The Incongruence of Internationalisation Policy in Japanese Higher Education: A Critical Discourse Analysis

Exploring how policymakers construct policy texts by recontextualising aspects of previous polices can provide evidence of whether a present internationalisation project in Japanese higher education provides a holistic understanding of the importance of deeper critical cultural awareness to support a comprehensive approach to internationalisation agendas. In some respects, these present policies are closely aligned to previous initiatives that were by design limited by narrow culturalist and socioeconomic conceptualisations of internationalisation. Applying the critical tools of discourse analysis will contribute to both a theoretical and practical interpretation of higher educational policy planning. This approach will provide both a historical and contextual relational analysis of policy texts to support a critical problematisation approach for interrogating policy in respects of socioeducational factors that support, or hinder, higher educational approaches to interculturality in Japanese higher education.