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Japan is experiencing a period of fundamental debate about – and significant modification of – education. The authors argue that it is important to gain further understanding about citizenship education from a range of contexts. Their reflections are based on a long period of collaborative work between colleagues in Japan and England which has included analyses of literature, projects funded by various bodies, including the Japanese government, and ongoing work in the field of political literacy. They provide some descriptive material concerning the historical background, key terms and concepts and aspects of policy and practice relevant to developing an understanding of citizenship education in Japan. They critique citizenship education in Japan, drawing attention to current struggles over the characterisation of this curriculum subject and how it is perceived to resonate throughout schools. They suggest that citizenship education is in a state of flux, and conclude that there is a need for further investigation if we are to gain a proper understanding of how citizenship education is – and could be – perceived and practised. They describe and discuss a recently established research and development project focusing on 'public discourse' through which this further clarification could, in part, be achieved.

The authors discuss findings from the project 'Political Literacy in Japan and England'. They do so to follow up on work published in this journal in 2011. The now completed project involved two schools in England and three schools in Japan, and had the aim of exploring what teachers would do in each country when asked to use the same approach to political literacy. That approach to political literacy was based on an attempt to promote discourse around a range of political concepts. Citizenship education in England, at the time of the project, was relatively secure as a National Curriculum subject established in schools since 2002. In Japan, there was a dynamic picture in which a variety of initiatives to promote understanding of and participation in contemporary society was embraced by individual teachers. In both countries, there was a focus on enhancing students' knowledge and skills in ways that were not always aligned very explicitly or precisely with particular political concepts or the promotion of specific types of discourse. The authors suggest that teachers in their sample espouse a commitment to concepts but actually emphasise content in their classroom work; they do not always help students to attain high levels of achievement in relation to ability to discuss; and the purpose of a positive classroom atmosphere may only be loosely attached to specific learning goals for political literacy.

Abstract
This article is made up of a set of interrelated pieces of work that emerge from the 9th citizED conference that was held in Tokyo in 2013. A symposium at that conference was organized on the theme of 'Comparative approaches on citizenship education: East and west'. We present here four individual contributions from Daehoon Jho, Shigeo Kodama, Walter Parker and Libby Tudball as well as an introduction and concluding remarks by Mitsuharu Mizuyama and Ian Davies. Throughout we have been keen not to present stereotypical reflections and are struck as much by the similarities and overlaps between authors as well as the differences. We hope that by sharing these ideas we will celebrate diversity and contribute to thinking and practice in specific countries, as well as raising the possibility of cross national collaboration and perhaps generating further reflections about the possibility of global standards for citizenship education.