In the century and a half since Commodore Perry’s ships first anchored in Uraga Bay, few subjects have occupied the reformers of both nations more persistently than the education of children. When the Meiji government dispatched the Iwakura Mission in 1871, one of its principal tasks was the study of American common schools; when the Occupation authorities, in turn, arrived in Tokyo in 1945, one of their first acts was the reconstruction of the Japanese classroom.
The two countries have watched each other, borrowed from each other, and misunderstood each other for six generations. EduJP is a small, independent archive devoted to the patient documentation of that mutual attention — its moments of resonance and its persistent discords, its policies and its classrooms, its teachers and its children.
The archive is organised into five research modules and a running case-study series. Each module gathers primary documents, translations, and comparative notes; the case-study series treats individual American school districts through the lens of Japanese pedagogical categories, and Japanese prefectural systems through the lens of American ones.
A structural comparison of the American K-12 continuum with the Japanese shōgakkō — chūgakkō — kōtōgakkō sequence: grade boundaries, promotion practice, curricular architecture, and the treatment of the transitional years.
The training of teachers in normal schools, teachers’ colleges, and university faculties of education; the long tradition of Japan–U.S. teacher exchange programmes from Fulbright to the JET Programme; and the pedagogical monographs both nations have produced upon the subject.
Where secondary education ends and tertiary begins: the American college-entrance apparatus, the Japanese daigaku juken, credential recognition, and the growing traffic in transnational undergraduates between the two systems.
Sustained observations of individual American school districts — selected for scale, geography, and demographic distinctiveness — alongside paired Japanese prefectural analogues. The inaugural case treats a rural Pacific-Northwest district against a Hokkaidō comparator.
A restricted-access data workspace for contributing researchers, hosting working notes, correspondence archives, and running observation logs. Access by invitation.
Comparative educational scholarship is easier to name than to practise. What follows are the four working principles of this archive.
Where a curriculum standard, a ministry circular, or a school board minute is available in the original, we prefer it to any subsequent interpretation. The habit of reading commentary first is the surest way to inherit its errors.
Every Japanese term of art is glossed in English, and every American term of art in Japanese. The archive assumes a reader fluent in neither system and patient with both.
National comparisons obscure more than they reveal. Where possible the archive descends to the level of the single classroom, the single teacher, and the single school year.
Educational systems move in generations, not in news cycles. The archive is under no obligation to update itself weekly, and its readers are under no obligation to consult it in haste.
The archive maintains a small correspondence with independent researchers, translators, and retired teachers on both sides of the Pacific. Contributions — of documents, of recollections, of corrections — are received through the archive’s general submissions address.
Formal citation of unpublished materials from the archive requires prior arrangement; informal reference and linking remain, as they should be, entirely free.