IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/oup/sscijp/v14y2011i2p165-187..html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Defining and Interpreting Absence from School in Contemporary Japan: How the Ministry of Education Has Framed School Non-attendance

Author

Listed:
  • Katsunobu SHIMIZU

Abstract

The issue of absence from school has gained much attention in contemporary Japan. The government continues to redefine the phenomenon and to publish their opinions, frequently inducing sensational media reports. This paper studies how the Ministry of Education has framed school non-attendance over the period from 1950 to the 2000s. To investigate the ideological aspects of the Ministry's framing, I carried out a content analysis of the reports and statistics it has issued over the decades. I found that throughout the period, the Ministry's terminology in discussing school non-attendance has closely reflected popular discourse. I conclude that the Ministry appears to cast around for ways to describe, quantify, analyse and respond to non-attendance, yet is easily swayed by popular and media discourses and is likely to change its approaches without any sound conceptual reasons.

Suggested Citation

  • Katsunobu SHIMIZU, 2011. "Defining and Interpreting Absence from School in Contemporary Japan: How the Ministry of Education Has Framed School Non-attendance," Social Science Japan Journal, University of Tokyo and Oxford University Press, vol. 14(2), pages 165-187.
    • Handle: RePEc:oup:sscijp:v:14:y:2011:i:2:p:165-187.
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/ssjj/jyr004
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:oup:sscijp:v:14:y:2011:i:2:p:165-187.. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Oxford University Press (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://academic.oup.com/ssjj .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.