News Analysis: Japan's economic success does not lie in producing robot-like workers in classrooms

With the recent controversial changes to Japan's international security roles and Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's pledges to bring about economic reform by way of his lofty " Abenomics 2.0" economic policies dominating the headlines of late, a monumental change also occurred currently to the nation's education policy that largely escaped public attention, but has experts on the matter extremely concerned.

Under the guidance of Hakubun Shimomura, the embattled minister of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology, who will relinquish his position in Abe's next Cabinet reshuffle to account for his ministry's bungled handling of a now scrapped stadium construction plan for the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games, the Japanese government issued a decree to all universities in the form of a letter, ordering the institutions to eliminate academic programs in the humanities and social sciences fields.

The move from the government will effectively mean that compliant universities will either vastly reduce or entirely dump programs in these major fields, which will see subjects such as economics, law, literature, sociology and political science not taught to undergraduates. Such an idea has utterly flummoxed and angered both educational experts, industry insiders and anthropologists alike.

The dictum from the education ministry follows the prime minister's utilitarian vision to recast the nation's economy to one that is "results-oriented," and subjects that, in the government's opinion, don't directly "meet the needs" of society should be ditched, in a regressive move that those with knowledge of the matter have likened to a throwback to Japan's former industrial policy.

"Japan's economy is nowhere near where Abe wants it to be and this also falls into his right-wing agenda to a large degree. He wants to restore Japan to its former glory, both militaristically and economically and the two largely go hand in hand. It was Japan 's rapid industrial growth starting in the sixties that elevated the nation towards becoming one of the world's largest economies today," David McLellan, a professor emeritus of postgraduate Asian Studies told Xinhua.

"The manufacturing industry was Japan's mainstay in the sixties and seventies and while Japan produced and innovated, more developed economies imported the technology and in those days Japan began to corner many markets, particularly in the consumer electronics and automotive industries and the economy here grew commensurately. It's quite a basic equation," McLellan explained.

He went on to elucidate, however, that once Japan reached its manufacturing peak, coupled with the ever-increasing competition from other Asian countries offering similar technological products and lower prices due to savings on raw materials and manpower costs, other sectors in Japan's economy developed and helped prop up the nation's balance sheet.

The service sector, for example, grew exponentially in the eighties and nineties, as Japan saw more expatriates coming here to work as major international companies needed their regional headquarters here to capture market share both here and in emerging Asian economies, while households' disposable incomes improved as the economy grew, meaning more time and money spent on recreation and leisure activities for the average Japanese family, even following the burst of Japan's asset bubble.

The economy here, while diversifying away from manufacturing, also saw financial industries, consulting and educational fields, as well as marketing and insurance sectors grow, to cater to the myriad patterns of a varied economy and the need to ensure its output remained efficient, punctuated, of late, by socio-economic pressures, including a rapidly aging and shrinking population, which necessitates an even more diversified workforce.

"Since production here most notably started slowing in the early nineties the economy's changing needs have been met by a shift in education. Japan no longer just required engineers and technicians, but people who could direct innovation, inspire creativity through conceptual analysis, negotiate with overseas clients and suppliers, attract foreign investment, disseminate international laws and boost brand awareness; essentially people with an educational background in the social sciences and humanities arenas," McLellan said.

"It is worrying that the government believes that these subjects, and hence these facets of the economy, are no longer worth nurturing and its belief that replacing these subjects with natural sciences or what it deems to be more 'scholarly' subjects will somehow miraculously save the economy and deal with its hollowing out, when in actuality, nothing could be further from reality," said McLellan, adding that the government's move was a monumental step backwards towards a bygone era of post-war industrialization.

Indeed, other experts on the matter concur, believing that the government's plans to ditch humanities and social science-related subjects in universities can only be negative for the nation and could lead to universities producing workers who only have "linear capabilities."

"Nowadays, a graduate needs to possess a wealth of skills to just survive in today's competitive job market, and to thrive, a graduate needs far more skills besides. The economy is much more diverse than it used to be and hence it stands to reason that education needed to expand to meet the needs of not just the domestic economy, but also the demands of the global economy; as no economy works in isolation," sociologist Keiko Gono told Xinhua.

"The government's notion, which is essentially suggesting that we need to revert to an emerging economy mentality and produce students who can, to put it simply, 'make things,' is extremely worrying as the strength of Japan's economy does not lie in producing robot-like workers in classrooms, but students with the ability to innovate, create and communicate these ideas to the world, with these lessons coming directly from halls and seminar rooms of social sciences and humanities lecturers and professors," Gono said.

Some authorities on the matter have also voiced their concerns about the government clamping down on arts-based subjects in favor of the sciences, as, traditionally, humanities and social sciences have been associated with liberal thinking and ideologies, often reflected in the teachings and tenets of the professors who teach these subjects, and, somewhat stereotypically, both subjects and teachers have been politicized as being influenced by or, indeed, influencing left-wing politics.

"Our sole purpose is to create global citizens, so when our students graduate, they are fully prepared to not just become another statistic as a salaryman or office lady in a nondescript company, doing a job that serves no real function in society, yet requires a 14-hour work day, but to go beyond the minimum expectation and view the world as theirs and explore and contribute to society on a global level. If this is somehow a left- wing agenda, then so be it," McLellan said. "I'd simply call it being realistic in an age of globalization," he added.

Other experts have also slammed the move, with the president of Shiga University, Takamitsu Sawa, vilifying the education ministry in a recent editorial on the matter as being "outrageous, anti- intellectuals" who wanted students to just study "software programming for bookkeeping and accounting in place of Paul Samuelson's 'Economics,' and (study) the skills of orally translating between Japanese and English rather than reading Shakespeare's works."

And even scholars on the opposite side of the education spectrum have weighed in and lambasted the government. The executive board of the Science Council of Japan, has recently criticized the government and expressed its "profound concern" over the move stating: "Academics contribute to the creation of an intellectually and culturally enriched society. We see it as our duty to produce, enhance, and transfer in-depth and balanced accounts of knowledge about nature, human beings, and society. Thus, the humanities and social sciences make an essential contribution to academic knowledge as a whole," the council's statement read. Endi