped her child out of his listlessness, adapt to a regular study routine, and become more organized time wise. The idea of being regularized into a routinized regime through attendance at juku classes hardly speaks of any sort of freedom to think and engage with new ideas that young people deserve better to have, even though the child’s initial problem was clearly a worrying one of listlessness. Dickensheets’ (1996) observation about schooling being a training to be salaried workers is not helped by descriptions in Gordon (2005) about the ‘crumbling’ status of teachers in contemporary Japanese society (p.  459; also see discussion above on teachers being obliged to teach towards examinations). Gordon (2005) explored the question of whether

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teachers were, in her words, ‘sinking to the level of ordinary salarimen [salaried workers]’ (p.  462). This may be more the case with parents ‘raised in [the] years or prosperity’ who, being more indulging of their children, may place ‘blame for academic and social failure on teachers’ (Gordon, 2005, p. 459). Whereas teaching was once supposed to be an honored profession ‘passed down within families’, some of the teachers surveyed in Gordon (2005) felt that there had already been a shift toward ‘a more business-like model’ where teaching would be no different from working in a company (p. 462). This stands in contrast to Freire’s (2005) idea of having good teaching benchmarked to a commitment to justice, liberty, and defense of the vulnerable. One is again unfortunately reminded of the lackluster impression of teachers among parents like Parent A and C, such an impression being attributed in Gordon (2005) to reasons to do with the difficulty of distinguishing them ‘from other white-collar workers’ (p. 462) engaged in the world of business.

After-School Tutoring Begins at a Tender Age Seen in perspective, attending after-school tutoring sessions actually begins much earlier for Japanese students than when they eventually reach middle school age, even though admittedly the stakes for older students are that much higher when it comes to the need to enroll in these classes. Japanese kindergartens are known to have affiliated cram schools or tutoring centers to which the running of after-school tutoring classes is duly outsourced. Teachers from these neighboring centers routinely conduct after-hours tutoring sessions on kindergarten grounds for children as young as the age of four or five. In this way, Japanese children are grooved or encultured into the habit of attending extra lessons from a tender and impressionable age. Subjects like Kokugo or national language including the kanji and arithmetic are taught in these classes, which extend from late afternoon into early evening. On days when after-school tutoring classes are held, children are accompanied to school twice, once in the morning and once in the late afternoon, by a parent. In many cases, actual or serious teaching of the hiragana alphabet, kanji, counting, and simple arithmetic is left (outsourced) to the after-­ school tutor. Kindergarten teachers generally do not spend much time honing-in on these areas. Much of a typical day in kindergarten is devoted to games, singing, dancing, and other socializing activities including organized or choreographed exercise routines like calisthenics and drills, which

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require the children to move in unison, while cued to the penetrating sounds of the teacher’s whistle. Special occasions like school open days, community days, festivals and sports days require even more preparation involving the putting up of artwork and decorations, which account for the considerable amounts of time spent, too, on art and craft. Such activities typifying the Japanese kindergarten experience are seen to be carefully replicated in Singapore (Chew & Thang, 2006; see Chap. 1). A senior administrator at a Japanese kindergarten in Singapore provides an account of how the kindergarten aims to mirror the Japanese system. To ensure that teachers can adapt to the culture and internal ethics of the kindergarten, only teachers trained in Japan are recruited after a careful selection process. [T]his is the system they have in Japan; naturally, we must follow the system and have Japanese teachers. “Totally the same system as in Japan,” this is what we are trying to say. (Senior kindergarten administrator in Chew & Thang, 2006, p. 247)

To qualify to teach in this kindergarten, teachers must adhere and subscribe to ‘the same norms and educational ideology approved by Japanese society’ (Chew & Thang, 2006, p. 247), down to the application of uniform procedures when handling child misbehavior. The senior administrator offers insights into the way the children are taught to be Japanese. But Japanese are Japanese from the very day they are born, aren’t they? Well, I think nature must play a very important role … In Singapore, there is nothing but heat all year round, isn’t it? This is very different in Japan where we have clear seasonal changes … We have different songs for different seasons like in spring, we have got “spring songs” and in the fall, we have got “autumn songs” … so that the child has got something to talk with his mother (sic) … I think we try to develop the “flower heart” (hana no kokoro) in the child. You know how a Japanese child would draw the picture of a flower, completing it with a smiling face; and the child is able to feel like the flower. But I don’t think the Singaporean child does that, right? Isn’t it so? (Senior kindergarten administrator in Chew & Thang, 2006, pp. 248–249)

In terms of its philosophy at least, and certainly despite their very young age, it can be seen from the senior administrator’s detailed account that the kindergarten seeks to instill in the children a sense that they must look

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to Japan and Japanese norms as points of reference for their learning, despite (or perhaps precisely because of) their being in an overseas location. Long Hours Spent at Tutoring Back in Japan, on a typical late afternoon or early evening when after-­ school tutoring session are conducted, children of kindergarten age are taught two subjects, each for a duration of 50 or 60 minutes. Workbooks and materials in colorful folders are provided by the tutoring school and time in most sessions is spent on completing repetitive exercises found in these materials. Besides the teacher, there is usually a teacher-assistant who assists with restless children or those who need to learn at a slower pace. Like their parents (mainly the fathers) who spend long hours at their places of work, Japanese children are guided and routinized from an early age to accept that the extra number of hours put into after-school studies is usual and normal. Indeed, these sessions are often represented and treated as further opportunities for socializing, both among the children themselves as well as their mothers who ordinarily gather around the kindergarten compound before and after these weekly or twice weekly sessions. An element of fun and friendship is included as part of reinforcing the message that these early evening classes are part of a normal routine. At the end of a typical session, the mothers who are standing patiently along the classroom corridors just before dismissal are usually given a fiveor ten-minute summary of the day’s lessons and instructions on how to guide their children through the homework that has been set. Dismissal time is usually very busy for both teachers and teacher-assistants. These days, instead of the traditional bow, children expect to be given ‘high-­ fives’ by their teacher or teacher-assistant as they make their way out of the classroom. Crowded if sometimes drab-looking bicycle parking lots around the kindergarten compound are made alive by the lively noises generated by the departing mothers and children as the fading daylight gives way all too quickly to the placid silence of nightfall in Japanese suburbia. After-school tutoring classes for Japanese children of kindergarten age are but only the start of many long years of after-school tutoring, the hours spent on which will only increase and not decrease as the children grow into teen-hood. As ‘growing up in Japan is marked by the tests one takes’, which then mark ‘the defining moments of one’s existence’ (Kennedy, 2020, p.  53), these beginning years are only a foretaste of

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steeper challenges to come. In the meantime, it may be seen that among Japanese early childhood education providers, symbiotic relationships are already firmly in existence between them and surrounding tutoring centers in the business of running after-school tutoring classes.

Considering the Possibility that Parents Are Looking in the Wrong Direction Finally, as a flashback to Chap. 3’s discussion on the psychedelic descriptions of the unconventionality of Japanese popular culture embodied in the work of Kyary Pamyu Pamyu and her fellow idols in the kawaii (cuteness) movement, the above descriptions of the life trajectories and identity landscapes of Japanese expatriate children are a contrast to the more contemporary aspects of Japanese creativity (see Lim, 2017). The fact that the vested interests of the parents of these children are in those very conventionally prescribed pathways of success may mean that these children may be deprived of the more creatively humanizing elements of life as represented and honestly acknowledged in the work of creative artists like Kyary Pamyu Pamyu. Addressing the problem of the culture of control that exists within Japanese education institutions, Kennedy (2020) correctly observes that individuals ‘cannot be allowed to be bracketed off from the production of a culture’ on pain of falling prey to neoliberal capitalism’s ‘crisis of spirit’ (p. 58, italics in original). While sitting for tests and examinations are about getting the right answers and achieving high grades, popularized renditions of human vulnerability or fallibility in the work of Kyary Pamyu Pamyu appeal to the more vulnerable yet innovative inner reaches of the human psyche, as seen for example in the deliberate use of ‘seemingly nonsensical and grammatically inaccurate lyrics’ in songs that are sung (Lim, 2017, p. 147). What seems to be happening here is a genuine attempt to ‘push beyond the judgmental gazes of social expectations’ imposed by society. Lim (2017) argues that ‘[m]ainstream values create insecurities in the psyche of young people’ and Kyary’s appeal lies in part in the fact that she acknowledges these very insecurities ‘by making them cool through deliberate mistakes in her music’ (p. 147). The point too that such forms of popular culture enjoy a healthy following in Singapore betrays the fact that these expatriate parents, for all their well-meaning intentions, are looking away from aspects of their

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Singaporean domicile that genuinely appreciates and welcomes the Japanese presence. While this presents another facet of the Singapore-­ Japan narrative begun in Chap. 1 and followed up in Chap. 3, it is one that speaks of the more fraternal and humanizing aspects of a narrative that is otherwise heavily skewed toward a set way of living, learning, exploiting, and profiting, underwritten by the running of big businesses and the accumulation of money. Lim (2017) notes that Singaporeans are known for their fondness of things Japanese—given the subject of this present discussion—almost in a manner that demonstrates a reverse form of hegemony. This is where a case of reverse-hegemony collusively accepts a well-­ packaged and well-nuanced form of hegemonic power and influence with a certain degree of willingness and readiness, calling to mind the readiness of Singaporeans to be voracious consumers of Japanophilia. Such willingness duly acknowledged (and as per what has already been recognized in Chap. 3), the very act of exporting and popularizing such a radically unconventional commodified form of entertainment and popular culture is no less, subtly or blatantly, reminiscent of the operations of Japanese nation-statist capitalism, but in a different guise or packaging.

Two Irreconcilably Different Life-Worlds Reminiscent of the Duality of Uchi and Soto Representations What seems to be emerging for further observation, therefore, is the existence and continuance of two very different social and life-worlds on the same small island that makes up present-day Singapore. The people in both of these life-worlds may not be totally aware or familiar with each other’s existence, because they are capsuled in two fundamentally different habitus and socio-discursive spaces. There is, on the one hand, a busy and industrious community of Japanese people who work their hardest in the Japanese companies that have sent them on overseas postings to a distant country. With their families in tow, they carry out their life activities in an earnestly beavering manner, which includes undertakings to properly educate their next generation in school, and after, in evening and weekend juku classes. This group sets its sights on homeland Japan where the promise of success for their children lies in their gaining entry into good schools and elite institutions. Theirs would be the way various cultural identity groups ‘are reproduced

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and produce themselves’ through ‘communicative or expressive cultural practices in various cultural sites’ and through ‘commodity consumption’ (Foley, 2002, p. 471). While in Singapore, they are housed all too exclusively in high-end condominiums complete with swimming pools and tennis courts whereas most Singaporeans make their homes in public housing which take the form of high-occupancy high-density high-rise government-­ built leasehold tenements (Toh, 2020, 2021). Scholars have observed that the Japanese community in Singapore tends to be isolated not just from the local community at large, but also from the wider expatriate community as well (see Ben-Ari, 2003, 2006; Chew & Thang, 2006). There is, on the other hand, a broad enough segment of the Singaporean population which is enthusiastically devoted to things Japanese, ranging from their interest in Japanese products to finding entertainment or satisfaction in Japanese fashion, cuisine, cosmetics, toys, gadgets, ornamental fish, music and entertainment. This is the segment of population that makes frequent pilgrimages to Japan because they are enamored of both the country and its culture forms, seen particularly in frequent outward displays of good manners and refined language (see McVeigh, 2002; also see Chap. 2). In similar vein, the Japan Creative Centre in Singapore organizes regular events to bring together Singapore’s Japanophiles while the Japanophiles themselves are a well-organized group which fraternizes regularly to exchange rare collectors’ items and memorabilia and to share their passion for things Japanese. Japanese fairs and exhibitions organized by local Japanese entities are well attended by Singaporeans who support them with eagerness (see Lim, 2017). It may be said that these are two life-worlds, which help to encapsulate almost perfectly the facets of Japanese culture that play out the way in which the inside and the outside, the uchi and the soto, are two diametrically different ways of portraying what may actually be one and the same entity. In this case, the uchi side of things concerns the private world of Japanese families, their hopes and aspirations embodied in their hard work and the schooling and after-school cramming their children are committed to. The soto side is what the Japanese proudly display and share readily with the non-Japanese Singaporeans, their popularized forms of art, music, fashion, and entertainment that attract a keen following of otakus (freaks) and enthusiasts. Yet it is only the soto aspect that is meant to be seeable and saleable on a tatemae basis (Makino, 2002; also see Chaps. 2 and 6), as in its being considered fit for consumption by a consuming Japanophilic Singaporean

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public. Both the uchi and honne aspects are relegated to the realm of privacy, if not secrecy. This is why a book needs to be written about Japanese after-school tutoring.

