The ‘new’ foreigners and the social reconstruction of difference: the cultural diversification of Japanese education1

In our internationalizing world, even countries that have had a reputation of being so‐called ‘homogeneous’ are facing cultural diversification within. Though Japan is a country often described as homogeneous or, at least, homogeneously minded, with the inflows of new types of foreigners, it is presently experiencing what has been dubbed the process of ‘internal internationalization.’ Such new forms of diversity trigger the formation of new social alignments, and challenge existing categories of the Different. This paper takes the Japanese example as a case in point to re‐examine the social nature of the construction of difference.     

Good and Poor Sources of Educational Aid: A Five-Nation Study

Good and Poor Sources of Educational Aid: A Five-Nation Study College students in five nations (Indonesia, Malaysia, Japan, Australia, the U.S.) were asked their opinions about which nation would be the best and which the poorest source of aid for 10 hypothetical educational-development projects in the Indonesian province of North Sumatra. For the 10 projects as a whole, the majority of respondents in each of the five countries chose an industrialized, formerly colonialist nation as the best source of aid in preference to the two developing nations, Indonesia and Malaysia. Of the three industrialized nations, the United States was selected considerably more often than the second choice, Japan; and Australia was a distant third.     

The knowledge-creating theory revisited: knowledge creation as a synthesizing process

This paper is a part of our attempt to build a new knowledge-based theory of the firm and organization to explain the dynamic process of knowledge creation and utilization. For this, we revisit the theory of knowledge creation through the SECI process and ba, and try to advance them further by incorporating the dialectic thinking. In this paper, knowledge creation is conceptualized as a dialectical process, in which various contradictions are synthesized through dynamic interactions among individuals, the organization, and the environment. With the view of a firm as a dialectic being, and strategy and organization should be re-examined as the synthesizing and self-transcending process instead of a logical analysis of structure or action. An organization is not an information-processing machine that is composed of small tasks to carry out a given task, but an organic configuration of ba. Ba, which is conceptualized as a shared context in motion, can transcend time, space, and organization boundaries to create knowledge.