Japanese Universities Abandon Merit

 

As the West walks back gender studies, Japan is opening the door.

Yuto Kunitake

March 26, 2026

Across Western academia, and particularly in the United States, a reckoning with gender studies and “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) ideology is underway. Since the return of the Trump administration, federal funding reviews and institutional pressure have intensified, and some gender studies scholars are finding themselves without positions. The irony is that Japan is quietly emerging as a landing pad for them.

Japan has long had a pattern of importing ideological trends from the West, particularly the United States, on a delay. But this time, the problem is not merely one of timing. What makes the current moment genuinely alarming is that Japan appears poised to absorb one of the most dysfunctional expressions of the DEI ethos precisely as the West is beginning to recognize its failures.

A Distorted Labor Market

Japanese universities have seen a sharp rise in the hiring of women-only faculty in recent years. This is already well-documented, but the phenomenon has evolved into something stranger: positions that specify no research field, which are already rare and highly coveted opportunities in a hyper-specialized profession, are increasingly being designated as women-only. The message sent to the academic labor market could not be clearer: identity matters more than scholarly fit.

In an environment where postdoctoral researchers and junior scholars already face an acute shortage of available positions, male researchers find themselves ineligible to apply for a growing share of openings. Meanwhile, female researchers are reportedly receiving simultaneous offers from multiple institutions, a seller’s market in a profession where most participants struggle to find any position at all.

Importing What the West Is Discarding

More troubling still is the emerging trend of Japanese universities actively recruiting gender studies scholars who have lost their footing in the United States. Institutions appear to be framing this as an infusion of international expertise. The reality is more complicated.

The criticisms now being leveled at American gender studies, including a deficit of methodological rigor, ideological uniformity, and a weak relationship with empirical evidence, are not coming exclusively from political opponents. They are increasingly raised from within the academy itself, across the political spectrum. Yet Japanese universities seem ready to welcome these scholars with little apparent awareness of the intellectual controversies they bring with them.

The risk is not simply one of importing flawed scholarship. It is that the institutional behaviors that accompanied gender studies’ rise in America, namely curricular capture, pressure to “queer” adjacent disciplines, and a narrowing tolerance for dissenting views, may arrive as part of the package.

A Lagging Cycle With No Safety Net

Japan has sometimes been seen as culturally resistant to the more destabilizing currents of Western leftist ideology. But academia is a different environment. Budget allocation mechanisms, international ranking pressures, and policy incentives from the Ministry of Education combine to make universities unusually susceptible to external ideological influence.

What Japan is now undertaking is, in effect, the institutionalization of policies that the West experimented with, paid a significant price for, and is only beginning to walk back: the formalization of sex-based discrimination in hiring, the active recruitment of ideologically homogeneous scholars, and the erosion of merit as the primary criterion for academic appointments, all occurring simultaneously.

For American conservative policy institutions, this should not be a matter of indifference. The flow of academic soft power is also the flow of ideas. An ideology that has lost institutional support in the United States retains the capacity to re-enter through the networks connecting American and Japanese academia. The cycle that began with Japan importing DEI may complete itself with Japan exporting its consequences back.

Japan’s universities are walking a path the West has already traveled. The concern is not only that they will repeat the same mistakes. It is that they may make them worse.

Minding the Campus

https://mindingthecampus.org/2026/03/26/japanese-universities-abandon-merit/