Vocational Training and Vocational Education in Postwar Japan: An Overview

Abstract

Introduction Japanese labor practices have long been associated with the three core components of seniority wages, lifetime employment, and enterprise unions. Scholar Moriguchi Chiaki has taken a more nuanced look at the dynamics of Japanese labor, identifying a Japanesestyle human-resource management model comprising seven mutually complementary human-resource policies whose roots she traces to Japan’s postwar period of rapid growth: (1) selective, once-a-year recruitment of new graduates, (2) extensive company training programs and education, (3) periodic pay raises and internal promotion based on evaluations, (4) flexible job assignments and small-group activities, (5) employment security until the age of mandatory retirement, (6) enterprise unions and joint labormanagement consultations, and (7) unified personnel management of white-collar and blue-collar employees (Moriguchi 2014, 61).1 The main theme for this edition of Japanese Research in Business History, the 37th in the publication’s history, is in-house education in postwar Japan—one of the pillars of the Japanese-style human-resource management model. The “postwar” element is key here, as it provides the temporal context for company-sponsored, in-house education as part of the country’s overall educational system. During the US occupation of Japan after World War II, the Japanese educational system underwent drastic changes through occupation-driven reforms. Two of the most pivotal elements of that transformation were the lengthening of compulsory education from six years to nine years and the subsequent shift toward a co-educational policy for every phase of the educational framework, including secondary and higher education. Whereas the educational system in prewar Japan was single-sex outside of primary education and compulsory education, the postwar transition saw essentially every element of the educational structure—including secondary and higher education—go coeducational. In prewar Japan, children who chose not to go on to secondary education