Sparked by the confluence of accelerating domestic transformation and increasingly explicit impacts from "globalization", the Japanese education system has undergone tremendous changes during the turbulence of the past decade. This volume, which brings together some of the foremost scholars in the field of Japanese education, analyzes these recent changes in ways that help everyone "reimagine" Japan and Japanese educational change at this critical juncture. Rather than simply updating well-worn Western images of Japan and its educational system, the aim of the book is a much deeper critical rethinking of the outmoded paradigms and perspectives that have rendered the massive shifts that have taken place in Japan largely invisible to or forgotten by the outside world. This "reimagining" thus restores Japan to its place as a key comparative link in the global conversation on education and lays out new pathways for comparative research and reflection. Ranging widely across domains of policy and practice, and with a balance of Japanese and foreign scholars, the volume is also indicative of new directions in educational scholarship worldwide: approaches that center global interactions on domestic education and contribute to a far greater recognition of the polycentric, polycontextual World unfolding today. This book will be of keen interest to scholars of education worldwide, as well as those working in and across anthropology, sociology, policy studies, political science, and area studies given that contemporary transformations in Japan at once reflect and approximate political, social, and educational shifts occurring throughout the World in the early decades of the 21st century. Contents of this book include: (1) Reimagining Japanese Education in the Global Conversation: Borders, Transfers, Circulations, and the Comparative (David Blake Willis & Jeremy Rappleye); (2) Reimagining Self/Other: "Catch-Up" across Japan's Three Great Education Reforms (Jeremy Rappleye & Takehiko Kariya); (3) "The Ideal Citizen", Globalization, and the Japanese Response: Risk, Gate-Keeping, and Moral Education in Japan (Marie Hojlund Roesgaard); (4) The "Internationalization" of Japanese Education and the Newcomers: Uncovering the Paradoxes (Ryoko Tsuneyoshi); (5) Globalization and English Language Education Policy in Japan: External Risk and Internal Inertia (Robert W. Aspinall); (6) Imagining Japan's "Relaxed Education" Curriculum: Continuity or Change? (Christopher Bjork); (7) Beyond the Four Walls of the Classroom: "Real" and "Imagined" Change in Japanese Sports and Education (Aaron L. Miller); (8) Redefining Internationalization in Higher Education: "Global 30" and the Making of Global Universities in Japan (Mayumi Ishikawa); (9) Imagining Neo-Liberalism, the Hidden Realities of the Cultural Politics of School Reform: Teachers and Students in a "Globalized" Japan (Manabu Sato); and (10) Reconceptualizing the Politics of Japanese Education, Reimagining Comparative Studies of Japanese Education (Keita Takayama). A foreword by Robert Cowen and an afterword by Takehiko Kariya are also included.