Masahiko Fujiwara explains the “Japanese form” embodied in morality, courtesy, compassion, discipline, and sensitivity to beauty. He criticizes the excessive emphasis on elementary-school English, IT, and fashionable global education, arguing that Japanese language, reading, writing, and arithmetic must remain the foundation of primary education. He also praises Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s diplomatic ability while judging his education policy a failure.

May 9, 2018
Revised and republished as a unified edition on July 25, 2026
This chapter combines several short installments originally published on May 9, 2018, centered on the remarks of Masahiko Fujiwara.
At the time, I deliberately divided the material into small sections so that each important statement would reach the reader with maximum force.
Read as a whole, however, Fujiwara’s argument was not merely a criticism of English-language education or a technical discussion of school policy.
He was arguing that morality, courtesy, compassion, hatred of cowardice, and sensitivity to beauty—the qualities forming what he called “the Japanese form”—must be restored to the center of education.
He was also warning that, before chasing foreign fashions, Japan must educate people whose minds are firmly rooted in their own language and culture.

The Japanese Form That Surpasses Other Countries

—When did Japan’s leaders and elites begin to lose pride in their own country?
Fujiwara: If we trace the problem to its roots, it began in the Meiji era.
Inazo Nitobe graduated from Sapporo Agricultural College, studied at Johns Hopkins University in the United States, and later studied in Germany.
When he became principal of the First Higher School in 1906, he sought to provide students with a Western-style education.
The problem is that among the elites born in the late Meiji period and educated at institutions such as the First Higher School, the “Japanese form”—the spirit of bushido, morality, courtesy, and compassion—gradually began to be forgotten.
Writers such as Saneatsu Mushanokoji, Naoya Shiga, and Ryunosuke Akutagawa also seem to have been overwhelmed by foreign forms because they had forgotten their own.
—Naoya Shiga even proposed abandoning the Japanese language.
Fujiwara: There can be no education without thorough mastery of one’s mother tongue.
Nor can a truly international person be formed without mastery of the mother tongue.
The Japanese missions to Europe and the United States at the end of the Tokugawa period and the beginning of the Meiji era, as well as the Tensho embassy of Japanese youths to Europe, were not respected throughout the world because they spoke excellent English.
They were respected because, from the moment they set foot on foreign soil, others could immediately sense that they possessed a dignified Japanese form based on morality and courtesy.
In Western society, morality has traditionally been taught mainly by the Church.
The fear that those who lie and commit evil will fall into hell or purgatory after death forms an important foundation of morality.
In Japanese society, however, morality is learned primarily through discipline within the family.
Rather than relying on complicated theories of crime and punishment, children are simply taught, “You must never behave in a cowardly or dishonorable way.”
The hatred of cowardice, compassion for others, and aesthetic emotions such as mono no aware are precisely the Japanese qualities that surpass those of other countries.

Japanese Civic Standards and Moral Discipline

—That is exactly the kind of education practiced by your father, the novelist Jiro Nitta.
Fujiwara: While studying in the United States and Britain and traveling throughout the world, I came to realize something.
In moral standards, concern for others, and what may broadly be called civic character, Japan stands far ahead of other countries.
Few peoples possess the Japanese qualities of disciplined upbringing, attentive consideration, and compassion.
These three qualities are rarely found in China.
Americans and British people can be very kind once a situation has been explained to them, but if nothing is said, they often do nothing.
Japanese people try to sense another person’s feelings and circumstances before that person puts them into words.
It is dangerous for Japan to forget this strength and devote itself only to imitating foreign countries.
The decline of Britain throughout the twentieth century dramatically demonstrated that learning English alone does not lead to national prosperity.
The British are the best English speakers in the world.
Yet, apart from finance, much of their economy lost strength.
Translation and interpretation can be entrusted to specialists.
English ability has no direct relationship to business success.
Nor does the ability to speak English automatically make someone an international person.
Among American university students, perhaps only one in ten could reasonably be described as genuinely international.
Even more interestingly, as far as I know, the Japanese people who are most proficient in English tend to be the most skeptical of English education beginning in elementary school.
In elementary school, the priority should be Japanese, Japanese, and Japanese.
By contrast, people who cannot speak English often try to force their children to learn it as though it were a matter of avenging a parent.
It is a serious problem when a generation that has forgotten the Japanese form and bowed down before English and information technology tries to pass its inferiority complex toward the West on to the next generation.
—That is entirely unnecessary interference.

