Lifelong Learning in Neoliberal Japan: Risk, Community, and Knowledge - Hardcover

Ogawa, Akihiro

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1438457871 ISBN 13: 9781438457871

Publisher: State University of New York Press, 2015

Synopsis

Explores the trend of lifelong learning in Japan as a means to deal with risk in a neoliberal era.

Akihiro Ogawa explores Japan's recent embrace of lifelong learning as a means by which a neoliberal state deals with risk. Lifelong learning has been heavily promoted by Japan's policymakers, and statistics find one-third of Japanese people engaged in some form of these activities. Activities that increase abilities and improve health help manage the insecurity that comes with Japan's new economic order and increased income disparity. Ogawa notes that the state attempts to integrate the divided and polarized Japanese population through a newly imagined collectivity, atarashii kōkyō or the New Public Commons, a concept that attempts to redefine the boundaries of moral responsibility between the state and the individual, with greater emphasis on the virtues of self-regulation. He discusses the history of lifelong learning in Japan, grassroots efforts to create an entrepreneurial self, community schools that also function as centers for problem solving, vocational education, and career education.

About this title

About the Author

Akihiro Ogawa is Professor of Japanese Studies at the Asia Institute, the University of Melbourne, Australia. He is the author of The Failure of Civil Society? The Third Sector and the State in Contemporary Japan, also published by SUNY Press.

Edition details

• Publisher: State University of New York Press
• Publication date: 2015
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1438457871
• ISBN 13: 9781438457871
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 254