114
example of a country where social sciences, including higher education research,
have been presented primarily in the literature written in the national language
(Yonezawa 2008 ). From the earliest stage of the establishment of modern universi-
ties in the latter half of the nineteenth century, the social science fields in Japan have
utilized the Japanese language as the main medium of instruction and have fostered
researchers mainly through domestic graduate education based on supervision and
literature in the national language (Yonezawa 2015 ).
The international experience of higher education researchers in Japan varies
(Huang 2015 ), partly because of diversified academic and professional backgrounds.
Many of the leading researchers in this field have had study-abroad experiences as
graduate students or visiting scholars. In addition, it is becoming more common to
participate in international conferences and projects inside Japan or abroad. However,
it is fair to argue that the number of higher education researchers who are actively
engaged in publishing articles in English is very limited, partly because the domestic
publication market is large enough to establish their academic career inside Japan.
The existence of this language barrier also impacts the landscape of academic
dialogue. Teichler ( 1997 , 2007 ), who has developed a close network with higher
education researchers in Japan, has pointed out that the rich accumulation of litera-
ture and dialogue on higher education research in Japan has historically been invis-
ible to the international academic community. Jung and Horta ( 2013 ) have developed
a map of higher education research in Asia through an analysis of the international
citation database. In their findings, Japan is one of the largest producers of publica-
tions in this research area, but even in international publications, it is not well con-
nected to the higher education research communities of other countries and
economies in Asia.
The boundaries of academic dialogue based on language have established a sepa-
rate development of perspectives in the academic literature among different lan-
guage communities. Those who are not familiar with a language that has a weak
international influence simply cannot access the literature in that language, and they
do not have a strong enough incentive to acquire the necessary language skills that
would enable them to access and participate in the ongoing dialogue. Under these
circumstances, authors writing in their own language do not include international
readers in their audience, and the academic dialogue therefore tends to be limited to
the users of their language.
This tendency also has been noted in comparative education research, which is
international in nature. Yamada (2014b) has described the rather autonomous
development of comparative education research in Japan based on an analysis of
questionnaires completed by members of the Japan Comparative Education Society.
However, Yamada’s review is rather unique because it has been specifically written
for the international research community.
Again, in the literature in Japanese, several literature reviews of higher education
research have been written with the assumption that the readers consist of those
within the Japanese academic research community (Tsukahara 2009 ; RIHE 2006 ,
2014 ; JAHER 2007 , 2013 ; Hashimoto and Asonuma 2010 –2011). The provision of
a simple aggregated summary of the enormous amount of literature on higher
A. Yonezawa