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CHAPTER 6

A Concluding Critique of Education, Entrepreneurialism, and Essentialism

Japanese after-school tutoring thrives on monolithic methodologies that feed on narrow and static understandings of knowledge, meaning creation, and learning. Study materials are overtaught and overlearned by way of worksheets, repetitive exercises, and mechanistic drills. Trends in the way examination questions are set are carefully studied and likely types of questions are identified for even more persistent dissecting and drilling. For these contrived learning arrangements to look generally acceptable, an embellished and belabored narrative surrounding education and personal success has to be manufactured and sustained rhetorically through an elaborate system of challenges, tantalizing promises, handsome rewards, and false generosities (Freire, 2000; Yung, 2021). All but overlooked are more socially conscionable approaches to teaching and learning made available by pedagogies incorporating critically transformative educational perspectives that help to expose students to views of ‘civic duty as social justice that [lead] to enhanced community … relationships’ (Avineri & Perren, 2020, p. 70). A decontextualized monochromatic understanding of knowledge and meaning is superimposed onto a belaboring approach to teaching and learning that promotes depersonalization, alienation, and ultimately, insular subjectivity. With little room for negotiation of ways to think, feel, and mean, empathy and conscientization (Freire, 2000, 2005) are values that brook little attention. States of being, becoming, and

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bringing forth that are more ‘reflective, empathetic, critical, diverse, or democratic’ are not considered a worthwhile part of the equation or weighting (Kennedy, 2020, p. 53). The type of ‘education’ that might be said to be provided is one that is mediated (or engineered) by artifacts like workbooks, worksheets, past-year papers, and lately because of the global pandemic, socially distancing online communication tools conveying prefabricated lessons with ever more depersonalizing drills and exercises. Drawing a parallel with Seargeant’s (2009) description of the way English conversation lessons are marketed as a commodified product through the English conversation schools that are found ubiquitously around subway stations in Japan, cram schools, like conversation schools, are ‘first and foremost commercial businesses, [and] the promotion of their services is likely to tend toward the saleable rather than the pedagogically sound’ (p. 94). Seargeant (2009) moreover observes rather pessimistically, if also sardonically that: [i]f the image of academic excellence appeals and is believable, it is probably of little concern of how orthodox or effective it is. Yet these establishments occupy a prominent position in society that the image they promote of successful … teaching will both reflect what is perceived within society as being correct and desirable practice. (Seargeant, 2009, p. 94)

In terms of oppressive outcomes, the predominantly ‘banking’ mode of delivery (Freire, 2000) used in cram schooling invariably involves the suppression of what Lillis (2003) has described as creative initiatives toward design, where teachers and learners assume greater agency and initiative in the shaping of knowledge and meaning and how they should be represented, conveyed, and dialogically engaged with. Adams and Agbenyega (2019) moreover associate such strictures of regimented learning with a form of national schooling that global middle class expatriate parents are known to be in the habit of avoiding. This group of parents, according to Adams and Agbenyega (2019), seek purposefully to ‘escape nation-state schooling’ of the sort that is not wholly different from the type of overseas Japanese schooling discussed here, with the ‘pressure[s] of exams’ (p. 657) and the ‘juken (“test cramming”) system’ (Kennedy, 2020, p. 53) being an integral part of the package. The Japanese parents seen in this discussion, in contrast, harbor homeward-­ bound intentions more aligned ideologically to Japanese nation-state schooling, confirmed by their seeking the homely assurances

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of cram tutoring as a way of making sure that their children will readapt to education in homeland Japan when the time comes for them to be called or sent home (Hashimoto, 2013). As juku in these instances serve to facilitate homeland reintegration, parents who are so inclined to regard juku in this light are unlike Mirai’s parents in Etsuko Shindo’s storied account discussed in Chap. 2, who wish for their daughter to be internationally minded and globally oriented in terms of inclination and outlook (Shindo, 2015). These parents are not only willing to spend precious money on tutoring but also think little about subjecting their children to long hours of structured forms of cramming, if in certain cases, also to deal with spells of teen listlessness and/or apathy (see discussion on Parent C’s son in Chap. 5).

Corollaries as a Consequence Cram school tutoring typically requires children hardly into their teens to have to outlast fourteen-hour or fifteen-hour days (Dickensheets, 1996). In earlier discussion (in Chap. 5), it was seen that the ways in which such tutoring was administered involved disciplined forms of repetition and regimentation in terms of learning style, that discourages them from thinking and acting ‘in an epistemologically curious way’ (Freire, 2005, p.  89). Certain corollaries can be drawn from the ways in which cram tutoring was carried (or played) out and the dehumanizing forms of indignity that came with exactions of the children’s bodily (somatic) compliance and discipline. In these particularized instantiations of cram tutoring, the possibility of drawing similarities with a form of exploitation is admittedly uncanny, but perhaps not unreasonable—truth be told. First, parental anxiety (see Dierkes, 2013) is one reason for the way a young person’s time and energy are thus ensnared into cram tutoring commitments. Images of the anxiously uncompromising parent constantly worried and flustered about grades, found captured in the Japanese term, kyoiku mama, come to mind. A kyoiku mama (literally ‘educational mom’) is the proverbially domineering and highly strung mother (Dickensheets, 1996; Dierkes, 2013; Kolesova, 2015). Among some mainland or overseas Chinese, kyoiku mamas might also be called ‘tiger mums’ (Kolesova, 2015; also see Allen, 2016, for relevant comparisons). In Dierkes’ (2013) discussion on their keenness for cram tutoring, they are liable to be morphed into ‘monster parents’ or ‘helicopter parents’, suggesting ‘an even more intensive form of parental involvement’ (p. 11). Kyoiku mamas

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are either feared, revered, or seen as controversial figures in Japanese society, even though the role they play has oftentimes been associated with the accrual of economic benefit. Through their regular applications of diligence, vigilance, and determination, kyoiku mamas have been spoken of as being the unseen pillars of the Japanese economy (Dickensheets, 1996), not unrelated to the curious way in which the cultivation of eugenic bloodlines tied to the economics of human capital accumulation has been concerned with improving the body composition of Japanese females (Robertson, 2002; see Chap. 4). After World War II, kyoiku mamas labored in love behind the scenes to ‘drive the nation’s tremendous postwar development’ (Dickensheets, 1996. p. 73). Entrich (2015) notes in terms of parental aspirations for their children that ‘mothers whose goal is to place their child in university’ tend to exert a ‘strong[er] positive influence on the decision for shadow education’ (p. 207) as compared to the influence of the fathers. As a revered nation-building and human capital resource, kyoiku mamas are said to be a sacrificial people, willingly putting aside their own career prospects to devote their energies ‘to the tasks of ensuring that their children become productive members of society’ (Dickensheets, 1996, p. 75). It has been similarly observed that it is rare for Japanese mothers go to work, one excepting reason being for them to earn additional income to pay for juku lessons (see Bray, 1999). Through demonstrations of insecurity and anxiety, however (see Dierkes, 2013), kyoiku mamas may be unwittingly collusive with forms of business opportunism that capitalize on parental anxiety to exploit the time, energy, and future of their children, for commercial gain. Besides cram school tutoring, children of kyoiku mamas may be sent for music, speech and drama, karate, or other classes that promise to boost the development of a child’s overall competitive instincts, determination, marketability, and future employability (see Nishino & Larsen, 2003). Second, parents and people involved in cram school tutoring as a business undertaking (assuming that there could be some who might just be able to treat education as something intrinsically worthwhile in itself—see Dierkes, 2010, for such a possibility) are both investors in their own right, but the types of benefit they are looking for may be materially different. The question of whether, as investors, they are looking for immediate or delayed forms of gratification depends largely on their motivations, agendas, and (time and risk) tolerance. Entrance examinations take time and pains to prepare for; drilling is an agonizingly time-consuming way to

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learn; and children need time to grow into adulthood before they make their entry into the world of capitalist production in search of actualization and fulfillment. In the meantime, children enrolled in cram school classes must give of their utmost, in Becker’s (1965) words, to ‘contribute to productive effort’ (p.  503). One is reminded of earlier discussion (see Chap. 4) regarding Becker’s (1965) concerns over the economics of time allocation and the opportunity costs of time. In this case, time spent studying and time taken to simply grow a few centimeters taller or just a little bit more mature in disposition, may be coldly considered in terms of the economics of time and opportunity, either won or lost depending on how they are rationalized and tallied. While (business) investors in tutoring centers look to increasing enrolments to feed a center’s coffers, parents are more likely to be setting their sights on the rewards that come with a place in a top university or pupilage for their children in a highly prestigious profession (see Roesgaard, 2006). Meanwhile, sworn neoliberalists will take comfort (or pleasure) in being reminded time and again of what Becker (1965) has observed so promisingly—that education is a good example of an activity that contributes ‘to work as well as to consumption’ (p. 504, italics added), which to say the least, spells a win-win situation for all their entrepreneurial designs. Third, tutoring centers need to establish a reputation for themselves in the market. There is a ‘faith’ or ‘big following’ element packaged into industry mythologies surrounding teacher stardom or superhuman status (see Watanabe, 2013; Yung & Yuan, 2018). As cram tutoring in Japan has mostly ‘not involved conventional school teachers’ (Nishino & Larsen, 2003, p. 13), a particularly charismatic tutor may or may not happen to be a licensed or qualified teacher but instead someone who simply has the ‘with-it-ness’ to take on the role of being a tutoring center’s external face. Certain tutoring centers with popular tutors may find their classes oversubscribed. In Japan, some of these tutors may in fact be maverick personalities (Watanabe, 2013) enjoying celebrity status, appearing on television to share their views on cramming and test-taking. One suburban Japanese tutoring center in Singapore was understood by parents to have had to merge with a downtown branch apparently because of the lack of a popular tutor on its premises. The other reason was that it was rather ill-­ advisedly located in premises surrounded by local semi-public housing, making it less popular among parents who expected a better environ. Tutoring centers looking to capitalize on the Japanese market in Singapore

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have to create their own distinctive external face and this includes physical, logistical, and decorative aspects of their classrooms and other facilities, not forgetting a beckoning and welcoming look in the reception area, which may need to be furnished almost to the standard of a nice hotel lobby. Other tutoring centers have their premises housed within expensive condominium developments, which is almost a reminder of Bourdieu’s (2018) treatment of habitat and habitus as mutually reinforcing imbrications. Such mutually reinforcing arrangements in turn facilitate the attendant work of organizing social space (Bourdieu, 2018) toward the instilling of ‘objectively orchestrated practice[s]’ (in this case orchestrated cram schooling practices) and the reproduction of a desired and particularized social order (Bourdieu, 1977, p. 163). Typical advertising literature, on its part, must include an obligatory list of famous universities like the University of Tokyo, Kyoto University, and Tohoku University where past students are supposed to have successfully gained entry to. According to Russell (1997), Japanese tutoring centers are ‘by far the most commercially developed’ as compared to those in Korea or Taiwan’ (p. 154). Cram school tutoring is a ‘thriving and ever-­ developing business’ (Roesgaard, 2006, p. 21) and large tutoring companies are listed on the Japanese stock exchange, ‘forming the basis for an “education industry” that goes beyond conventional concepts of private enterprise involvement in education’ (Russell, 1997, p. 154). Schools That Tap on Cram School Materials for Lessons These corollaries are, moreover, not to be seen apart from one other important observation surfaced in Chap. 5. At the peak of the corona virus pandemic, at least one Japanese-medium school in Singapore took to using commercially produced video lessons marketed by tutoring companies to overcome the problem of teacher shortage, revealing an uncanny meeting of minds (or orchestration of methods) that brings to light the fact that both institutions (school and cram school) can subsist or operate on a similarly cloned pedagogical framework. It has been argued too that like Japanese-medium schools (see Toh, 2020, 2021), Japanese cram schools operating in overseas locations like Singapore may also be playing the role of surrogate cultural agencies, to help ensure that Japanese children properly ‘adapt to Japanese ways’ (Hashimoto, 2013, p. 23) even before they set foot again on Japanese soil. Kanno (2003) relates the way in which cram schools help overseas

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returnees seeking reentry into Japanese institutions prepare themselves for admission interviews. Regarding the fine-tuning of manners, candidates are rehearsed to gently open the door with their right hand as they enter, close the door with their left as they leave, and to take their position on the left-hand side of the chair before being told to sit down. The irony of such types of ‘cultural’ training or enforcement on the part of jukus is their strong ‘focus on resocializing [returnees] in Japanese ways’ (Kanno, 2003, p. 76) when universities may actually be wanting the opposite—for such students to be people who are ‘familiarized … with another culture [and] another way of life’ (p. 75). Kanno (2003) notes that while returnees are expected to be familiar with foreign languages and cultures, there continues to be little ‘excuse for [their] failing to behave in accordance with the rules of Japanese society’ (p. 76), whatever forms such rules may take. As surrogate cultural agencies in this sense, cram schools duly fulfill their (honorary) role as de facto cogs in the machinery of social acculturation and subjectivization, which in normal circumstances goes beyond their role as the money-making entities of the Japanese education industry. In this respect, Roesgaard (2006) is right in making her observation that Japanese cram school businesses have been ‘very effective at diversifying and seeking [out] new markets to cover and new services to offer’ (p. 23), in this case, to help young people acquire manners acceptable to the Japanese establishment.

