ICT Use and Inequality in Japan before and after the Pandemic

Japan has been known as a society that experienced early economic development in East Asia and has been recognized as a technologically advanced country. However, Japan is actually among the most delayed countries in the world when it comes to the usage of ICT in schools (MEXT 2019, Ma and Cheng 2022).

However, this situation has drastically changed in recent years. Due to the spread of COVID-19, schools in Japan were closed for three months starting at the end of February 2020, and even after reopening, they faced prolonged disruptions from regular operations. In response to this situation, the Ministry of Education in Japan accelerated the initial plans of ICT implementation policy forward by several years. However, some scholars including sociologists expressed concerns that the sudden introduction of ICT into schools that had not previously used could lead digital divides between families and across schools.

This study aims to clarify how the significant shift in ICT usage policies under the Covid impacted the nature of education by quantitatively analyzing PISA and a survey conducted in collaboration with the government. In the analysis, we will first descriptively compare the 2018 and 2022 PISA data to examine ICT usage within Japan, and then compare them to the other countries. As the second step, we will examine how the effect of socioeconomic status on the usage of ICTs in schools changed before and after the pandemic.

Although the main focus of this research is on Japan, it also seeks to make a theoretical contribution as a case study of non-Western late industrialized country which imported policy from Western societies. Furthermore, it aims to provide insight of generative mechanisms of digital divide within and between schools when ICT is rapidly introduced during the pandemic.