Japanese teachers are a key component in the success of the Japanese educational system. They work long hours, and are responsible for a variety of tasks within the school, including administration, discipline, and cleaning. This study was designed to facilitate a more thorough understanding of the various roles of the teacher in both lower and upper secondary schools in Japan.This research took place in Morioka City, Iwate Prefecture, Japan, and utilized a combination of personal interviews and sustained direct observations of individual teachers as they went through their daily routines schools. A questionnaire was also administered to in Iwate Prefecture in order to quantify the data, and the responses were subjected to a comparative analysis to determine the percentages of time teachers spend on different kinds of activities.The roles of the teachers were interpreted after analyzing the case studies and questionnaire responses, the results indicated that Japanese secondary teachers spend over sixty hours a week performing various functions within their schools. The roles range from police officer, friend, individual guidance counsellor, and administrator, to career councellor, librarian, and surrogate parent. Japanese teachers take their roles and responsibilitis seriously and are committed to insuring that all their students succeed. / Department of Secondary, Higher, and Foundations of Education

This study explores the tremendous pressure Japanese students must endure in the pursuit of academic achievement. It identifies the sources of student's pressure and discusses the cultural, social, and economic conditions that influence a fiercely competitive educational system. The focus of this study is the impact of academic pressures on Japanese students. / Japanese education is a single-minded drive for achievement that results in what many refer to as examination hell. The university entrance examination is at the root of the pressures that are placed on students and is the primary mechanism responsible for driving competition. The life-long ramifications of students performance on this examination are far reaching. As a result, the pressures that are exerted upon students to achieve are overwhelming. Mothers, teachers, peers, and society contribute to the pressures that are placed on students to achieve, while many children continue to fall victim to emotional, psychological, and physical harm. / The study provides richly descriptive narrative accounts of student's experiences, thoughts and feelings seen from a student's perspective. The study gives voice to Japanese students and invites them to tell it like it is.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Yale University, 1996. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 147-151).

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While global human rights knowledge has become a central facet of curricula used to shape multicultural societies and develop cosmopolitan citizenry, such knowledge is shaped by sociopolitical context. Japan has a long history of incorporating human rights concepts into its citizenship curriculum; however, this curriculum is produced in a political context where there is resistance to extending rights to minorities and the disadvantaged, and where there are renewed attempts to emphasise traditional Japanese cultural values through education. Potential tensions have been recognised, yet little has been written about educational knowledge as end product, or its role in informing learner and teacher understanding of human rights. Intentions to promote inclusivity and new communal identities notwithstanding, this work establishes that the recontextualising discourse of human rights within Japan's school curriculum, as a discourse that regulates identity and citizenship, portrays the rights of marginalised and non-Japanese identities as privileges extending beyond the norm of society, while at the same time implicitly denying ethnic Japanese individuals full access to rights language. Thus, while learners regard human rights of value, many are less receptive and empathetic to rights claims made by non-like others, and are likely to consider society as incapable of embracing diversity. Human rights concepts possess symbolic value and weight; however, their symbolic importance can be easily embedded within particularistic notions of identity and nationality to ends contrary to multiculturalism and cosmopolitanism, which for this research was witnessed in their transformation into tools for cultural and political legitimacy by the Japanese State. This research arrives at these conclusions through a systemic, holistic analysis of human rights learning in Japan that ties official knowledge to instructional and learning outcomes. This research is first a mixed-method policy sociology utilising computer-based analytical techniques to examine the structure and content of human rights knowledge within upper-secondary social studies textbooks representing Japan's official curriculum. This is followed by a comparative case study of two upper-secondary institutional sites of human rights learning, an academic, public coeducational western Japan senior high school, and a private Tokyo girls' senior high school, the primary differentiation being that the western Japan school is an explicit site of human rights learning, applying its own content and pedagogic practice as part of a specialised human rights curriculum designed to supplement the official curriculum. This research not only has implications for Japan in yielding a greater understanding of how the curriculum engages and reproduces identities and to what end, but also potentially to understand how similar tensions and contradictions between universal and particular play out in other national, State-sponsored education contexts.

This thesis examines the identity of the students at the Montreal Hoshuko and the factors that affect the way in which they identify themselves as Japanese, drawing upon a framework of political economy and concepts of globalization and transnationalism. It also explores how Japanese identity is changing in this globalized world. The fieldwork demonstrates that the identity of the Hoshuko students is somewhat commoditized based on Japanese popular culture such as Pokemon. It suggests that increasing communication and contact with external forces has changed and will further change the way Japanese people understand their own culture, identity, and themselves. It is argued that identities are not fixed or frozen in time; rather, they should be understood as flexible and a process shaped by history, a given context, and multiple external factors, and that a more fluid understanding of Japanese culture and identity is needed in a globalized, transnationalized world.

Although humane education, promoting children's kindness toward animals, has been evaluated as a factor influencing children's kindness toward humans later in their life, the effect of a classroom pet hasn't been well studied. The current study investigated the influence of intensified daily interactions with living animals in the classroom on the development of empathy among Japanese children. Specifically, the study examined (a) the effect of introducing animals into the classroom on children's empathic behaviors and attitudes, and (b) the generalization of this animal-directed empathy to humans.

No description available.

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Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Hawaii at Manoa, 1995. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 393-410). / Microfiche. / 2 v. (410 leaves), bound 29 cm