Answers to the Research Questions My search for answers to the research questions outlined in the first chapter related to the purpose of gaining a better understanding of the agendas, and admittedly, the influence of ideological assumptions, behind the activities undertaken by tutoring centers, ostensibly in the name of education. The questions pertained to the following concerns: (1) the range of factors causing or motivating Japanese families domiciled in Singapore to subscribe to cram tutoring classes; (2) benefits to be gained, whether materiel or perceived, attributable to these classes; (3) enactments of Japanese cram schooling unique to its being carried out in an overseas location like Singapore; and (4) the types of ideologies and hegemonies that have a part in influencing the realities and observations surfaced in answer to (1), (2), and (3).

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Answering Question (1): Reasons for Subscribing to Cram Tutoring Classes Enrolment in tutoring classes is regarded by parents as a way for their children to keep up with the pace of teaching and testing in school, if a child appears to be underachieving or experiencing difficulties (see Roesgaard, 2006 for this aspect of private tutoring). In these respects, the tutoring sought for is ostensibly remediating but also preparatory in nature toward a bigger aim of gaining access to the next level of education. Parents with children in need of extra coaching or cajoling to prepare for tests, examinations, and entry into the next level of schooling that includes helping the children to adapt to certain ways particular types of tests are designed, may also turn to tutoring centers for this purpose (see similar reason in Roesgaard, 2006). In addition, having a child gain familiarity with a topic ahead of it being taught in regular school is also important, based on the supposition that repeated exposure to learning content promotes understanding. When a topic is eventually taught in school, a child who has been first exposed to this topic in juku will have the presumed advantage of learning it the second time, compared to someone not enrolled in juku. Not unrelatedly, in situations where the teaching in a child’s school may appear to a parent to be uninspiring or uninteresting, an extra round of teaching by a slightly more likeable, inspiring, or energetic tutor (as the case may be) may be seen as a way of bringing about fresh interest in learning. Tutoring may also be a way of having a child grooved or encultured into a study routine so that time can presumably be spent more purposefully or at least less aimlessly, paralleling parental concerns raised in Nishino and Larsen (2003) that time should not be spent on meaningless or unsupervised activities, but ‘in disciplined self-development’ (p.  25). As students are expected to apply themselves diligently to study in a disciplined manner for their crucial entrance examinations, cram school tutoring may be regarded by parents as a way of helping their offspring to readapt or be reattuned to Japan’s examination-centered approach to education, especially when the time comes for them to return home. Going to juku in Singapore, working hard, doing well, landing a place in a good school, are viewed as being part and parcel of a successful reentry into the homeland system.

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Answering Question (2): Levels of Achievement Sought for and Win-Win Benefits Presumably Gained For parents in Singapore’s Japanese community, the high levels of achievement sought for, enough at least to impress people around, may be related to feelings of the need to maintain middle class, elite, or on the occasion, internationalized, identity and status. Parents who are themselves career high-flyers will seek to increase their children’s exposure to a multiple range of learning opportunities, which does not preclude a significant amount of time spent at being tutored in a cram school setting (see Roesgaard, 2006, for a description of how time-intensive cram schooling can be). This was apparently the case with the child (Parents E and Fs’ high-achieving daughter) seen in Chap. 5 who went to an English-medium international school in the day, and then to a Japanese-medium tutoring school in the evening. Parents generally express their happiness when their child gains a place in an elite school (see Roesgaard, 2006) placed ‘at the top of the education pyramid’ (Zhang & Yamato, 2018, p. 326), especially one that opens wide its doors to returnee children. One unmistakable benefit of gaining admission into such an elite institution is the highly sought-after mark or badge of success and the positive seken or appearances (see Chap. 2) that come with it. These schools are also thought to be more able to understand the needs of returnee children than the normal schools that handle mostly children who have hardly been overseas, and because the effects of bullying or discriminatory treatment (see Kanno, 2003) that returnee children may face would, in this way, be mitigated to some extent. Schools and parents are likely to regard such situations as win-win situations for both parties. For the former, this win-win situation is about the advertising value that comes with having a good number of returnee children on their rolls and for the latter, it is about the snob value of having one’s children enrolled in a school that has a noticeably large number of returnees from overseas. On the part of Japanese tutoring businesses looking to make themselves relevant and profitable in overseas situations where Japanese expatriate families can be found in good numbers, such businesses would need to be tuned in to the demands of this particular sector of the market and to adjust their approaches and business models accordingly. Any such readiness to change and adapt would attest to the sorts of commercial

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versatility that jukus are said to be particularly known for (see Roesgaard, 2006; Dierkes, 2010). Sidling Up to and Mollycoddling Returnees and Their Parents While concerns over the possibility of returnees’ loss of Japaneseness is a matter that has been documented by scholars (Kanno, 2003; Aspinall, 2011; Hashimoto, 2013), there is another aspect of returnee status that warrants some attention. This has to do with the fact that there are also schools in homeland Japan that make it a point of targeting returnee students for enrolment, to the extent of setting up designated email addresses for enquiries related to the admission of returnee children, for hypothetical example, [email protected]. Such schools typically have a different set of entrance examination criteria for students returning to Japan from overseas or even examinations specifically designed for transfer students (tenhennyushi ken). For example, exemptions or waivers may be given such that these students will not have to be tested in classical or old Japanese. Greater weightage may also be given to their English ability as a criterion for entry. For students to be admitted based on their returnee status, however, parents are almost always required to provide documentary proof of a bona fide overseas posting for the father (kaigai zairyu shomesho) and of the students’ actual time spent living overseas with their parents. On the part of the schools, targeting returnee students makes good (business) sense. Returnee students are more likely to be ones from families with relatively high social economic status and parents who, due to the likelihood of their having respect for education (see Fujihara & Ishida, 2016, for a discussion on how education is valued among highly educated parents), are willing to invest in their children’s schooling and, just as importantly, tutoring. As such, there is a greater likelihood too that these students will end up supposedly as high achievers, a sought-after ingredient for advertising that will bolster any school’s reputation. To this end, schools typically promise in their advertisements a curriculum that will enhance or build on the different ‘strengths’ and ‘potentials’ that returnee children are assumed to have (a line of thinking that can be quite discriminatory). Metaphors of ‘change’, ‘growth’, ‘globality’ or themes like ‘leadership’, ‘dynamism’, ‘adventure’, ‘global jinzai‘(talent or resource) are commonly foregrounded in such advertisements, however much they may

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(on the surface) be in contradiction to the dictums of nihonjinron discussed in Chap. 2. For schools seeking to recruit returnee students, having them in good numbers can be a way of making them stand out from the rest as unique or special, despite the fact that returnees may need some help with readapting to life in Japan (see Kanno, 2003). Some schools even have designated ‘Returnee Weeks’ on their school calendar, to focus attention on their returnee segment and to highlight their specially developed returnee programs (e.g., ‘Double Diploma’ immersion programs, which is more likely a glorified name for increased exposure to subjects taught partially in English) to parents of potential students. In this way, it may be argued that returnee subjectivities are gradually being transformed by the sorts of aggressive advertising that schools engage in for the expressed purpose of recruiting them. In Singapore, the Japanese community is large and significant enough for glossy magazines on education to be published entirely in Japanese for distribution free of charge. Inside these magazines are colorful pictures, articles concerning overseas parenting, feature articles on (by) famous educators, new programs offered by middle or high schools in homeland Japan, as well as announcements and advertisements of up-and-coming entrance examinations and recruitment briefings. Oftentimes regarded or treated as a de-Japanized character, an entity or oddity ready to be discriminated against or bullied (see Kanno, 2003, and discussion in Chap. 2), the returnee is fast becoming someone to be sidled up to and mollycoddled, by both homeland institutions and jukus operating in distant overseas locations. For the promise of the above win-win benefits to come to fruition, Japanese expatriate families play a big part in their belief that juku preparation constitutes an effective way of ensuring that their children meet school entry requirements, particularly those that apply to returnees from overseas. Well-known tutoring centers are, ultimately, assumed to have tutors experienced in preparing students for placement in popular high schools back home, due to their familiarity with the kinds of examinations that are set year after year by these schools.

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Returning to the Problematic as Part of Considering Research Questions (3) and (4) In Chap. 1, I noted that my writing of this book was shaped by the need to attend to a larger problematic as a way of gaining deeper insight into contingent and contextualized social practices and their embodiment of historically structured social forms that regulated ways of being and acting (Simon & Dippo, 1986). A Problematic Representing Critical Poststructural Concerns in Human Relations As was explained, this problematic related to my regarding ethnography in both its critical and poststructural dimensions and how these dimensions support an emergent critique. This is a critique that draws attention to: (1) the ways in which human relations and subjectivities may be shaped and negotiated within particular contingencies or situations; and (2) its own potential to enable deeper understandings of the social dynamics of such contingent situations. In the present case, negotiations of subjectivity, assertions of identity and enactments of life trajectory (see Connelly & Clandinin, 1999) concern situations in which movement, migration, and cross-border relocation may be regarded as forces that destabilize ideologies of Japaneseness and homogeneity, within a dominant neoliberal economic order. In Chap. 1, it was acknowledged that the Japanese community itself might not be entirely impressed by this fact of reality. For good measure, I also considered a third aspect of the problematic. This was how specifically situated practices and social relations uncovered in (1) and (2), might shed light on the way ideologies and hegemonies materialized in Singaporean-cum-Japanese spaces are shaped and legitimated. These spaces are ones that can be physical, geographical, cultural, symbolic, and discursive in nature (see Chap. 1 on Japan and Singapore as narrative). In other words, within different relational frameworks and habituated practices, questions could be asked about the types of ideologies that underlie them. As will be seen, these ideologies are about the ways in which Singapore and Japan are constructed in the minds and actions of various human actors.

