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Purpose: Amidst ongoing attempts to think beyond Western frameworks for education, there is a tendency to overlook Japan, perhaps because it appears highly modern. This is striking given that some prominent strands of Japanese philosophy have formulated an explicit and exacting challenge to the core onto-epistemic premises of modern Western thought. It is also surprising because Japanese educational practices have resulted in some of the highest achievement outcomes--both cognitive and noncognitive--found anywhere in the world and inculcate a worldview that is distinct. Design/Approach/Methods: Herein, we thus attempt to make visible the potential contribution of modern Japanese philosophy by outlining some of the core ideas, then turn to sketch resonances with and responses to other projects outlined in this Special Issue. Our approach is elucidation through relational comparison. Findings: Through this process, we suggest that the notion of self-negation as a mode of learning may be helpful in explaining why--at the empirical level--the outlook of Japanese students, and perhaps other East Asian students, diverge markedly from their Western peers. Yet we also find that an attempt, such as ours, to link divergent onto-epistemic thought to alternative empirical hypotheses quickly gives rise to various doubts and discomforts, even among otherwise sympathetic scholars. Originality/Value: In directly responding to these doubts, one original contribution of our piece is to show just how difficult it may ultimately be to divest from the symbolic foundations already laid by Western liberalism: Even if divergent thought can be imagined and different cultural narratives explored, dominant readings of empirical "realities" continue to be entrapped in the logic laid by Western liberalism.

Facing increasing critique that PISA focuses too narrowly on cognitive achievement and human/knowledge capital, the OECD has recently shifted some of its focus to student happiness. The 2017 Students' Well-Being report distinguishes between 'happy schools' and 'unhappy schools', showing that among students who combined high performance and life satisfaction, northern European countries topped the charts. Meanwhile, students in East Asian countries including Japan, China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Korea registered the lowest 'life satisfaction' scores among all participating countries. This piece points out some of the problems inherent in the OECD's recent turn to happiness, problematizing the OECD yardstick of life satisfaction. Attempting to keep the critique constructive, we suggest that the OECD may want to consider using alternative metrics, then briefly highlight one developed in East Asia from different first assumptions: the Interdependent Happiness Scale. In conclusion we flag, but cannot answer, some related educational questions concerning policy, pedagogy, and priorities for the future.

East Asian dominance in international large-scale assessments is widely known. This is often explained as an outcome of highly competitive, exam-oriented education systems in East Asia, wherein students partake in a fierce competition for limited college entrance. Although achievement scores may be comparatively higher, the argument goes, the relative success comes at a steep price, with the emphasis on high-stakes tests heightening student stress and anxiety. In this paper we refute this persistent and out-dated stereotype by focusing on changes in Japanese education over the past several decades. The two original studies we report herein show that not only do Japanese students feel less school-related anxiety and stress than they once did, but these levels are now comparable to students in America, Australia, and the United Kingdom. In showing that stereotypes do not match empirical realities, we seek to open a richer discussion around East Asian student achievement. We conclude by extending the discussion to recent changes in China, Taiwan, and South Korea. We then raise the possibility that fundamentally different outlooks on the learning process explain both differences in achievement and the persistence of the West's distorted images of Japanese and East Asian education.

Researchers and journalists in Japan recently proposed forest management as an alternative to dam reservoir development for water resource management. To examine the validity of the proposal, we compared the potential low-flow increase due to forest clearcutting with the increase due to dam reservoir development. Here, we focused on forest clearcutting as an end member among various types of forest management. We first analyzed runoff data for five catchments and found a positive correlation between annual precipitation and the low-flow increase due to deforestation. We then examined the increase in low-flow rates due to dam reservoir development (dQd ) using inflow and outflow data for 45 dam reservoirs across Japan. Using the relationship between annual precipitation and the low-flow increase due to deforestation, we estimated the potential increase in the low-flow rate for each dam reservoir watershed if forests in the watershed were clearcut (dQf ). Only 6 of the 45 samples satisfied dQf > dQd , indicating that the potential increase in the low-flow rate due to forest clearcutting was less than the increase due to dam reservoir development in most cases. Twenty-five of the 45 samples satisfied dQf <0.2 dQd , indicating the potential increase in the low-flow rate due to forest clearcutting was less than 20% of the increase due to dam reservoir development in more than half the cases. Therefore, forest management is far less effective for water resource management than dam reservoir development is in Japan. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]