JAPANESE TERTIARY EDUCATION
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graduate and former top executive at Kirin Beer (former president of the Shakey’s
Pizza restaurant subsidiary of Kirin). He has a desk both in this administration
office and in the office of the chairman of the board of trustees. Chairman
Kawaguchi, himself a former Kirin executive, personally recruited Mr. Mori to this
amakudari (see footnote below) position after his retirement from the corporate
world.
The Academic Affairs Department, also with a staff of eleven, is divided into
two sections. The first section is responsible for the registration of students,
scheduling of classes and professors, and coordinating the curriculum and
syllabuses for both faculties. The second section handles the extracurricular classes
for certification, the study abroad and international programs, and the grant
applications for academic funding, both internal and external. There are also one
staff member who handles the secretarial work for the graduate school, and another
who is responsible for the licensing program for student teachers.
The Student Affairs Office has a staff of nine and is divided into two sections:
student affairs and careers. The student affairs section focuses on all aspects of the
students’ affairs, including clubs and circles, university cards, and scholarships and
fees. The careers section busies itself providing information for and counseling
students to find work and placement in jobs after graduation.
The Library Office consists of five full-time staff members and numerous part-
time circulation desk employees. The majority of these “librarians” do not have
specialist qualifications in the library sciences but, rather, are regular members of
staff who are rotated between departments like everyone else. The Admissions
Center has three staff members as well as a former high school teacher who has
been hired as an assistant.
There is a nurse in the nurse’s office, a professional counselor in the student
counselor’s office, a groundskeeper employed for the sports ground located just
west of Tokyo in Kawasaki, a cadre of campus security guards working for an
outside agency contracted by the university, cheerfully manning the guard house
24/7, and a live-in caretaker family at the EUC seminar house, a facility rebuilt in
the late nineties and located in the mountains of Gunma Prefecture, four hours
north of the EUC campus. The seminar house can accommodate more than fifty
guests. It is mostly used as a retreat for seminar classes, as well as student-run
clubs and circles, but any member of the EUC community, including alumni, is
entitled to stay at the facility at a subsidized rate.
Last in this description of the administrative departments is the IT/Media
Center,
which controls the largest administrative budget at EUC. The “medeia
sentaa,” as it is usually called, employs a modest full-time staff of only two
(originally three), one of whom is an IT specialist hired specifically for the position
in addition to hiring an outside private computer consulting firm, which has
assigned a few consultants to work at EUC on a semipermanent basis.
Perhaps because of the lack of transparency in the use of their budget, which
includes huge grants from the Ministry of Education, there exists a jealous
perception that this administrative department has somehow achieved a
CHAPTER 1
semiautonomous status outside the informal organizational structure of the
university. An entire conference and edited volume has been devoted to the
analysis and discussion of the many sociocultural conflicts that plague IT centers at
Japanese HEIs (Bachnik 2003). Not surprisingly, the EUC Media Center was at the
center of controversy at the university on a number of occasions.
The first move by the head of the administration offices was to deny the recently
married computer specialist at the center, Ms. Ōta, the right to continue using her
maiden name at her professional workplace, EUC. This decision was viewed as
rather draconian by more than a few in the EUC community and strongly criticized
by many faculty members. The EUC labor union, consisting of both faculty and
administrative staff members, submitted a formal protest to the board of trustees on
behalf of Ms. Ōta. Though the head administrator did not budge in his conservative
policy, this incident paved the way for a compromise with new women faculty
members a year later. By opposing a change in the national law that would allow
married couples to keep separate surnames, conservative members of the Japanese
Diet are even now fighting this battle against popular opinion in their effort to
“protect” the “traditional Japanese household” (ie).
A second major conflict erupted when a computer security breach forced the
head administrator and the Media Center committee to play a heavy hand in their
personnel decisions. In an intriguing case of alleged sabotage, Mr. Sekiguchi, the
network specialist at the EUC Media Center, was suspected of hacking into the
university administration offices server from outside the university firewall.
Though this suspicion was at first largely kept secret by the president and his inner
circle on the one hand, and Mr. Mori, the head administrator, on the other, with the
support of the board of trustees, the president, the Media Center committee, and
the evidence provided by the outside experts at the consulting firm, the head
administrator openly accused Mr. Sekiguchi of shirking his responsibility as
university network and security specialist. Though he was neither fired nor
demoted in terms of pay scale, Mr. Sekiguchi was subsequently ostracized to a
clerical position in the library with strict orders not to touch any of the university
computers. Villages in Edo Japan were known to have used the weapon of social
ostracism (murahachibu) to punish individuals and their families. Although
allowed to remain in the village, the victims and their families were given the
silence treatment and forbidden to participate in village activities. The “curse” was
only ignored in the case of fire or death. Though officially still members of the
village, they were no longer part of the community. The way of dealing with Mr.
Sekiguchi was reminiscent of this custom—he was not fired by the university, but
his silent penance in the library, where few people spoke to him, effectively forbid
his participation in the EUC community.
Mr. Sekiguchi attempted to appeal his case to the university community by
posting a letter of petition and “supporting documents” to the home of every
faculty and staff member. He did not do much for his own cause, however, when
he accused the EUC labor union of not properly coming to his defense, when in
fact the elected board of the labor union, three faculty members, had spent hours
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