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Thinking the Unthought Through Second Glancing My attention therefore turns to what it means to be doing poststructuralist critical ethnography (see Simon & Dippo, 1986; Britzman, 1995; Behar, 1996; Goodman, 1998; Noblit, 2004) in a cross-border migratory situation involving Japan and Singapore and how this situation animates as well as orders certain sets of social practices, in this case, to do with cram tutoring. In so turning my attention, I wish to be alert to what Britzman (1995) calls the ‘second glance’, and what taking this ‘second glance’ means for ‘think[ing] the unthought of ethnographic narratives’ (p.  231)— unthought-of thinking that I will attempt to consider here for readers. In so attempting, I bear in mind possible ways in which Britzman’s observation that good ethnographies tell stories that read like novels will pan out against her poststructuralist enjoinment to ‘read the absent against the present’ (1995, p. 230). As I do this, I will not forget to devote attention to forms of knowledge that ‘ethnography cannot tolerate knowing’, following Britzman’s tempting call to do so (1995, p. 231, emphasis added). I will likewise be reminded of helpful observations from Sedgwick (2017) in his work on business anthropology and corporate ethnography involving businesses as ‘privately protected fictions’ and ‘particularly demanding anthropological sites’ (p. 59). Sedgwick (2017) points out that these challenges present ‘a means of speaking to power’ as they can be turned into opportunities to understand prevailing social-economic conditions that support the neoliberal regimes now structuring ‘most of humanity’s contemporary circumstances’ (p. 59). I trust therefore that it is now apparent that it may not be possible to answer questions (3) and (4) if only a ‘straight version of Ethnography 101’ is applied (Britzman, 1995, p. 230)—as long as more remains to be said, told, and unraveled, than initial observations would be able (or willing) to reveal. Thus, notwithstanding the answers to questions (1) and (2) provided above, and not to take anything away from what they reveal—as they are indeed part of the abovementioned ‘straight version’—I wish in the remainder of this chapter to devote space to a deeper critique. This is a critique that would influence the way in which questions (3) and (4) can be answered, which will be in a necessarily more reflexive manner. Such reflexivity is well in order particularly as the answers to (3) and (4) may indeed be even more contingently storied and perspectival in nature than any ‘straight version’ would be tolerant of.

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Answering Question (3): Cross-Border ‘Exported-to-­Singapore’ and ‘Made-in-Singapore’ Enactments (Variants) of Juku Japanese cram tutoring as it is done in Singapore is not just an ‘Exported-­ to-­Singapore product (even though much of the programs, packaging, and draconian practices remain trustily invariant) but also a ‘Made-in-­ Singapore’ phenomenon and commodity. In this section, I wish to consider what factors can be in play that mark the uniqueness of juku tutoring with respect to its being carried out in a Singaporean setting. The main question addressed here is that of what ‘Made-in-Singapore’ ingredients of Japanese cramming would appear like. In Singapore, the running of jukus may be extremely structured as juku programs would be, sad or needless to say. Nevertheless, deeper or ‘unthought of’ realities (Britzman, 1995, p. 231) surrounding their existence and operations may be anything but scripted according to stolidly configured Japanese homeland styles and resources. The possibility of the evolvement of such (yet) unscripted or uncharted forms is a real one, as much as it is also possible for Japanese families in Singapore to still be thinking that homeland-style jukus can simply be cloned, copied, exported, and reproduced, or to be in total denial that Japanese juku tutoring in Singapore might in fact be quite (albeit not so obviously) different. As a caveat to be offered here, the secrets of stories untold of jukus may be more than Singapore’s Japanese community, or Japanese in general, would be willing to admit, or confront honestly. These are precisely the absent stories told ‘against the present’ (Britzman, 1995, p.  230), ‘the unthought of’, or the forms of ‘knowledge [which even] ethnography cannot tolerate knowing’ (p. 231). The Influence of Contextual Specificities on Organized Thinking and Behaviors The ethnographic insights encountered thus far are part of a dynamic historical space, the evolving nature of which the players involved are both agents and outcomes of. The unique dynamics of this historical space have their origins in Japan’s long-standing commercial interests in Singapore. This particular aspect of a history that is still evolving has been made possible by the presence of a large and fully functioning if rather aloof and self-contained Japanese community in the city state (see Ben-Ari, 2003,

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2006), living out quintessentially the good expatriate life and the capitalist story. Singapore’s Japanese population has been spoken of as being segregated from both the local as well as other expatriate populations and has been thought of as ‘[l]iving in a “bubble”’ (Ben-Ari, 2006, p. 230). The reason for my highlighting of this aspect of the Japanese presence in Singapore is to reiterate my awareness that ethnography in this case is interested in not only ordered social practices (here of expatriate living), but also in contingent discourses, evolving histories, negotiated forms and patternings that nevertheless act collusively to organize and regulate human behaviors (Simon & Dippo, 1986; Britzman, 1995; Behar, 1996; Noblit, 2004). Given present concerns, this self-partitioning or self-­ isolation of the Japanese population provides a timely reminder that Japan was in fact self-isolated from the rest of the known world for a period of more than 200 years, and that the ‘protectionist and ideologically regulated character’ of its subsequent contacts with the outside world after its forced opening in 1853 on pain of the threat posed by American warships, is still ‘deeply rooted within this history of self-isolation’ (Seargeant, 2009, p. 70). Be this as it may, energizing the strong Singaporean–Japanese bilateral relations are Japan’s contributions to Singapore’s fledgling economy after almost 150  years of British colonial rule (see Chap. 3). The influx of Japanese capital investments and the provision of much needed technical expertise and knowledge transfer subsequently culminated in the signing of a monumental free trade agreement between the two countries (Terada, 2006; Balakrishnan, 2016). Japan’s relations with Singapore have since been established on a basis of mutuality that upholds the value of shinrai or mutual trust and kizuna or bonds of friendship (Balakrishnan, 2016). Besides the strong relations forged and fostered through close economic ties, warm cultural relations have been formed and facilitated through the setting up of friendship associations and exchange programs in areas like education, sports, music, and the arts. Through various local agencies, Japanese expatriate wives with time on their hands have also played an active part in volunteering to help and support the needy and less fortunate in Singapore (Toh, 2021). The fresh understandings of Japanese juku tutoring offered here take on a life and uniqueness of their own, afforded and energized by a particular set of cultural, political, and economic histories, late evolvements of which have contributed to the current state of Japanese and Singaporean

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relations. The presence of the Japanese expatriate community to sustain the viability and profitability of Japanese business concerns (including the bespoken tutoring businesses) also relates to matters concerning migration, cross-border movement and exposure, and accompanying possibilities for more divergent types of human relations. Extant within these human relations are human perceptions, assumptions, presumptions, and even prejudices that affect the way situated observations can be (re)constructed, (re)presented, and (re)told (Britzman, 1995). In this respect, I remain just as conscious in this concluding chapter, that the ‘Made-in-­ Singapore’ aspects of Japanese juku tutoring, situated as they are within Japanese–Singaporean social and cultural relations described in Chap. 3, are also not independent of my being, as I write: (1) the Singaporean husband of my wife who is Japanese; (2) the father of two children, one of whom goes regularly to evening and weekend cram classes; (3) a reflexive career educator who has experienced working in Japanese institutions in homeland Japan and thus not unfamiliar with the need to critically negotiate various aspects of life’s challenges within Japanese institutional domains (see, e.g., Toh, 2015, 2017, 2021); and (4) an ethical subject for whom truth-telling (see Ball, 2016) remains an integral part of critical ethnography. ‘Born-in-Japan’ Mercantilism Transposed onto ‘Made-­in-Singapore’ Jukus Understanding the mercantilist aspects of the Japanese presence and their implications for human aspirations, life trajectories, future-scapes (Adams & Agbenyega, 2019) is vital to understanding the ways in which the learning behaviors and schooling habits of Japanese families domiciled in Singapore have evolved (Toh, 2021). Seemingly or blatantly exclusivist practices of Japanese cram tutoring may thus be a corresponding reflection of the discourses of exclusivity inhering the exclusionary lifestyles of Singapore’s Japanese population (see Ben-Ari, 2006). The middle class or elitist nature of their tastes and aspirations extend visibly to the way cram tutoring is done or scripted. What perhaps needs to be understood here is that cram tutoring in nice exclusive environments and being conveyed to classes in privately hired vehicles are not to be held apart from other culturally elitist trappings like living in condominiums in fashionable neighborhoods and frequenting exclusive high-end country clubs with swimming pools and children’s playgrounds on weekends by expatriate

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families (and well-heeled locals). During their short stints in Singapore, Japanese business executives and their families may understandably wish to maximize on the opportunity to enjoy the perks and privileges of expatriate living, while not forgetting to invest some time and money in something as crucial to them as cram school education (see responses to research questions (1) and (2) above). The prosperous Singapore that Japan has helped to champion economically after independence makes real the particularized enactments of cram schooling that would otherwise not be possible elsewhere, not even in high-end Tokyo or downtown Osaka. Without Singapore’s phenomenal economic success and Japan’s integral contribution to it as benefactor nation that in turn supports the strong Japanese presence, the air-­ conditioned buildings and sophisticated infrastructure that make possible the comfortable settings in prestigious locations for juku branches to operate, would be all but unimaginable. Being the egalitarian society that Japan supposedly is, the elite or privileged element of juku attendance in Singapore for the Japanese can only be possible in Singapore and not in homeland Japan where obvious forms of ostentation or nonconformity are frowned upon (see Lie, 2003; Aspinall, 2013). In this sense, juku training for expatriate children becomes a unique form of cultural production (see parallels in Bourdieu, 1977, 2018) that can only be made possible in the way that it is, in the (particularly enviable) context of an expatriate posting to an expatriate-friendly location, and not in Japan. In its tacit approval of an elitism that contravenes (and outrages) all forms of egalitarianism (see Lie, 2003; Aspinall, 2013), one aberrant aspect of ‘Made-in-Singapore’ juku is its departure from the outward shows of even-handedness and oneness implicit in nihonjinron inspired dictates of Japanese egalitarian beliefs (see Roesgaard, 2006, for descriptions of struggles with privilege and inequality resulting from private tutoring). For each regular test or assessment conducted at major juku branches, online comparisons are made with the results of top students from other overseas branches in the metropolitan areas of Taipei, Bangkok, and Shanghai. These locations are also the major business centers in Asia where Japanese investors and investments have made their presences felt— as if a form or trapping of elitist education might be reified or rendered even more visible through the making of such glaring comparisons across juku branches located in Asia’s most affluent and populous metropolises. Jukus in this sense are a constant symbolic reminder of the presence of Japanese business and economic power across Asia and beyond, both to

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the Japanese themselves including the parents who subscribe to them, and the curious Singaporean passersby impressed by the presence of tutoring schools in the trendier or more pricey parts of town or suburbia (see Parent H’s comment about costs in Chap. 5). One Singaporean person who lived in an expensive condominium building where a Japanese corporate cram school had its premises once remarked to me that the Japanese cram school teachers were not only polite and well groomed, but were always dressed formally in suit and tie even in Singapore’s equatorial weather. The very presence of these cram schools, too, becomes a statement to the Japanese themselves, that they are supposed to think and act like expatriates from an affluent country and be able to afford to send their offspring to extra tutoring and other enrichment classes specially catered to them overseas. This sort of statement may extend even to those who might be forced against their will(ingness) or principles to so conform (which might have been the case with someone like Parent H when he finally decided to pull his son out from the system). In answer to research question (3) on unique outworkings or enactments, therefore, ‘Made-in-Singapore’ juku may well be a way of humoring or sidling up to ‘Born-in-Japan’ mercantilist capitalism. ‘Born-in-Japan’ mercantilism is given yet another externally favorable face, which helps to make the statement that Japan is a well-to-do trading nation, Japanese are persistently hardworking people, Japanese cram school teachers are a dedicated and well-presented group of professionals, and Japanese children are a docile and disciplined group of youngsters who have the tolerance and stamina to work quietly and obediently for long hours. A Matter of (Interesting) Perspective On point of fair reflection, my own alertness to certain aspects of Japanese expatriate life would not have been as acute if it had not been for my own child’s continued attendance at juku lessons, which extend sometimes to twelve hours a week of tutoring over weeknights and weekends. Furthermore, from my position as a non-Japanese Singaporean parent, I might actually even find myself looking hard at different cram schooling practices and consider them to be sufficiently deterring (or degrading) to warrant the critical reflections that I offer here (also see section on emotions histories in research in Chap. 1). Perhaps it may also have been the costly tuition that I have had to keep paying for month after month, which bought me (or brought on me) this level of alertness to, or wariness of,