Global Education Is Already a Lap Behind

Fujiwara: It is magnificent that second-grade children from Hokkaido to Okinawa learn the seven-times multiplication table at roughly the same time.
This is the result of a nationwide curriculum and officially approved textbooks.
In many countries, educational content and standards differ from state to state or region to region.
They lack the discipline needed to instill the fundamentals.
Western scholars who recognized this began saying in the 1980s that they could not defeat Japan economically unless they imitated Japanese education.
Japanese education scholars, however, read older Western papers and, from the late 1990s into the 2000s, promoted the relaxed-education policy by imitating the West.
After it became clear that relaxed education had produced educational slackness, they moved on to the slogan, “Learn from Finland.”
The main reason was that Finland had achieved high scores in the OECD’s international academic assessments.
That enthusiasm later faded as Finland’s educational performance declined amid major social changes, including increased immigration.
Nevertheless, Japan argued that China and South Korea were energetically teaching English from elementary school and that Japan would lose unless it did the same.
It therefore moved the beginning of formal English education from the fifth grade to the third.
It makes one dizzy to see Japan imitating countries whose economies are far weaker and which have produced very few Nobel laureates in the natural sciences.
Japan also leaps at already outdated ideas marketed as global education, such as information technology and presentation skills.
It imitates one foreign fashion after another without recognizing that from the early Edo period until around the year 2000, Japan maintained an outstanding level of education and social order for nearly four centuries.
The essence of Japanese primary education lies in thoroughly teaching the fundamentals of reading, writing, and arithmetic.
The most important of these is reading—that is, the reading of books.
Electronic devices should be put aside, and children must be encouraged to pick up books.
Otherwise, the country will truly decline.
The claim that stuffing children with English and IT will automatically make them international and give them diverse values reflects an extraordinarily shallow understanding of human beings.
Education is far more difficult than economics or politics.
It is not something that Keidanren or the government should reform on the basis of passing ideas.

The Greatest Goal of Elementary Education

The greatest goal of elementary education is to raise children who voluntarily reach for books.
A child who reads encounters the lives of other people.
That child learns about the past.
That child discovers worlds that existed before he or she was born.
That child encounters ways of thinking different from his or her own.
Through language, the child develops the power of imagination.
This accumulation forms a human being and forms a Japanese person.
English and information technology can be learned later when they become necessary.
But the power of the mother tongue, the habit of reading, and moral sensitivity, all of which should be acquired in childhood, cannot easily be recovered later.

Prime Minister Abe Was a Genius in Diplomacy, but…

—Should Prime Minister Abe also look back at the foundations beneath his own feet when considering education policy?
Fujiwara: Let me state this clearly.
Prime Minister Shinzo Abe was a genius in diplomacy.
He could discern the balance of power among major countries such as the United States, China, Russia, and Germany, and rapidly determine which countries Japan should cooperate with and how.
His policy at the time of imposing severe economic sanctions on Kim Jong Un over North Korea’s nuclear and missile programs was entirely correct.
The truth is that North Korean missiles already had the capacity to reach Tokyo and Seoul.
Had the United States launched an immediate attack on North Korea, Japan and South Korea would have suffered the greatest immediate damage.
The American mainland would not have faced the same immediate consequences.
Prime Minister Abe understood this.
While calming President Trump, who might have wished to destroy North Korea immediately, Abe managed the Japan–United States relationship with remarkable skill.
At that time, the Japanese people could not afford to replace him.
Unfortunately, however, his education policy deserved a failing grade.
The Abe administration was promoting work-style reform.
What Japan needed was not an expansion of discretionary labor systems that could encourage longer working hours, but a shift toward intellectual work that produces greater results in less time.
Japan therefore had no time to waste excessive amounts of children’s precious years on education centered on IT and English.
Even if children mastered English, high-performance automatic speech translation would soon become standard on smartphones and other devices.
It was predicted that by the time the elementary-school children of that period graduated from university, people would be able to converse across languages simply by carrying such a device.
What, then, was the purpose of beginning English education in elementary school?
The greatest goal of elementary education is to raise children who voluntarily reach for books.
That is what forms human beings and forms Japanese people.
—I sincerely wish that you were Minister of Education.
Fujiwara: But I would probably fail the political vetting process.
I must avoid at all costs the tragedy of women I dated throughout the world telling weekly magazines all kinds of true and untrue stories about me, after which my wife would advise me to accept a divorce.

Conclusion

The central question in this dialogue is not simply whether children should study English.
Nor is it a choice between using information technology and reading books.
The decisive question is what must stand at the foundation of education.
Children must thoroughly master their mother tongue, read books, acquire the fundamentals of reading, writing, and arithmetic, learn to despise cowardice, and develop the ability to sense the suffering of others.
Only after that should they acquire whatever foreign languages and technologies they need.
This order must never be reversed.
If Japanese people lose the Japanese form and continue chasing only foreign approval and fashionable trends, no amount of English education or digital equipment will produce independent international citizens.
An international person is not someone who has stripped away nationality and culture.
It is someone deeply rooted in the language, history, morality, and aesthetic sensibility of his or her own country, and who can meet the people of other nations from that firm foundation.
The words of Masahiko Fujiwara continue to challenge Japan to decide what its education must protect and what it must recover.
MIKIO KISARA