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- Getting up close and personal with the researchers -

The academic field of sociology of education is the study of education in society. Although it has the word "education" in it, it does not only consider what happens inside schools, but also analyzes various issues surrounding education and society from a sociological perspective, such as whether differences in region or family lead to differences in academic ability.

Up until my master's degree at graduate school, I had been researching the process of how political consciousness is formed through school education, but my supervisor pointed out to me, "It seems like your interest lies before the process of the formation of political consciousness," and handed me a book called "Imagined Communities" by Benedict Anderson, saying, "You should read this." This is a famous research book that analyzes how the experiences of individuals through culture affect the community in creating social unity, but at the time it was difficult for me to understand, and I didn't understand why he told me to read it.

However, right after I finished writing my master's thesis, I happened to be listening to a CD of traditional Japanese songs such as Ministry of Education songs and children's songs, and I had a realization. For example, when we hear "Kimigayo," we feel strongly that we are Japanese. But that's not because it's the national anthem. We should have the same feeling with "Haru no Ogawa" or "Furusato." No one in 21st century Japan has ever "chased rabbits," but the phrase "Usagi Oi Shikanoyama" strikes a chord, and all of us Japanese share a similar feeling. Does this mean that music education has a big influence on creating unity in this country? With this feeling, I decided to conduct research on the social role of music education in my doctoral program.

When I went to Takato Elementary School in Nagano Prefecture to investigate with volunteers from the Tokyo University of the Arts' Music Education Research Lab, we came across a prewar document that contained a music room timetable. I was excited to find something really interesting! I see, to have music classes you need a place where it's okay to make music, so there must be a lot to do with the spread of music education and the establishment of music rooms in school buildings. On the other hand, the people at the Tokyo University of the Arts didn't respond as much. They could make music flow in their heads with just notes written on a staff, so they probably didn't think that they needed a place to make music. Since the sociology of education captures education in society, the experiences and sociality of each of us researchers also influence our studies. In this case, I had not had enough musical experience to make music flow in my head when I saw the sheet music, so I had a ``hunch'' that made me notice the problem of ``place'' from the document and come up with a hypothesis.

Excerpt from "Children, Music, and Schools in Wartime" (2015)

After that, I narrowed my focus to the theme of music rooms and broadened the scope of my research, compiling the results in a Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research report titled "The Process of the Spread of Singing Education as Seen from Musical Instrument and Singing Rooms" in 2006. When I started my doctoral studies, some people around me said, "Is music education really researchable?", but in the end, this thesis produced results that changed, at least to some extent, how the history of music education is perceived.

Until now, my research has focused on the creation of social unity through school education and the formation of discipline and norms in a broad sense. I am also working on music education and the social significance and role of club activities and the various issues within them, but I am currently very interested in the issue of environmental hygiene in schools, such as toilets and hand-washing areas. As with the music room, this was also triggered by historical documents.

When I was doing a school survey in Iida City, Nagano Prefecture with a research colleague on the history of education and modern history, we came across a very interesting document in the archives of Oitemachi Elementary School. It was a historical document called the "Nursing Journal," which recorded the general health of children. In the "Toilet" section of the "Nursing Journal" from the 1930s, there were repeated entries to the effect that "Even though we instructed students not to pee in the flush toilets in the new (reinforced concrete) school building, XXX people peeed today." What kind of social circumstances were behind such records?

Excerpt from the nursing journal of Otemachi National School, 1944

In fact, in 2004, Building 1, an old reinforced concrete school building on our Aoyama Campus, did not have a toilet inside the building. When I first came to our university as a part-time lecturer that year and entered Building 1, which was assigned as a classroom for my subject, I couldn't find a toilet inside the building, and while searching, I found a sign that said, "Please use the toilet in Building XX across the street." I was surprised and thought, "I've come to a crazy place." However, now that I have been conducting research, I understand that this was not a unique situation unique to our university. Until the early Showa period, it was common for pit toilets to be located outside the building in wooden school buildings, so it is likely that even in the reinforced concrete school buildings that began to be built around that time, there were quite a few that did not have toilets inside the building.

There are cases in which schools from before the war until a certain point after the war sold excrement as fertilizer to nearby farmers to make money. Around that time, Oitemachi Elementary School built a reinforced concrete school building in addition to the existing wooden school building and installed simple flush toilets inside the school building. It is likely that the school's "Don't poop in the flush toilet" policy was not just due to a desire to use the toilet cleanly or the water not flushing properly, but also due to the problem of not collecting excrement, which is a source of income, and the loss of money if it was flushed.

In an era when budgets for school education were scarce, schools at the time expanded their facilities with support from the local community; for example, local residents pooled together funds to install pianos and organs in music rooms to accompany singing. For this reason, school management was likely a major concern for the local community. In this way, the connection between education and society was very strong, and a suitable "place" was needed to undertake new educational practices. Hardware such as music rooms and toilets demonstrate this relationship.

The relationship between education and society is not limited to Japan. When I went to Ghana, Africa, about 10 years ago to visit a school, I saw that the toilets were in poor hygiene, that water did not come out of the faucet when you turned it on even if you were told to "wash your hands," and that there was no running water in the first place, and I saw a situation where the environmental hygiene desired by SDGs and other goals could not be realized, and I thought that we had to think of a way to improve the situation somehow. If we could carefully research and present the data and foster awareness that this is an issue that concerns the health of everyone in the local community, people would naturally move to resolve the situation. In hindsight, such an idea was shallow, but at the time I wanted to use schools as an opportunity to improve health conditions. With such thoughts in mind, I began to work on research into toilets in African schools.