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what I am now able to identify as oppressive practices prevalent in Japanese cram schooling. In writing this section, I find myself taking exception to being subjectively positioned as a client and/or taken for granted as a credulous one at that. As a conscientious educator, I duly problematize for readers practices of overlearning and drilling. I consider as dis-educational and oppressive (Freire, 2000) methods that treat students as ‘empty “space[s]” waiting for content’ (Freire, 2014, p. 105). I am also duty-bound to problematize callous attempts to despoil education by acts of ‘turning sites of learning into deregulated enterprise zones’ to the extent that ‘the rhetoric of democracy and education has now become oxymoronic’ (McLaren, 2015, p. 20). Yet, I hold to these opinions without any intention of taking lightly my wife’s conscientious insistence that our child should be given a chance to learn in a juku as part of his growing up experience as an overseas Japanese, and without the least bit of disagreement that some of his juku teachers may be a little more nurturing in their manner, or conduct their lessons with a little more ‘with-itness’ and salespersonship than the teachers in his regular school (see commentary on teacher attitudes in regular schools in Watanabe, 2013) whose lessons (whether interesting or uninteresting) he understandably has to sit through day after day. For me, beneath all the outward displays of sophistication (nice glossy brochures, fine complementary stationery, color-printed monthly test reports, nice classroom furniture shipped over from Japan) is the darker ironic reality that all the external contraptions are part of the belying or dissimulation of certain dehumanizing aspects of what may actually be a rather debasing or debased form of education. Russell (1997) has noted that the Japanese cram school industry was a source of ‘embarrassment to the Japanese government’ (p.  154) and considered ‘a threat to teacher union ideals that stress “whole person” education’ (p. 154; also see section on the history of government disavowal in Chap. 1). Seargeant’s (2009) observation that the impression of academic excellence, if made to be appealing and believable, overrides concerns over values like correctness and desirability, enabling jukus to gain some albeit dubious reputation as centers for ‘good’ teaching. Meanwhile, the cynically or smugly outmoded teaching methods, ‘teacher centered’ and ‘largely non-­ interactive’ as they are (Allen, 2016, p. 62), might only be thought of as being in stark contrast to the attractive décor that gives these tutoring centers their external and marketable face. Such outward attraction (with teachers in suit and tie to complement) might be in consonance with the

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tastes of an especially discerning and/or demanding white-collar expatriate clientele, but again, would be problematized by people like me who would anytime be more comfortable with education in its less extravagant, exhibitive, or contrived forms. Admittedly, certain of these somewhat irreconcilably contradictory aspects of juku in Singapore are only the case because of my own concerns with the need for pedagogies to be democratized, empowering, and transformative. Perhaps for those parents among the ones who are very competitive when it comes to good grades of which there appear to be many particularly in the homeland (see Entrich, 2015), or concerned about a bright future and giving their children exposure to Japanese-style learning in preparation for their eventual return home, juku lessons are more of a necessary way to ensure that their consciences are appeased. At the very least, their children are taken through the paces of hard study, regardless the outmodedness of the methods used. My own experience with outmoded language teaching methods (which is within my area of interest) in Japan extends to forms of teaching that would not be acceptable in more critically attuned or even regular contexts where care is taken not to jeopardize or disempower learners through disenabling their agency, initiative, and imagination (Toh, 2019).

Answering Question 4: Dominant Ideologies and Hegemonies Subtly in Operation What are the underlying ideologies and hegemonies that have a part in influencing the realities and observations surfaced in answer to questions (1), (2), and (3)? In this section, I turn to issues concerning the hegemonic and homogenizing power of money, outward appearance, and capital accumulation as they are naturalized within ideologies promoting a form of neoliberalism that is shored up by a powerful discourse of Japaneseness (see Chap. 2). Providing More Leads on Matters of Concern: Openness, Closedness, and Conscientization If the saying goes that truth can sometimes be stranger than fiction, that ethnographies can read like novels (Britzman, 1995), then imagining cramming as a form of human exploitation, a matter first mooted in Chap.

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1, may not require too much of a stretch in reasoning. More than a novel, some aspects of the ostentation and oppression observed in this chapter may incorporate elements of a melodrama. Perhaps the answer to research question (4) depends on whether people in gatekeeping roles are amenable to storied and/or dialogic perspectives that are liable be suppressed or silenced given dominant hegemonies. As for the matter of whether the imagination can (or cannot) be stretched, my hope is that this is not going to be a matter for academic wars to be waged between staunch devotees of fidelity and imaginers of possibility, between structure and ‘poststructure’, or straight versions and stretched versions, as might be the case (see Britzman, 1995; also see critique on journal manuscript reviewing below). The conscientized imagination (Britzman, 1995; Freire, 2000), which sensitizes researchers not only to feel empathetically, respond reflexively (seek Fook, 1999), act poststructurally, and think imaginatively, might also be one that lends itself to an element of amenability and negotiability, for better sense and good measure. Without an amenability that helps to fashion the sort of open-mindedness seen described favorably in Peters and Roberts (2012), all four of the said conscientizing attributes would be all but hard to sustain. What one might call amenability in scholarly research speaks of the openness of a mind that is oriented toward design and transformation (Lillis, 2003) rather than one that tarries (if sometimes mean-spiritedly) within constricted spaces of positivism or some specious, slavish, or sycophantic form of fidelity (Britzman, 1995; also see Goodman, 1998; Fook, 1999; Foley, 2002). For Peters and Roberts (2012), Openness … is inclusive of but not limited to open-mindedness [and] has not one but several opposites. Most have something to do with closure. Closed-mindedness is one example, but we might also talk about closed-­ systems and closed societies. Indeed, when attention is drawn to the need for openness, it is frequently in response to something less than open in the social world. (p. 45, italics added)

I see in amenability an enabling and empowering form of human dignity that one may find at times to be absent behind systems and mindsets that operate out of controlling or oppressive structures of domination and control. With respect to pedagogy,

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[t]he optimal pursuit of openness in pedagogical settings … requires the presence of other virtues and can be contrasted with various forms of closure, including dogmatism [and] excessive certainty. (Peters & Roberts, 2012, p. 44, italics added)

Systems and structures that support the manner of cram schooling described in this book are essentially and necessarily closed in nature as much as the tests, examinations, and entry criteria that the industry is that much concerned with and profits from, may also be the forbidding (foreboding) systemic hurdles that serve as a reminder of closed doors that have to be prised open through compliance, conformity, and hard labor. Academic (Re)views that Silence and Blindside My concerns over the need to resist ideologies of oppressiveness in education have led me to critique reductionist ways of conceptualizing academic knowledge and representing academic meanings. Simon and Dippo (1986) regard ethnography as a way of creating knowledge, but knowledge of a kind that acknowledges its inherent contingencies and multiple epistemologies, while accommodating social relations that are dynamically and contingently negotiated (also see Behar, 1996; Goodman, 1998; Fook, 1999; Noblit, 2004). This is a form of knowledge creation and representation that is not like what Freire (2014) describes as being magical, in other words acontextual, acausal, passivized, mechanized, fatalistic, nor is it to be mired in denials of its own situatedness. By way of expressing my concerns over oppressive and reductionist behaviors in education, I have spared no opportunity to bring to attention different ways in which academic knowledge and meaning may be essentialized, sometimes by the least expected of parties. These may be the very people who should be working to expose the subtlety of ways in which the more deleterious forms of essentialization of knowledge can take place, even in academia. In recent work (see Toh, 2018, 2020, 2021), I have thought it very necessary to critique both the subtle and not so subtle ways in which academic review(er)s can be subject to the influence of hegemonic ideologies and fixated mindsets. The influence of underlying ideologies is seen in the way such reviews may seek to silence attempts to problematize an incumbent status quo of reductionist educational practices, or more seriously in my view, to refashion the way such critiques are written, with a similar intention to silence them. In these instances, the

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cardinal failure to recognize that academic knowledge and meanings are discursively situated and derived is liable to be quite blatant (Lillis & Turner, 2001; Lillis, 2003), as much as a scholar’s deep commitment to representing their craft may be blindsided by overly positivistic demands by reviewers to represent their scholarship in a prescribed set of ways (see Behar, 1996; Goodman, 1998; Fook, 1999; Foley, 2002; Noblit, 2004). Like in Toh (2018, 2020, 2021), I provide here an instance where a manuscript on elitist aspects of Japanese overseas education that was submitted (ironically, as will be seen) to a journal that publishes articles on social and philosophical issues in education was subject to a review that sought to diminish or at least refashion its inherently (and necessarily) discursive and storied nature. The shadowed nature of this ‘drama’ lies in the manner in which the review is given a façade of neutrality. The way this neutral façade was achieved was by the reviewer’s attempt to impose on the manuscript a pseudo-scientific framework that would all but silence the forms of knowledging, historicizing, reflexivity, and accountability that would only be possible through unfolding contextual accounts. This situation is an example of the sorts of reviewer responses that may accompany a paper that relies on critical ethnography and storied accounts as the backbone of its arguments. Certain sections have been italicized to draw attention to relevant concerns. The paper, ultimately entitled ‘Schooling (for) Japanese Children in Cosmopolitan Singapore: building bridges and erecting barriers’ has since been published as Toh (2020) in the journal International Studies in Sociology of Education. Happily, it stands as a paper that demonstrates the importance of providing critically rich accounts of oppressive behaviors in education, which can hardly be reduced to particularized and essentialized forms of research writing fashioned narrowly and mechanistically (Lillis & Turner, 2001). The Review Comments to the Author The paper tackles an interesting topic. However, in its current version it needs substantial rewriting to be able to address the expectations of being published in the journal. Its major shortcomings are as follows:

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1. The paper lacks a clear methodology section. It is not clear how the author gathered her/his data; no information is provided on data sources and sample or on the analysis processes. In addition, given that it somewhere revealed (but not stated clearly in the manuscript) that the author is a member of the group he or she is reflecting on, no information is provided as to issues of credibility of the study and research self-monitoring. The study thus cannot withstand critique as to its rigor. 2. Even though enough (even exhaustive) information is provided on the context of the study, as well as on its theoretical foundations, the reader receives no information as to how the different thematic findings have evolved from the data collected and how and why they were organised in the way they were presented. 3. The Conclusion section is brief and does not discuss in a comprehensive manner the main findings of the study. The Reality of Power Differentials Controlling What Can Be Said and in What Way The academic review has been said to be an unpredictable, subjective if not nebulously partisan process (see Brown, 2004; Cusick, 2016; Kaspar, 2017; Toh, 2018). The prevailing reality is that writers who have put in painstaking effort into writing a manuscript have next to no idea who in the wide world of academia might be asked to review the work, what their understandings of the topic of discussion might be, or how aware they could even be of academic reviewing as a situated or even partial process. The above review document can be rationalized in the following manner. In order to be compliant with the reviewer’s understanding of what a publishable paper would look like, certain expectations of being published in a journal need to be met. These expectations are put across as being nonnegotiable on pain of not being published. Not meeting these nonnegotiable expectations is put forward cardinally as a ‘shortcoming’ that will attract a decision of manuscript rejection. The reviewer’s opinion of the manuscript constitutes an authoritative pronouncement on whether a manuscript will or will not see the light of print. The word ‘clear’, and its nominalized form, ‘clarity’, is used three times. Both words are tendered as terms that mandate transparency and neutrality as regular, unproblematic, nonnegotiable expectations. By mandating clarity, transparency, and neutrality, all three values are at once reinvented

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and reappropriated as tools or techniques of power and enforcement (Foucault, 1979). This is despite the fact that ‘clarity’ itself is a historically situated construct, traceable to a style of argumentation supposedly adhered to by Sir Isaac Newton when he needed his theories to be accepted by a particular type of audience (Lillis & Turner, 2001). Edwards and Usher (2008) furthermore point out that ‘the idea of disciplines as disinterested and bounded bodies of knowledge’ is actually one that is traceable to ‘the modernist idea of … liberal education’ (p. 60). Proffered as a neutral idea, however, ‘clarity’ becomes one that prevails upon manuscript writers to conform to a certain way of articulating and representing knowledge. In reality, far from being a neutral term or idea, ‘clarity’ becomes a wielded form of power that is exercised on manuscript writers to write and present information in a certain structuralized way (see Goodman, 1998). Blindly or indiscriminately applied across manuscripts, organization, presentation, and self-monitoring in their most positivistic or panoptic of forms are also tools of regulatory control that are used to reify particularized understandings of rigor, credibility, transparency, and acceptability. In like fashion, different aspects of storied experiences and lived realities have to be reinvented as data (however qualitative or quantitative). Thematic findings must then be traced back to this form of data and in turn to sources, samples, and analytical processes. In Freirean terms, certain governing formulations of the way knowledge must be represented, formulated, and articulated (or in this case, desiccated) must take priority over the need for greater awareness of unfinished histories and contextual realities that help to shape meaningfulness (Freire, 2014). Using Japanese terminology, it is the tatemae (external form, façade, or fabrication) that must take precedence over the honne (core truth). In critical discussions about education in Japan, the complicity of tatemae with external and structured forms of representation in academic writing is one that is extremely uncanny as I have only had to experience in my attempts to deconstruct externalized facades in order that hidden truths might be made visible (Toh, 2015, 2016, 2018, 2021; see section on tatemae and honne in Chap. 2). In such situations, I have only found that reviews that have insisted on ‘clear’, ‘transparent’, or ‘neutral’ representations (as if in collusion with tatemae) of what are in fact unfolding histories ‘constructed by people engaged together in life’ (Freire, 1998, p. 72) to be poorly attuned to the attempts at surfacing for open discussion issues that are normally hidden or dissimulated. They (the reviews) play into the superficial hands of

