Gender, social policy, and postwar Japanese textbooks: A content analysis

This study examines gender-related social policies concerning education, family, and labor that reflect the gender dynamics of Japanese society, and attempts to determine the relationship between Japanese education and social policies about women by looking at a main medium through which cultural ideas are transmitted: textbooks. To do so, this study employs both manifest and latent "content analyses" to examine the treatment of women in civics textbooks used in Japanese junior high schools between 1952 and 2003, in order to reveal the gendered assumptions behind social policies of education, family, and labor.;The questions that this study seeks to examine are: (1) What is the mean quantitative coverage that textbooks devote to the portrayals of women in the family and in the labor force? (2) What is the nature of the explicit and implicit characteristics of women, family life, gender-related laws, and care-giving, over the years? (3) Is there any possible evidence that the course of study by the Japanese Ministry of Education has affected the portrayal of women over the years? and (4) Is there any possible evidence that the implementation of gender-related social policies, rather than that of the course of study, has affected the portrayal of women?;This study found that portrayals of women have been significantly underrepresented over the years. Furthermore, Japanese textbooks are still depicting and perpetuating gendered assumptions implicitly and explicitly in the portrayal of women, although the explicit gendered treatment in the portrayal of women has decreased in the newer textbook editions. Another finding was that there have been significant differences between the actual content of textbooks on the subject of the family, and the content as prescribed by the course of study, at least on the subject of the family, over the years. This result rejects a number of researchers' assumptions that the course of study in Japan affects the content of textbooks. Finally, and more pragmatically, social policy changes have had more effect on the portrayal of women than those of the course of study. Detailed latent content analysis findings are discussed in terms of curricular perspectives, and implications for the realities of social policies and women are explored.