When I arrived in Japan to be interviewed for a university teaching job in late 1989, most of what I knew about education came from four years of secondary teaching and five years university tutoring in Australia. When I left, after eight years at that first university and twelve at a second, I could see the rationale of much that had puzzled me, and perceive changes under way in what had seemed a rather immobile system. The first hints of what I was to learn came from a kindly Japanese academic at Sydney University, whom I’d called on receiving the…