CREATING THE CITIZENS OF TOMORROW. A study of the Japanese curriculum regarding goals in creating “the good citizen”

Abstract

The main purpose of this thesis is to study what kind of citizen the Japanese curriculum aims to create and what language and words are important in doing so. The research is based on three main materials; First, the Japanese middle- and high school curriculum in civics. Second, two semi-structured interviews (with a civics professor at Tokyo Gakugei University and a civics teacher at a Tokyo elementary school). Third, a moral education pamphlet commissioned by the Japanese Ministry of Education. This thesis is built as an expansion of a study, previously conducted by the author, on comparing the Japanese and Swedish curriculums in their goal of creating national identity. The results of this thesis show that the Japanese curriculum holds its country’s traditional values and culture high and that moral education has taken a more dominant position within civics education. The citizens of Japan are supposed to be hard working, as to contribute to society, to protect the culture and values of Japan, and are expected to coexist with their fellow countrymen. The results of this study also point towards that Japanese citizens should play a more active role in the international community, to further help the Japanese economy and to spread Japanese values abroad. Most importantly, this thesis shows that the contents of the curriculum are very vague and that the teachers are responsible for interpreting the intertextual meanings of the curriculum contents. The teachers are thus assumed to be part of the cultural hegemony to understand the curriculum.