Orientalism, the West and Non-West Binary, and Postcolonial Perspectives in Cross-cultural Research and Education

Research in the field of comparative and international education often examines the cultural and educational practices and systems of countries and societies other than the researchers’ own. Indeed, a cross-cultural, or so called “comparative, " perspective is one of the great contributions that research in the field of comparative and international education can make to the scholarship on education; at the same time, that comparative perspective and the issues surrounding it-conceptually, methodologically, and practically-pose difficult questions for us (both for those conducting research and those teaching in the field), especially when Western scholarship examines non-Western experiences. In this chapter, I would like to explore ways to address some of the problematic relations between the West and non-West in scholarship in general, and in educational research in particular, by considering and reconsidering a particular example-research on Japanese culture, society, and education.