'Justice' Makes It to Japan

It seems that "Justice" is taking Japan by storm.

The PBS show based on Professor Michael J. Sandel’s Moral Reasoning 22 course was picked up by a Japanese television channel last April. The name of the show, "Harvard Hakunetsu Kyoshitu," means "Harvard’s Heated Discussion Classroom," writes Tomomichi Amano ’12 of the Wall Street Journal blog "Japan Real Time."

The show’s interactivity challenges the dominant Japanese model for studying political philosophy through "memorizing the name of thinkers in the past, and the books they wrote," according to JRT.

"Justice" also challenges social values in Japan that support such models, as Kiyoshi Kurokawa, a professor at the National Graduate Institute for Policy Studies in Japan who has praised Sandel’s methods, might know from experience. After giving a presentation in mid-May modeled after Sandel’s lecture style, he wrote on his blog that there was "some kind of ambience in the air especially discouraging open and interactive discussion and exchange."

An archive of Sandel’s lectures in Japanese can be found here.