Professor Takehiko Kariya

I was Professor of Sociology of Japanese Society at the University of Oxford from 2008 to 2024.  Prior to Oxford, I worked at the National Institute of Multimedia Education from 1988 to 1991, then moved to the Graduate School of Education, University of Tokyo, where I taught the sociology of education for almost two decades until coming to Oxford. After retiring from Oxford, I was appointed Specially Appointed Professor at Sophia University in Tokyo.

My research interests cover sociology of education; social stratification and social mobility; social changes of Postwar Japan; social and educational policies. In these areas, I have published 16 books in Japanese, including A Sociology of School, Occupations, and Selection (1991); The Rise of Mass Education Society (1995); Education in Crisis in Stratified Japan (won Osaragi-Jiro Rondan Shō Promotion Award in 2002); The Century of Education, (won Suntory Gakugei Shō, Academic Award in 2005); Education and Equality (2009); and Who killed Japan’s modernity What Comes after ‘Catch-up’? (2019), (won the Humanities and Social Sciences Prize by the 74th Mainichi Shuppan Bunka Sho (The Mainichi Publication Culture Prize)).  Additionally, I have edited and co-authored 13 other books, and published more than 50 articles in Japanese academic journals. I was awarded a Japanese Medal of Honour with Purple Ribbon (紫綬褒章), the Medal awarded to individuals who have made an outstanding contribution to academic and artistic developments, improvements, and accomplishments.

My books in English include (in descending chronological order):

• Education, Equality, and Meritocracy in a Global Age (Teachers College Press; 2020; co-authored with Jeremy Rappleye)
• Education Reform and Social Class in Japan (Routledge; 2013)
• The State and Higher Education (Symposium Books, 2013) 
• Challenges to Japanese Education: Economics, Reforms, and Human Rights (Teachers College Press, 2010; co-editor) 

My recent publications available in English include (in descending chronological order):

• ‘A Long & Wrong Road to Globalization: Why Have Japanese Universities Failed in “Catching Up” in the Twenty-First Century?’ Daedalus, Volume 153, Issue 2, Spring 2024
• ‘Can Non-Western Countries Escape From Catch-Up Modernity? The Troubling Case of Japan’s Education Reforms in a Global Era’ in The Oxford Handbook of Education and Globalization (2023)
• ‘Credential Inflation and Decredentialization: Re-examining the Mechanism of the Devaluation of Degrees’, (co-authored with Satoshi Araki), European Sociological Review, February 2022 .
• ‘Japan’s Post Catch-up Modernity: Educational Transformation and its Unintended Consequences’ in Routledge Handbook of Contemporary Japan, Edited by Hiroko Taketa and Mark Williams, Routledge, 2021.
• ‘Meritocracy, Modernity, and the Completion of Catch-up: Problems and Paradoxes’ in Japanese Education in a Global Age - Sociological Reflections and Future Directors, edited by Yonezawa, A., Kitamura, Y., Yamamoto, B., and Tokunaga, T. Springer, 2018.
• ‘Education and Social Disparities in Japan’, In Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Education, 2018.
• ‘Understanding structural changes in inequality in Japanese education: from selection to choice,’ 2017.
• ‘Resource allocation, historical background of egalitarian education and its changes in Japan: A silent revolution and its unintended results', 2013.
• ‘The State’s Role and Quasi-market in Higher Education: Japan’s Trilemma’ in The State and Higher Education, edited by Goodman, R., Kariya. T., and Taylor, J. , Symposium Books, pp.217-214, 2013 (available to read in the Bodleian Japanese Library).
• ‘Is everyone capable of becoming a ‘good citizen’ in Japanese society? Inequality and the Realization of the ‘Good Citizen’ education,’ Multicultural Education Review, vo.4 No.1, April 2012, pp.119-146.
• ‘Japanese solutions to the equity and efficiency dilemma? Secondary schools, inequity and the arrival of ‘universal’ higher education,’ Oxford Review of Education, Vol. 37, No. 2, April 2011, pp. 241–266.
• ‘Credential Inflation and Employment in ‘Universal’ Higher Education: Enrolment, Expansion, and (In)Equity via Privatization in Japan’, Journal of Education and Work, Vol.24 No.1-2, pp.69-94, Routledge, 2010.
• ‘The Twisted, Unintended Impacts of Globalization on Japanese Education,’ (co-authored with Jeremy Rappleye), in Research in Sociology of Education, Volume 17, pp. 17–63, Emerald Group Publishing Limited, 2010.