The triumvirate governing japan’s higher education policy since the 1990s: Perspectives on neo-liberalism

The aims of this paper are to track the primary actors in the transformation of policy toward higher education in Japan since 1990 and to explore the effects of those policy changes at Japanese universities. We find that the Ministry of Education was joined by two new actors, the Councils established by the Cabinet Office, plus METI and the business world. This triumvirate has been engaged in a three-way struggle over the universities, with the new actors both strongly proposing neo-liberal policies. When the actors’ policies were applied to the universities, however, they were seen less as expressions of neo-liberalism than as ways to overcome the Japanese universities’ recent crises. Because of these pressures, university reform could not be resisted.