The balance between individual independence and social interdependence is a perennial debate in Japan. This book discusses these debates and shows how reforms have been implemented at the school level. It explores how the balance between individuality and social interdependence is managed in practice.

From Confucianism to Kant's categorical imperative, from the Ancient Greeks to Amnesty International, This essential volume presents ethics through a fascinating global historical lens and relates it to everyday life and 21st-century politics. Peter Cave traces the development of this key branch of philosophy up to the present day, introducing readers to all the main schools of thought. With his characteristic wit and clarity, Cave takes on good and evil, power and politics, and liberalism and relativism, and handily guides us around some of the most common potholes in ethical reasoning....

Balancing the development of autonomy with that of social interdependence is a crucial aim of education in any society, but nowhere has it been more hotly debated than in Japan, where controversial education reforms over the past twenty years have attempted to reconcile the two goals. In this book, Peter Cave explores these reforms as they have played out at the junior high level, the most intense pressure point in the Japanese system, a time when students prepare for the high school entrance exams that will largely determine their educational trajectories and future livelihoods.

Cave...