Hidetada Shimizu

What Is Tracking? Cultural Expectations in the United States, Germany, and Japan

On the basis of the TIMSS Case Study Project data collected in the United States, Japan, and Germany in 1994–1995, this article examines the phenomenon of tracking as part of curricular differentiation and student placement practices in public K–12 school systems. The authors document clear national differences in differentiation and placement measures and summarize the history of conflict over those measures. Analysis of respondent perceptions and beliefs about differentiation and placement (what people think “tracking” is) shows that nation-specific values and attitudes (i.e., cultures) determine which forms of curricular differentiation are legitimated and which contested. Dominant cultural beliefs about what students are capable of and the role that schools should play in educating them create different points of conflict over tracking.

Beyond Individualism and Sociocentrism: An Ontological Analysis of the Opposing Elements in Personal Experiences of Japanese Adolescents

Many studies of Japan have used the ‘sociocentric’ (i.e., contextual, collective and empathic, etc.) framework of analysis to contrast Japanese culture, people, or behavior with their arguably individualistic counterparts in America (or ‘Western societies’). This article argues that the individualism-sociocentrism dichotomy as applied uniformly (e.g., all or the majority of Japanese are sociocentric) and exclusively (e.g., Japanese are sociocentric but not individualistic, unlike Americans who are individualistic, but not sociocentric) to a group of people such as those in Japan is methodologically limited and conceptually inadequate to understand private experiences of its individual members. Placing case studies of three adolescents in the ontological perspective of Heidegger and Paul Tillich, I will show that the two orientations are mutually dependent and dynamically constituting elements of their personal experiences.

Japanese Adolescent Boys’ Senses of Empathy (Omoiyari) and Carol Gilligan’s Perspectives on the Morality of Care: A Phenomenological Approach:

This study replicated the interview method of Carol Gilligan and her colleagues to examine the nature of the care perspective in Japanese adolescents’ real-life experiences of moral conflicts and decision making. Four emergent themes that contradicted Gilligan’s theoretical perspectives were identified: (1) both Japanese male and female adolescents showed what Gilligan would call a ‘female’ (i.e. ‘care-oriented’) concern; (2) the care orientation was expressed as a normative voice of a larger (Japanese) society, whereas Gilligan saw it as a subordinate (to justice) voice of male-oriented Western society; (3) caring and justice were linked in the thought and actions of Japanese adolescents, whereas Gilligan saw them as polar opposites; (4) Japanese adolescents saw caring as a communal responsibility, whereas Gilligan saw it as individual feelings. Implications for the applicability of Gilligan’s concept of the morality of care in crosscultural research are discussed.