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tatemae, hampering deeper realities from being made visible without them having to conform to some externalized form of representation. In this respect, a lack of openness to alternative forms of representation of knowledge and meaning may in fact be a conclusion that one would draw concerning reviews like the above, in the sense that they read more like unreasonable demands than academic reviews per se. In sum, the scourge of ‘clarity’ and positivistic and rationalistic transparency exerts its toll on conscientized forms of meaningfulness, alas nowhere recognizable in any of the reviewer’s suggestions. Regarding Freire’s reminder never ‘to succumb to the naïve temptation to look on content as something magical’ (2014, pp. 101–102) or history as something ‘already determined’ (1998, p. 72), it is relevant to note that the tendency to look upon situated knowledge ‘in a neutral manner’ precisely symptomizes a worrying state of magical consciousness (2014, p. 102). The Response to the Editor after Corrections Had Been Made All too aware of the power differential existing between me and the reviewer, I decided to write the following response in as gingerly a fashion as words would allow me. The following reply is as much a situated instantiation of carefully crafted rhetorical strategy as it is a reminder that such forms of writing are sadly necessary to humor and to persuade skeptical scientists like those described in Lillis and Turner (2001). A rhetoric of gingerliness prevails in such a situation, marking all too well the power asymmetry between reviewer and the reviewed, which extends also to the space or chasm between cold-blooded insistence on positivistic ways of capturing meaning as opposed to the spontaneity of reflexively storied accounts that support a much truer representation of meaningfulness (Winke, 2020; also see Behar, 1996; Noblit, 2004). Dear Editor Thank you very much for all the comments and suggestions. This is how I have responded to them in my corrections. As was advised, a separate section on methodology has been created, instead of having it as part of the introduction as was in the original manuscript. Ideological deconstruction as is made possible by way of critical ethnography is now described explicitly in this section. In describing the methodology, I came to a point of realizing and accepting that my description would not be quite as positivist as was impressed

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upon in the review, by way of the provision of ‘data sources and sample’, ‘analysis processes’ or how ‘thematic findings’ have ‘evolved from the data collected’. This is owing to the discursive nature of the subject matter being investigated. I found that the description itself needs to be one that: (1) melds ecologically into the context of the research, which (as is kindly noted in the review) I have taken pains to provide readers with; and (2) takes into account the complex, discursive and ideological nature of the issues being investigated (see, e.g., Okano, 2009, mentioned in the text). The paper now has an Introduction, a section for Methodological Approach, Background (I, II and III), Observation and Discussion (I, II, III and IV) sections, and a Conclusion, keeping in faith with the reviewer suggestion and also the discursive ethnographical nature of the approach. Attention has now been given to my own reflexive praxis, positioning, and self-monitoring, as too was kindly suggested. With best wishes Glenn Toh

Conscientization as a Humanizing Attribute My point of highlighting the above discussion is that understanding cram school tutoring as a form of exploitation and dis-education needs to be seen in the context of conscientization and humanization (Freire, 2000), not as a matter that must only be comprehended through data sets, methodology, and researcher self-monitoring, which not incidentally, is not as neutral an idea as its regular users would like it to be (believed). Self-monitoring is in fact as forebodingly panoptic an idea as any to impose on any living person or writer as human being. The panopticon, of course, is a regulatory instrument designed to enforce a regime of self-­ policing. For Lyon (2006) however, the panopticon is more than a physical form of custodial and mental control. More menacingly, it also encompasses a set of practices directed toward the same regulatory ends. If academics may at various times be subject to regimes of self-monitoring practice, they would always be put across in neutral sounding (if hopelessly pedantic) terms. By the same token, readers of published material should not have to be prevailed upon to read articles that have been, behind the scenes (i.e., during the review process), forcibly refashioned to the narrowest or most reductive of ways of containing knowledge and meaning. While the point of foisting on readers such narrowness of meaning may vary from

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adherence to convention to attempts at regulating ways to mean, their outcomes are likely to be essentializing and damaging. Readers like everyone else ought to be given ‘the right to know better than they already know – alongside another right, that of sharing in some way the production of the as-yet-nonexistent knowledge’ (Freire, 2014, p. 101). In other words, no one needs or deserves to continue in a magical form of existence, not even reviewers operating out of the most ‘dictatorial forms of thought’ (Behar, 1996, p.  29) or numbing of mindsets, however much the reviews they write may consign readers to the very same (see Winke, 2020). Among ‘researchers and the researched’, Noblit’s (2004, p. 200) argument for the importance of attending to their positionality and reflexivity as a matter of a critical ethnographer’s moral commitment is a reminder that the same dignity must be accorded to readers also. Research that is born of such commitment is ‘in an important sense, not designed’ (Noblit, 2004, p.  200, italics added) according to ‘precise research techniques’ (p. 199) as may be viewed in their narrowest of ways, but ‘enacted or produced as moral activity’ (p. 200), which certain types of reviewers may fail miserably to realize. If researchers and people that they study are said to be morally responsible for the ‘social construction of everyday life’ (Noblit, 2004, p.  200) and for social worlds that they jointly produce, one may argue that editors, reviewers, and readers, too, would have a share in this same moral responsibility. In this connection, perhaps the humanizing antithesis or antidote of this sort of panoptic self-monitoring is the conscientization (Freire, 2000, 2014) and ethical decency that Freire (1998) associates with aesthetics and true beauty. Whereas self-monitoring works against the dignity of human subjects, conscientization and ethical decency attest to their own importance as companions of hope (Freire, 2000, 2014) and aesthetical beauty (Freire, 1998). Both attributes allow difficult questions (here in part over whether cram tutoring is an opportunistic or exploitative undertaking), to receive a fair airing and hearing, notwithstanding the manner of dehumanizing realities next to be described. In any instance, any suggestion that cram schooling and questions of opportunism and exploitation can be dealt with purely on neutral or rational terms (see discussion in Chap. 1 on emotions histories in research) may be unwittingly missing the underlying cruelty of such a suggestion.

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Question 4 Answered: Dehumanizing and Hegemonic Ideologies Infiltrating Education as Investment Poststructuralist theories are said to allow space for critical concerns over hitherto falsely neutral or unquestioned beliefs and hegemonic practices to be surfaced for discussion. In the present case, these concerns relate to cram schooling among children of Singapore’s Japanese families and how they can all too easily be, in the words of Britzman (1995, p. 231), made ‘intelligible, valorized, or deemed as traditions’, oppressive to some as these intelligible and valorized practices might be. Parochialism as a Form of Hegemony In the case of the Japanese community in Singapore, these same vaunted practices are repackaged and made exportable from homeland Japan across geographical and cultural borders to maritime Southeast Asian Singapore. As has been observed, negotiations over agency, identity, and life trajectory of the learners, or even the possibility of their taking place in Singapore’s diversely plural cosmopolitan ethos, are not considered in the banking orientations to teaching that legitimate a ‘“contentistic” purely mechanistic education’ (Freire, 2014, p.  100). Neither do learners play much of any part in the choice or negotiation of the content they are made to learn and overlearn (see Freire, 2014). Content is treated reductively as being ‘fixed and given’ (Williams, 2010, p. 141), while the relational processes involved in the constitution of meaning are not recognized for what they are. Absent are the types of knowledging and negotiation of knowledge that Williams (2010) is keen to encourage, reducing education to ‘a matter of simple technique’ and ‘the teaching of contents’ (Freire, 1998, p. 39). On a related matter, Dierkes (2013) raises an interesting question about whether Japanese education can potentially be ‘integrated into global streams of student mobility’ and whether ‘high-intensity supplementary education’ of the kind discussed here may in fact be ‘a hindrance in such processes of globalization’ (p. 213). What Dierkes’ (2013) question draws attention to is the way in which a particularly time-consuming and convergent form of education may in fact be colluding to instill narrow worldviews among the students, young people who are fortunate enough to be growing up in an overseas cosmopolitan situation by virtue of their parents’ work. Homeward- and homeland bound and even

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parochial in essence, juku education fails to help students recognize that there can be so many other things that can be learnt from overseas living than a particularly inward-looking form of education can afford them. Following Entrich’s (2015) observation that juku education may contribute to various forms of social reproduction, the forms of parochialism (re) produced within such narrow forms of juku education in cosmopolitan multicultural Singapore may well be more than what Entrich himself might have expected, when his concerns were (so appropriately) raised. Concerns of such nature are reminiscent of Kennedy and Lee’s (2008, p. 56) observation that the ‘instilling of local values and national loyalty’ and maintaining traditional values in an age of ‘globalization and global influences in general’ seems to be one observable characteristic of Japanese education, in this instance even when it assumes a heavily commercialized and commodified form like juku tutoring. Herein lies an example of how easily neoliberal ideology within a framework of Japanese neoliberal nationalism (Kawai, 2020) conceals itself in seemingly neutral or unquestioned practices. Hegemony and Homogenization Concealed within a Façade of Neutrality Meanwhile, the spending of long hours in mechanistic drilling and cramming is given an equally harmless façade, undoubtedly tatemae in style, attesting to the fact that homogenizing hegemonies from the homeland remain powerfully influential in an overseas location like Singapore. Clean air-conditioned tastefully furnished tutorial rooms are housed in nice buildings in the choicest parts of Singaporean town and suburbia. Following the discussion above, to not question or problematize the neutral façade of what in fact are both ideologized and hegemonic educational practices would perhaps be tantamount to existing in a state of oblivion or dereliction. Such a façade of neutrality may also belie what in fact are ‘mechanistic, dogmatic, authoritarian’ viewpoints about education which reductively consider the latter as being about ‘the sheer transmission of neutral content’ (Freire, 2014, p. 99). Similarly, it takes a more conscientized state of being to know that content ‘cannot simply be transferred from the educator to the educand’ or ‘simply deposited in the educand by the educator’ (p. 99). Meanwhile, decisions made to enroll a child in a cram school program continue to be reliant on an overly neutral or commonsensical but

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nonetheless flawed understanding of what in reality are neoliberally charged ideologies that naturalize instrumentalized efficiency, human productivity, individual entrepreneurial values, and rewards based on performance (see Apple, 2006; Dardot & Laval, 2013). While Apple (2006) acknowledges that ties between education, paid work, the market, and the wider project of fulfilling economic needs have been growing stronger, the encroachment of neoliberalism on education (see Dardot & Laval, 2013) seems to be particularly blatant in this instance, with evaluation procedures being callously made to ‘determine rewards and punishments‘ based on a ‘culture of results’ and a coldly ‘quantitative logic of performance’ (Dardot & Laval, 2013, p. 248–249). Educational decisions are moreover rendered time-sensitive in that there is only a perceived window of time for intense preparations to be made urgently for entry into high school or university (Dickensheets, 1996; Roesgaard, 2006; Allen, 2016), and furthermore time-allocative (Rosenzweig & Evenson, 1977) in the sense that children have to commit long hours to studying and commuting. Apart from the eight to ten hours a week of regular tutoring the year round, one example of how intense cram tutoring can be comes in the form of some 108 or so hours of summer tutoring offered by enterprising jukus, spread typically over three weeks in August. Classes begin promptly at 9:00 in the morning and end at 5:40  in the afternoon, with some time set aside (humanely) for students to have short breaks. The obviously time-bound, time-serving, and time-dependent decisions to enroll for cram tutoring classes have an effect on the demands made on a child’s effort and energy, and those of their parents. In no abstract way or rather in a very somaticized way, these belaboring energies of the children and their parents feed invariably into the viability (or profitability) of tutoring businesses—perhaps a taken-for-granted arrangement that speaks of the way wealth can be created by having money circulated or shifted around (see similar concern in Chap. 1) through activities seemingly related to a form of education. While the American and Australian populations in Singapore both have long-established and well-regarded international schools that teach American and Australian national curricula (Toh, 2021), the equivalent of a cram tutoring industry is, for all practical (or profitable) purposes, nonexistent among Singapore’s American and Australian expatriate population. Bray (1999) notes that among Australians in particular, ‘most are averse to repetitive cramming of facts’ as a way of learning, while

