International Conferenceon Education, Psychology and Society
July 16-18, Hokkaido

Living in the 21st century requires every one of us to strive for a life-long learning in order to cope with all kinds of challenges facing us ahead. In terms of globalization impact and technological advances, the roots of the challenges that come from change, complexity, uncertainty and diversity force us to ask reflexively: “Do we really understand the world we are living in?” and “Do we understand our own self?” These two questions can be regarded as a signifier-and signified question pair which urges us to undergo a life project of inquiry for asking ourselves: In what way can we make meaning of what we have been doing in our life? Understanding itself is a ‘hard’ construct that defies a simple definition of what exactly we mean by ‘understanding’. In my doctoral inquiry, I have developed the notion ‘understanding as myth’ with which we as a learner can make self-assessment of what and how the ethical choices that we make determine our life trajectory. In this talk, I will delineate how our living myth enables us to develop the learner agency for creating meaning through action in order to make sense of what we have been experiencing in our life.

This presentation discusses the continuous challenges which overseas Japanese schools have wrestled with since before the Second World War. Japanese overseas education started and developed in parallel with the county’s opening to the outside world and overseas expansion in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. The expansion of overseas Japanese population strengthened demand for various kinds and levels of educational institutions for their children. As a result of the collapse of the Japanese empire in the Second World War, the Overseas Japanese communities and schools also expunged. However, the country’s economic miracle and resurgence as a great economy in the postwar power promoted overseas economic expansion and the increase of the Japanese population overseas again, and the number of Japanese schools simultaneously increased. Even after the collapse of the economic bubble reduced Japanese economy to long-term stagnation and decline in the early 1990s, the number of overseas Japanese residents and schools has never stopped increasing. By comparing the records of the North China Japanese Elementary School Principals’ Conference held irregularly in North China from the mid. The 1920s until the wartime period to those of the Japanese overseas school and the education ministry in recent years, this presentation argues that the postwar overseas education has been unable to overcome the problems which troubled the prewar overseas education.

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