119Japan and also because the connection with the international research community of
higher education has been rather limited.
For example, Japanese experts on the history of higher education have their own
academic community called the Research Group of University History. Their core
research topics include the history of universities and higher education both inside
and outside of Japan. The universities and higher education institutions in Japan
have primarily been patterned after a Western model that is based partly on the heri-
tage of Eastern intellectual cultures influenced by China and Korea. Therefore, this
research group has been actively engaged in publishing the histories of higher edu-
cation in Germany (Beppu 1998 ), the United States (Sakamoto 2002 ), China
(Otsuka 1996 ), France, Italy, and more. Most of the researchers in this group have
visited and studied in these countries and have interacted with experts and research-
ers there. However, the majority of the articles and books written by the Japanese
researchers of this group have been published in Japanese, and their targeted audi-
ence has been the Japanese language community.
Borrowing the Models Outside of Japan
Many researchers have tried to engage in higher education research from a com-
parative perspective by reflecting on the actual issues and challenges faced by uni-
versities and higher education in Japan. There has always been a demand for
adopting policies from other countries, such as those of North America and Europe.
This research on the higher education systems of foreign countries and the com-
parative research from the Japanese viewpoint have significantly impacted the
direction of the policies and practices of higher education in Japan.
One example of this is the policy design for the expansion of the higher educa-
tion system in Japan. Japan had realized mass higher education by the beginning of
the 1970s as an early case in the world. To understand the ongoing transformation
of the higher education system in Japan, many higher education researchers referred
to Trow’s model of elite, mass, and universal higher education (Burrage 2010 ).
Actually, Trow’s model and his related work have been viewed as the most influen-
tial in Japan research among higher education researchers and policy makers.
Kitamura and Amano, leading researchers on US and Japanese higher education in
Japan, edited and translated several articles of Trow’s work (Trow 1976 ; 2000 ), and
these works have been utilized for predicting, analyzing, and reflecting on the
expansion of Japanese higher education in the latter half of the twentieth century.
For example, Kaneko ( 1990 ) identified the uniqueness of Japanese mass higher edu-
cation, which is led by its large private sector, compared with those of the United
States and Western Europe, where public higher education institutions absorb the
absolute majority of students. Researchers on the history of Japanese higher educa-
tion have pointed out that the expansion of Japanese higher education led by the
private higher education sector had already started before World War II because of
the government’s reluctance to expand the public higher education sector even
6 Higher Education Research in Japan: Seeking a Connection with the International...