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Education is the foundation of a strong and productive individual as well as being the foundation for a strong and productive country. Any country that keeps its’ people uneducated or does not help to educate them cannot hold them entirely responsible for their actions that result from their lack of education. The United States and Japan both feel very strongly about education and that they need to have well educated people. Both of these countries have educational systems that are similar in some ways and yet very different in other ways. Both the similarities and the differences of these two systems give light to how each of these countries go about educating its’ people and how much each of these countries value education.

The educational system in Japan has not always been the way it is today. In fact it went through the very drastic changes in the end of the eighteen hundreds and then again in middle of the nineteen hundreds; right after World War II. The Meiji government was the first imperial government and it came into power in 1868. This government had a relatively nonrestrictive textbook policy. Then in 1872 it passed the School System Law, but it still did not include a Textbook Compilation Bureau. In the 1880’s, there was a surging of nationalistic sentiment among Confucian scholars and this group was led by Motoda (1818-91). Due to this feeling sweeping the country, Mori Arinori (1847-89) became Education Minister and under his leadership state control on what was taught and what was in textbooks tightened. Then there was the Imperial Rescript on Education of 1890. This document had three themes: that the foundation of the nation is Confucian Values, that the role of education is perfecting ‘moral powers’, and that the duty of the subjects is to respect the national polity headed by the emperor. In 1903 the government instated the national textbook system which compiled all pre-collegiate textbooks. The history...