Children wash their hands and dishes in a basin of water during lunch time (Ghana)

To improve undesirable environmental sanitation in schools and eliminate "health disparities" between regions and countries, from a public health perspective, one might think that "the problem can be solved by making school toilets flushable," but that alone does not take into account the actual conditions of each society. When considering the background to "health disparities" in line with the actual conditions of local communities and schools from the perspective of educational sociology, it becomes clear that it is not enough to simply "make the toilets flushable."

After visiting the toilets and hand-washing facilities in schools in several African countries, I realized that it is important to build environmental sanitation that suits the local area, rather than pointing out problems based on the standards desired by Japan or the SDGs from a top-down perspective. To do this, we need to consider various things, such as the hygiene awareness and hygiene behavior of the people living in the local community, customs, culture, religion, industry, and infrastructure. For example, there was a school where the flush toilets in the school building had many water faucets and hygiene instructions were thorough, and children washed their hands with the faucet after using the toilet, but during lunch time they washed their hands and dishes in a basin in the courtyard. I realized that simply "raising the level of education" or "building flush toilets" is not enough to improve environmental sanitation and improve people's health, and that there are many things that need to be considered in order to link universal knowledge backed by science with practices that are appropriate for that local community or school.

As part of this, I am currently working on a study on how to use hand-washing stations in Japanese schools. There used to be regulations regarding school toilets, such as how many stations per person, and there has been a lot of research from the perspective of architecture, etc. However, there are no regulations or systematic research on hand-washing stations. In fact, since the COVID-19 pandemic, children and students have started to go to wash their hands all at once, and we have seen issues with the previous facilities not working well. Therefore, I think it is necessary to start by looking at how children and students use hand-washing stations, and by exploring the background of the diverse uses, we can use this to improve the issues.

People walk miles from their homes to get water from a public water source (Ethiopia)
...It's not enough to just bring in Japanese standards

I think that in Africa, too, we can bring hygiene awareness and the actions required for it closer together by providing hand-washing facilities suited to the circumstances of each local community. In this case, scientific approaches such as public health are very important, but at the same time, I think it is important not only to provide hardware, but also to use a social approach that takes into account customs, culture, religion, etc. to promote hygiene awareness and actions, thereby improving health conditions and narrowing health disparities. It's like applying knowledge from the sociology of education to public health.

This method was introduced by Ichiro Kawachi, a social epidemiologist living in the United States, when he came to Japan to give a lecture, using the word "arbitrage." Looking back, my research has been about music education, club activities, school toilets, etc., in the sense that when approaching a certain social or natural phenomenon, the ideas and knowledge of academic fields that have produced more results are brought to bear on academic fields that have not yet produced much.
It can be said that "Arbitrage" has produced results.

In addition to "Arbitrage," there are a few things I want high school and university students to keep in mind when studying the sociology of education, or in other words, when exploring anything. First of all, "sensitivity." When you talk to artists, they say, "People tend to think that they have a rich imagination, but that's not the case. They have a rich sensitivity, and they take in a lot of things from society, nature, and various things with their five senses, and their minds are filled with interests and questions, and what comes out of that becomes their work." The same is true for academics. Enrich your sensitivity, face society and nature firmly, and receive it with your five senses. Your sensitivity is different from that of others, so even if you are facing the same society and nature, each person will have their own unique way of perceiving society and nature, and will have different interests and questions than others.

And the most important thing is intuition. In Sakyo Komatsu's sci-fi masterpiece "Japan Sinks," not only in the novel, but also in the 1973 film version, the 1974 TV drama version, and the 2021 remake of the TV drama version, the conversation "What is the most important thing for a scientist?" "It's intuition." In order to prove the correctness of "intuition," hypotheses are made based on "intuition" and "imagination," and data is collected by conducting surveys and experiments. Of course, educational sociology is a rational discipline, so objective correctness is necessary, but I think that the origin of any discipline that seeks to develop science and understand society and nature better than ever before, not just educational sociology, is "sensitivity" and "intuition."

However, hypotheses based on intuition and imagination should not be mere ideas or guesswork. It is impossible to use your own limited experience to develop an intuition or hypothesis that is sufficient to understand previously unknown aspects of society or nature. Therefore, it is important to expand, deepen, or shift your intuition or hypothesis about how society or nature appears to you by talking to others, and to clearly define its outline before conducting research or experiments to collect data. Sensitivity, intuition, talking to others, and arbitrage. I believe that being aware of these things will enable you to deepen your learning and exploration from your own unique perspective.

When we are students, we tend to think that "teachers know the right answer" and "what is written in the textbook is 100% correct". However, this is not actually the case. University professors continue their research because there are things they do not know or understand, and in that sense they are fellow students who learn together, and textbooks simply contain what is the most persuasive information at the present time. I would like high school and university students to first compare two or three newspapers every day and think about how they report the same news or data, and how their approaches differ. In other words, you are gaining experience from various pseudo-positions. By doing so, you will naturally develop a critical perspective, enrich your "sensitivity", and hone your "instinct" backed by experience. I hope you will acquire your own unique "sensitivity" and "instinct" and jump into the academic field.