'nihonban' hihanteki kyoikugaku/kyoikukenkyu o soshitsu suru: hihanteki chi no datsu seiyoka ni mukete

The chapter sketches out and attempts to 'invent' the Japanese tradition of critical education scholarship. It identifies synergies as well as tensions among a wide range of critical intellectual traditions within Japanese education scholarship. In so doing, it demonstrates how the Japanese critical tradition has evolved over time in relations to the development of critical education scholarship in the English language academic world. At the time same, the chapter problematizes the problem of West as method, the heavy intellectual reliance on the English-language critical education scholarship. It shows how the development of the Japanese tradition is conditioned largely by the global structure of academic knowledge production where the English-language scholarship plays a paradigm-setting role for scholarship in the global peripheries. As a way to reimagine critical education scholarship in Japan that challenges this global structure of knowledge, the chapter proposes an alternative knowledge practice and relationship, Asia as method, in order to broaden the intellectual horizon of the Japanese critical education scholarship, which has hitherto relied heavily on the 'West' for intellectual resources.