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though there was a rapid increase in demand due to industrialization (Amano 1986 ;
Ito 1999 ). Referring to these studies, Yonezawa ( 2013 ) composed an article in
English on the development of private higher education, referring to the various
comparative frameworks in the international literature.
The US and German higher education systems have particularly influenced the
development of higher education in Japan from the mid-nineteenth century up to the
present. In addition to mass and universal higher education, various topics high-
lighted in higher education research in the United States have been introduced and
investigated by researchers in Japan, such as general and liberal arts education, the
closure of universities and colleges, student consumerism, tuition and fees, finance,
and organizational governance. These topics are strongly related to the trends of
“globalization,” “marketization,” and “commercialization” in higher education,
which have also been observed in Japan.
On the other hand, the approaches to and methods of education and quality assess-
ment have also been focus areas of policy adoption. Some researchers have provided
comparisons of the US and Japanese higher education systems and proposed reforms
based on their own experiences, and some have developed comparative frameworks
from a Japanese viewpoint (see, e.g., Kariya 1992 ). Others have conducted surveys
and described the systems and practices of US higher education, such as those related
to professional schools and student enrollment (Yamada 1998 , 2008 ).
The German higher education system has also been used to explain the origins of
contemporary issues and the challenges faced by higher education in Japan, such as
the systems for appointing faculty members and chairs (Ushiogi 1973 , 2008 ). In
particular, international comparisons of university governance in the United States,
Germany, and other countries have been published (Takagi 1998 ; Morozumi 2001 ;
Ehara and Sugimoto 2005 ) before and after the Japanese government made a drastic
reform of national and local public universities by introducing corporate style man-
agement in 2004. Again, the target audience of these comparative studies was
Japanese readers. However, some researchers have also been actively involved in
introducing these reforms and their impact to an international audience (see, e.g.,
Kitagawa and Oba 2010 ).
Developing Comparative Frameworks from Japan
These comparative research studies have not been limited to mere collections of
information; some studies have intentionally tried to develop their own comparative
frameworks. For example, Ushiogi ( 2004 ) argued that the research on higher educa-
tion in Japan faced a turning point due to global structural changes in the 1990s. The
end of the Cold War led to the end of a major ideological conflict in education
between non-Marxists and pro-Marxists. At the same time, Japanese society had
become more established and mature in social living after experiencing an unprec-
edented economic boom in the early 1990s. Before this change, the North American
and European higher education systems had been perceived as the perfect models
for policy adoption. However, researchers started to realize that they needed to
A. Yonezawa