Noritsugu Gomibuchi: What the "New Japanese Language" Curriculum Poses

2022/07/19

In April 2022, high school classes based on the new Academic Advisory Board guidelines finally began. Regarding the "reform" of high school Japanese language education, active discussions and issues have been raised in conjunction with a series of criticisms regarding entrance exam and educational reforms. Here, I would like to organize the problems of the "New Japanese Language" from a slightly broader perspective.

A while ago, the editorial department of "AERA" conducted a survey titled "Memorable Works Encountered in Textbooks" ("Soseki or a Contract: 'Do I Have to Choose One?'", AERA, January 13, 2020 issue). First place was Atsushi Nakajima's "Sangetsuki" (The Moon over the Mountain), second was Natsume Soseki's "Kokoro," and third was Mori Ogai's "Maihime" (The Dancing Girl). Other literary works often called "standard materials" in the world of Japanese language education, such as Kajii Motojiro's "Lemon" and Hermann Hesse's "Souvenirs d'enfance" (Memories of a Boyhood), also ranked high. However, caution is needed in how to "read" this data. It is not just a matter of validity and reliability, as the survey was conducted online and the sample size was not particularly large. This is because these results do not necessarily reflect the content of lessons currently being conducted in "Japanese language class" in secondary education.

What does this mean? For nearly 20 years, I have participated in the editing of high school Japanese textbooks, in charge of modern and contemporary texts. The editing process likely varies considerably by publisher, but at least when I assisted, we would read about 200 to 400 material proposals to create a single textbook, narrowing down the candidate texts. Even though it is a Japanese language textbook, it does not only include texts themed around language, culture, and literature. It also includes texts on philosophy and ethics, texts explaining basic concepts of politics, economics, and law, texts explaining the dilemmas of modernization and late modernity, texts discussing contemporary forms of media and communication, and texts themed on ways of perceiving life and nature. It is often misunderstood, but high school Japanese textbooks do not only feature well-regarded novels and critiques by famous literary figures. Since the 1990s, high school Japanese has served as a window to "knowledge" through the Japanese language, covering fields up to the natural sciences while being based on the fundamental contents of the humanities and social sciences. Although it clearly placed an excessive burden on teachers in the field, "Japanese language class" provided the first step in opening the door to new "learning" for students in the classroom.

Therefore, the view that short-circuits the problem of the current "New Japanese Language" solely as a "neglect of literature" does not properly capture the situation. Recently, during the textbook screening process conducted under the new Academic Advisory Board guidelines, there was talk of a publisher that included multiple novel materials in the compulsory subject "Contemporary Japanese," where the inclusion of novels was "not originally intended." However, literature is not the only thing that will suffer a blow if the "New Japanese Language" is implemented literally. Rather, what I consider important is that by high school Japanese shifting toward "practicality" and "emphasis on output," the opportunities to encounter various forms of "knowledge" related to the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences through texts will be reduced. The framework of judgment for what is considered "information" or "data" can itself be diverse. "Correctness" is never just one thing, and the value standards for what is considered "correct" have themselves changed historically. There are multiple entrances to thinking about things, and each leads to the world of "scholarship"... While it may not have been an intended program, the problem is that the time for such intellectual training, which high school Japanese has consequently carried out, will be scraped away. Have those who argue that the "Japanese Language Department" should be made more practical ever imagined what kind of situation will arise when high school Japanese abandons this role? My position is that the "reform" of high school Japanese should inherently be discussed while comprehensively examining the design of high school education as a whole.

Finally, I would like to return to the AERA survey once more. To begin with, even in current high school Japanese, the time allocated to literary materials is not large. Nevertheless, in this survey, many literary works were cited as "memorable" rather than critiques or essays. Perhaps another issue emerges here: the value of fiction for humans and the meaning of encountering stories. Recently, the question "Are the classics really necessary?" has also been posed to high school Japanese, but the importance of encountering stories as products of past imagination serves as a supporting line for considering the significance of learning the classics, moving away from a short-sighted emphasis on "tradition." Japanese language class should be a place of training to gaze at the past and cultivate the imagination to open a new era.