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mainstream education in Australia tends to be more ‘flexible and supportive of individuals’ (p. 70). Cram Tutoring as a Belaboring Form of Education (Consumption) [The] metaphor about child labor […] is attention-grabbing but unwarranted. The author states that Chap. 1 will consider “whether the metaphor of ‘child labor’ is a reasonable one for Japanese after-school tutoring practices in a Singaporean context”. I am not confident that the author will be able to show that it is indeed reasonable. Rather, it is emotive and unbalanced. (Comment by an unfavorable reviewer, c2020)

As part of bringing this discussion to a conclusion, it is important for accountability’s sake that I readdress an issue that was first highlighted in Chap. 1 concerning emotions history in research, in relation to which I highlighted the matter of whether cram school tutoring might in some ways be akin to a form of child labor. In bringing up this issue, I referred to the work of Jorgensen (2019, 2021) on how researchers involved in the study of the preserved body of the world’s last passenger pigeon became involved in their research in a way that gave credit to the element of their own emotions and their sense of right and wrong, and how this element became a factor in the committed manner in which they dedicated themselves to the work of studying extinct species (see also Behar, 1996; Fook, 1999; Ball, 2016). To be absolutely sure, cram tutoring classes are not about Japanese children living through physically taxing situations in which children toil in heavy manual work in tough conditions to support themselves and their families—although having children engage in heavy manual labor for long hours must surely be an extremely worrying concern for the esteemed colleagues and scholars writing in the area. For Freire (1998), there would be the added need for educators to consider what is ethical and decent as may be seen in the following observation: ‘I am more and more convinced that educational praxis … cannot avoid the task of becoming a clear witness to decency … thereby constituting ourselves as ethical beings’ (p.  38). Similarly, and again to be sure, cram tutoring classes are not about the perverseness of what Giroux and Filippakou (2020) describe as ‘thriv[ing] on the energies of the walking dead’ (p.  2088), which too is equally

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worrying for the authors, where both hope and agency are all but inadmissible and unimaginable. Nevertheless, these classes demonstrate sufficiently that decisions over cram tutoring are, in reality, decisions that reflect family and household behavior, influenced or determined in large part in the present case by social and ideological pressures arising from the need to conform to certain normalizing mandates and undertakings of Japaneseness (see Chap. 2 for discussion on seken and conformism). The high cost of such tutoring may also directly or indirectly affect household finances but such expenditure is viewed as a worthwhile form of investment, often in predictably economic terms (Dickensheets, 1996; Roesgaard, 2006). Each family is then seduced to become its own competitive self-serving enterprise as well as neoliberal entrepreneurial project (see Kawai, 2020). In this pejorative sense, even the role of Japanese kyoiku mamas has been rationalized in economic (if also nationalistic) terms as their specified home duties are said to ‘involve raising and helping educate Japan’s next generation of leaders, workers and citizens’ (Dickensheets, 1996, p. 74). An Ideology of Economics Imbued in Female Bodies The practice of ‘fully utiliz[ing] women in the role of child-rearing’ is not just an inanely cultural one, bearing well in mind that material resources too are put into educating Japanese women to a high level (Dickensheets, 1996, p. 74). Seen by Rudolph (2020) to be ‘posted in every classroom’, the philosophy of one Japanese woman’s university ‘contended for an idealized “Japanese femininity”’ and for its mission to have ‘Japanese females … perpetuate the “Japanese race”’ (p.  97). One university academic interviewed in Rudolph (2020) argues that mothers ‘raising high school boys … sending off their husband[s] to go to office’ and ‘cutting radish in the … kitchen’ must still be sufficiently informed about international affairs and politics for them to fulfill their economic roles (p. 92). Sugimoto (2010) aptly observes from a typical life-cycle perspective that Japanese women leaving the labor force for child-rearing are obliged to ‘make decisions at three different times’ in their lives. These are ‘at marriage, following childbirth, and when their last child commence[s] schooling’ (p. 163). While some women may aspire to be part of the workforce, the reality remains that their careers may be ‘constrained in ways foreign to most men’ (Sugimoto, 2010, p. 163). With men being assigned productive roles, women are consigned to reproductive functions (Sugimoto,

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2010) as Japanese capitalism enlists women ‘chiefly as supplementary labor’ (p. 166). Even with an aging population and the desperate need for women in the labor force, the continued expectation that women should play their part in child rearing leads Kawai (2020, p. 41) to observe that women are treated ‘as “flexible” tools that can be used to repair Japan’. Already underrepresented in workplaces, a persistent ‘gender pay gap’ sees women disadvantaged through marked ‘discrepancies in payment structures’ (Yokoyama & Birchley, 2020, p.  25). The keeping of women in ‘deprived positions in wage labor’ in effect subjects them ‘to the imperatives of both capitalism and patriarchy’ which neatly support the perpetuation of kyoiku mama subjectivities (p. 166). Not surprisingly, women, as the powerless powerhouses (oxymoron) of population reproduction for economic gain, were the ‘primary audience for eugenic marriage counseling’ and were indeed ‘encouraged early on to undertake meticulous hygienic and eugenic surveillance work’ concerning their physical bodies, such productive work being part of ‘their official gender role of good wife [and] wise mother’ (Robertson, 2002, p. 205). Not unrelatedly, a woman’s physicality became synecdochic of larger concerns with economic consumption, which was ‘inextricably associated with the body and its cosmetic, nutritional, and sartorial enhancement’, therein naturalizing the link by both state and big business ‘between women’s consumer citizenship and eugenics’ (Robertson, 2002, p.  203; also see Kawai, 2020). Eugenics, bodily pulchritude and (re)productivity, the economics of consumption, and the engenderment of a diligent and productive future generation became, in this way, linked to the female gender as such, and particularly, to the kyoiku mama as both cheerleader and mascot—her collusion with undesirable forms of cramming notwithstanding. An Ideology of Economics Imbued in Children As for the children, while physical and bodily demands are indeed placed on those attending cram tutoring classes, they are not of the type that children pressured into physical labor, may experience. This would be especially the case when Japanese children are told to go to particularly well-appointed tutoring centers in upmarket or downtown Singapore, perhaps an oxymoronic way of laboring in comfort. Indeed, Nishino and Larsen (2003) aptly point out that Japanese young people are generally spared the added burden of having to perform their household chores so long as they promise to do their level best and study very hard, as if in full

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admission that cram schooling is itself a wry, if not immediately obvious, form of work. In many respects therefore, there exist contingent resemblances or similarities that support a metaphor that carries with it the idea of exploitation, subjectivization, and oppression, especially where the symbolically violent aspects of cramming are concerned (but cleverly concealed). The children may not be exploited in terms of physical labor but are no less subjectivized into positionings of belabored production, whatever the neoliberal ideologies, situational moralities, or even academic rationalities and pretentions that would be permissive or condoning of such actions (see Chap. 2 for the ambivalence of Japanese situational ethics). Tutoring becomes part of a nicely window-dressed (tatemae), seemingly transparent educational front that veils underlying attempts to exploit learners’ vulnerabilities and defenselessness, not least by way of reifying a discourse that naturalizes mechanistic forms of learning and ‘mindless standardized curricula’ (Giroux & Filippakou, 2020, p.  2088) as a disempowering and devitalizing way of ‘investing’ in their future (subjugation to a grand neoliberal cause). With a market that vaunts free choice and celebrates promised falsely generous rewards (see Freire, 2000; Yung, 2021), it is not ironical that young learners are therein subjected to a form of learning that is severely prescriptive, constrictive, and burdensome. A Shifting of Labor to the Consumer If indeed the metaphor of child labor applied to cram school tutoring seems strange or discomfiting, it might only be so because the relevant production processes are cleverly hidden (even to academics), echoing Appadurai’s (1990) description of the unique way in which ‘relations of production’ can also be masked in certain (for him, far-flung transnational) situations (p. 307). Curiously, in some of these situations, the consumer too undergoes transmutation, degenerating into a mere ‘mask for the real seat of agency’, which in Appadurai’s (1990) opinion is definitely ‘not the consumer, but the producer’ in collusion with ‘the multiple forces that constitute production’ (p. 307). The fact that these forces and relations of production are hidden speaks of the specious way in which the young people in the present discussion (the supposed consumers) are in truth the ones who are deprived of their agency in a subtle ploy in which ‘the consumer is consistently helped to believe that he or she is an actor’ (Appadurai, 1990, p. 307). The truth (if I am now allowed to tell it or see Ball, 2016),

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masked by the tantalizing rewards promised to those who go faithfully to juku classes and holiday programs, is in fact quite the opposite. The so-­ called consumer, who is vulnerably exposed to the hidden hand of the producer’s first mover advantage, is only ‘at best a chooser’ (Appadurai, 1990, p. 307) and at worst, a pawn or (wretched) laborer in the production machinery. This is a type of conflation (confusion) of roles between laborer and consumer which, according to Apple (2005), big businesses achieve by sleight of hand, where ultimately, ‘a good deal of labour (sic) is shifted to the consumer’ (p. 12). In Apple’s (2005) case, ‘[s]he or he now must do much of the work of getting information, sorting through advertising and claims, and making sense of what is often a thoroughly confusing welter of data and “product”’ (p. 12). In the case of juku attendees and their families, it is the sort of work and commitment involved when one buys into the marketization, standardization, managed procedures (see Apple, 2006), in essence, the commodified and labor-intensive form of education (production) that cram tutoring businesses stand in proxy for, par excellence. In doing my duty as an educator to highlight the way in which neoliberal marketization can be party to such a transposition or transmigration of subjective roles and production relations, I am seeking to argue too that the matter is one which deserves a decent (see earlier discussion on decency) scholarly hearing—my own vulnerability to being thought of (albeit much too simplistically and conveniently) as being ‘attention-­ grabbing’ and ‘emotive’ (see quote at the start of this section, but also Jorgensen, 2019, 2021), notwithstanding. I am, in addition, grateful for Ball’s (2016) call for educators ‘to make new sorts of statements, new sorts or truth, imaginable’ (p. 1131) where official (officious) discourses continue to stifle either such truths or the imagination that unveils them.

