Role of vocational and technical education in Japanese development

Abstract

For the past five years, the present author has conducted, as Coordinator, project sponsored by the United Nations University (UNU, Tokyo) on "Technology Transfer, Transformation & Development - The Japanese Experience" (JE Project). This project is aimed at reviewing the past experiences of Japanese technological development since the inception of her industrialisation from the standpoint of the needs in the developing countries today. This re-appraisal of Japanese development from such a standpoint is really a new task, which few scholars engaged in such an aspect of Japanese history have ever studied on, even though the nation has had quite a huge army of very knowledgeable socio-economic historians and very large assets of academic works produced by them. Their main academic interests centre around how and why the Japanese economy in the past was "delayed" and "twisted" in comparison with Western countries. Very few of them took interest in the other side of the coin: How Japan could overcome the difficulties which are uniquely common to late-coming countries, including Japan.