Conclusion The Japanese in Singapore are an extremely successful, well-organized, and closely knit community that operates in the manner that it does because of activities relating to Japanese business and commercial interests. The ideologies that legitimate and perpetuate the existence of this community are principally mercantilist and capitalist in nature. Both schooling and out-of-school tutoring naturalize an instrumentalized and technologized form of education, which, while affirming these

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mercantilist and capitalist ideologies, in turn make possible the forms and frameworks of education, dis-education, and exploitation they epitomize. Undertakings in education and the youthful subjects on whose (purported) account these undertakings are thereby set in motion are treated ostensibly as commodities to be invested in. Private tutoring then lends itself to being a convenient yet subtle way of ‘privatizing and commercializing people’ (Kawai, 2020, p. 29) obscuring the social injustices involved as a necessary part of so doing. While it is known that ‘cultural form and content [as well as] processes of distribution are indeed [treatable as] commodities’ (Apple, 2005, p. 17), the commodification of cram schooling as a cultural form in this instance is one that cannot be seen apart from the fine-tuned way in which it is packaged and distributed to Japanese communities in far-flung locations like Singapore. Apple (2005) uses the example of how Mark Fowler, President Reagan’s Chair of the Federal Communications Commission was known to have said that a television set was ‘simply a toaster with pictures’, while a media mogul from the UK was supposed to have claimed that that ‘there was no difference between a television programme and a cigarette lighter’ (p. 17). For Apple (2005), such a kind of logic would mean that so-called education institutions (in the present case, cram schools) might just as well be ‘toasters with students’ (p. 17), with deleterious (even horrifying) implications not least for student subjectivities. Equally deleterious in this respect is the way cram schools lessons are planned and delivered (distributed). A palpably conservative style of education allows content knowledge to be taught, treated, and tested in an essentialist and anti-dialogical manner. Such static treatment of content knowledge is not to be seen apart from the fact that tutoring centers may also be regarded as cultural agencies that serve to acculturate Japanese children living overseas to styles of teaching and learning still common in schools and jukus in homeland Japan. In this respect, the tutoring industry is liable to being fielded or wielded as a cultural(ist) technology, one that is mobilizable for purposes of enacting and reifying ideologies of Japaneseness. Considering the realness of such a possibility and not overlooking the fact that tutoring centers are firstly commercial ventures offering services that customers buy their way into, one can only wonder at the weight of importance that is placed on the maintenance of Japaneseness in an overseas location, if even money-making commercial ventures too are made to function as surrogate cultural agencies. Positive imprints of Japaneseness and Japanese education are furthermore to be reinforced

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through efforts to ensure that such tutoring is given a good external face. Japanese tutoring centers in Singapore are found in centrally located areas that charge high rentals, in keeping with tatemae or the need to portray a desirable front for both the community and the mercantile interests it represents (see discussion earlier in this chapter and Chap. 2). The benefits of tatemae in this regard extends also to presenting a positive image of the Japanese community as an industrious, forward-looking, and well-­ organized group of enterprising people, which augurs well for its future in Singapore’s principally and perennially business hungry (friendly) environment. In this connection, cram tutoring as a well-elaborated line of business in Singapore can only be sustained viably if its clientele of students remains on site to do their better part of keeping the industry profitable. Duly preparing the students for their eventual return to Japan would thus prove to be a bitter-sweet undertaking. There is this sense that each returnee to Japan means a loss of income for a Singapore-based branch of a multinational tutoring concern—which can be mitigated by a potentially positive side to this loss. When ex-students do particularly well to enter prestigious institutions back in Japan, this can be a much-coveted form of free advertising for the jukus that once ‘nurtured’ them. Obviously, dependent as it is on the type of work and homework put in by children to do the drills and exercises meted out to them lesson after lesson, the tutoring business will not be sustainable without the regular (regulated) presence and sufferance of these young people on whose young shoulders rest not only the viability of juku businesses overseas, but perhaps the very future of Japanese mercantilism itself. It would also not be too hard to forget that the balance sheet and report card of the tutoring industry’s performance depends heavily too on the types of grades to be found in the children’s termly reports. Notwithstanding the weight and reality of the abovementioned forms of cultural(ist) ideological loadings, cram tutoring programs must also be viewed in economic terms as a form of investment in a future generation, money spent ahead of which would perchance enhance or catalyze a young person’s prospects of attaining career success and high social status— Japanese style. For larger society, the aggregation of such benefits is a way of envisaging potential gains to be made via the accumulation of human capital. In the meantime, hopeful parents take it upon themselves to make sure that there are ample funds in their bank accounts for monthly auto-­ deductions to be made successfully in favor of an elaborate if enervating

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form of schooling on top of another layer of schooling, all of Japanese society’s egalitarian norms (myths) conveniently set aside. The idea of sowing into hard work in order to reap status and success is perhaps a deceptively self-serving motive that may or may not be self-­ fulfilling in the end, at least not without due consideration given to the amount of time and energy or toil and sweat that have to be expended for the sake of buying into a well-spun, if hackneyed, capitalist myth of a prosperous future.

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Index

A Administrators, 24–26, 57, 122, 137 Advertising, 30, 62, 106, 154, 157–159, 184, 186 America, 26, 28, 75, 91, 98, 115 Anxiety, 17, 85, 96, 133, 151, 152 Asia East, 74, 76, 79, 86, 91–92, 108 Southeast, 54, 74–77, 79, 86, 105, 108 Aspirations, 14, 16, 30, 67, 95, 96, 120, 141, 152, 164 Assessment, 9, 120, 123, 130, 134, 135, 165 B Banking form of education, 18, 126 Bloodlines, see Eugenics Bukatsu, 96, 101, 102

C Capital, 14, 15, 18, 21, 29–32, 77, 85, 86, 89–102, 121, 122, 127, 133, 152, 163, 168, 186 Capitalism, 48, 61, 92, 129, 139, 140, 166, 182 China (Chinese), 20, 22, 42, 43, 54, 151 Cold War, 28, 46, 47, 76, 91, 119 Commodification, 12, 94, 185 Commodity, 14, 15, 78, 84, 93, 97, 141, 162, 185 Competition, 4, 13, 15, 39, 50, 78, 85, 114 Compliance, 2, 32, 49, 50, 151, 170 Conformity, 48, 53, 121, 133, 135, 170 Conscientization, 149, 168–170, 175–176 Consumption, 4, 12, 15, 18, 22, 32, 89, 97–100, 141, 153, 180–182

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 G. Toh, Cross-border Shadow Education and Critical Pedagogy, Palgrave Studies on Global Policy and Critical Futures in Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-92832-2

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194 

INDEX

Cramming, 13, 18, 62, 86, 128–130, 134, 141, 151, 153, 162, 168, 178, 179, 182, 183 Cram tutoring, see Juku Critical pedagogy, 3, 12 D Deficit learning, 126 model, 126 Dehumanization, 89–102 Dispositions, 49, 62, 107, 129, 153 Drilling, 28, 30, 32, 125, 128–130, 149, 152, 167, 178 E Elite, the, 127, 165 Elitism, 165 Emotions history, 7, 9, 11–13, 166, 176, 180 English grammar, 41, 112, 114, 121, 126, 130 native speakers, 23, 24, 62, 63 taught in English, 63 teaching of, 1, 23, 24, 26, 63, 121 Essentialism, 31, 44, 149–187 Ethnography, 4, 5, 8, 13, 14, 109, 160–163, 170, 171, 174 critical, 4, 5, 8, 14, 109, 164, 171, 174 poststructural, 4, 160 Eugenics, 94, 100, 101, 152, 182 Examination, 13, 17, 31, 39–41, 64, 83, 84, 108, 112, 114, 115, 126–128, 130–135, 139, 149, 152, 156, 158, 159, 170 Exclusivity, 30, 93, 107, 123–124, 164

Expatriate, 4, 5, 8, 9, 13, 21–23, 25, 26, 30–32, 57, 62, 76, 79, 81–83, 98, 102, 105–142, 150, 159, 163–166, 168, 179 Exploitation, 10, 18, 95–99, 124, 151, 168, 175, 176, 183, 185 F Family behavior, 16, 164, 181 budget, 3, 16 Fathers, 24, 60, 64, 66, 76, 83, 109, 110, 115, 129, 138, 152, 158, 164 Foreigner, 42, 44, 54, 64, 66 Free market, 13, 29, 85, 90, 128 Free trade agreement (FTA), 77, 79, 163 G Globalization, 9, 19, 57, 76, 96, 177, 178 Global jinzai, 80, 158 Good manners, see Politeness H Habitus, 47, 62–64, 107, 124, 129, 134, 140, 154 Hegemony, 4–6, 12, 15, 39, 140, 155, 160, 168–180 Homogeneity, 8, 28, 39, 42, 50, 62, 124, 160 Homogenization, 62, 178–180 Hope, 5, 13–14, 101, 106, 110, 115, 120, 127–134, 141, 169, 176, 181 Humanization (de-), 89–102 Husbands, 20, 25, 26, 76, 164, 181

 INDEX 

I Identity national, 41, 57, 102 negotiation, 8, 19, 20 Ideology, 6, 8–9, 13–15, 20–23, 27–29, 32, 39–67, 82, 86, 89, 92, 94, 100, 101, 120, 137, 155, 160, 168–185 Indignity, 32, 151 Insularity, 41–44 Internationalization, 24, 56–59 International schools, 115–118, 130, 133–135, 157, 179 Investment, 13, 14, 16, 20, 21, 28, 29, 32, 61, 64, 75, 77, 86, 89–102, 163, 165, 177–184, 186 J Japanese businesses, 2, 28, 30, 48, 59, 73, 79–82, 92, 111, 129, 134, 155, 157, 164, 165, 184 capitalism, 26, 48, 61, 78, 85, 102, 129, 140, 166, 182 community, 1, 7, 8, 13, 20, 27, 28, 30, 83, 93, 99, 129, 140, 141, 157, 159, 160, 162, 164, 177, 184–186 culture, 23, 28, 41–44, 48, 53, 57, 59, 63, 93, 99, 108, 141 education, 29, 39–67, 81, 82, 95, 100, 101, 120, 139, 155, 177, 178, 185 entrepreneurship, 80 expatriates, 4, 5, 8, 9, 13, 21–23, 26, 30, 31, 57, 62, 76, 81–83, 98, 102, 105–142, 157, 159, 163, 164, 166 identity, 28, 30, 41, 53–60, 63, 92–94, 101, 139

195

management practices, 79 popular culture, 78, 139, 140 Japanese-medium education, 2, 5, 23, 81–83, 108, 122, 135 Japanese-medium kindergarten, 25 Japanese-medium school(s), 1, 3, 20, 82–84, 108, 113, 115–118, 122, 154 Japaneseness, see Nihonjinron Japanophilia, 31, 140 Juku, 3–7, 10, 12, 13, 16, 18, 27–32, 52, 62, 73, 83–86, 96, 98, 105, 107, 108, 114, 123, 124, 126, 127, 134, 138, 151, 153, 155–157, 161, 162, 164, 166, 176, 179–182, 184, 186 businesses, 11, 15, 17, 119, 124, 126, 133, 186 industry, 10, 123 K Korean (Koreans), 42, 43, 54 Kyoiku mama, 109, 151, 152, 181, 182 L Labor market, 15, 95, 96 M Mercantilism, 31, 164–166, 186 Monetization, 94 Monoculturalism, 28 Mothers, 9, 24–26, 30, 58, 64, 66, 109, 113–115, 117, 131, 134, 135, 137, 138, 151, 152, 181, 182

196 

INDEX

N Narratives, 4, 5, 7–9, 19–22, 26–27, 29–31, 45, 53, 84, 86, 89–92, 109–111, 121, 140, 149, 160, 161 Nationalism, 42, 48, 57, 59, 178 Neoliberalism, 15, 90, 168, 179 Nihonjinron, 8, 19, 20, 22, 27, 28, 31, 32, 39, 41–49, 53, 54, 57, 58, 61–64, 78, 81, 82, 92, 94, 158–160, 165, 168, 181, 185 O Opportunity cost, 95, 97, 153 Oppression, 129, 169, 183 Otaku, 78, 141 P Pacific War, see Second World War Parents, 1–3, 7, 9–14, 17, 24–26, 32, 40, 58, 62, 64–67, 83, 84, 95, 96, 106, 108–120, 123–126, 130–136, 138–140, 150–153, 156–159, 166, 168, 177, 179, 186 Parochialism, 177–178 Politeness, 48–49, 55, 61, 141 Privileges, 26, 107, 165 Production, 4, 12, 15, 18, 30, 31, 50, 61, 75, 79, 90, 97, 99, 100, 109, 139, 153, 165, 176, 183, 184 Q Quantitative logic, 179 R Reductionism, 31

Returnees (returnee children), 58, 59, 65, 67, 106, 108, 115, 155, 157–159, 186 S Second World War, 28, 43, 47, 74, 101, 152 Seken, 50, 62, 157, 181 Singapore colonial history, 83, 163 independence, 28, 75, 77, 86, 92, 165 Social practices, 5, 7, 8, 14, 21, 89, 121, 160, 161, 163 Social status, 25, 124, 127, 186 Status quo, 5, 62, 134, 170 Status, socioeconomic, 13, 14, 85 Storytelling, 4, 78 Symbolism, 93, 107 T Tests, 9, 13, 41, 82–84, 108, 112, 116, 121, 122, 125, 130–132, 138, 139, 156, 165, 167, 170 Time allocation, 14–18, 32, 96–98, 153 Tutoring schools, see Juku Tutors, 84, 107, 108, 112, 125, 126, 130, 131, 136, 153, 156, 159 U Uniqueness, 39, 41–44, 47, 61, 64, 74, 162, 163 W West, the, 43, 63, 74, 91–92, 113 Window dressing, 94 Wives, 25, 26, 75, 76, 123, 124, 163