Japan Teachers Union
| Native name | Nihon Kyōshokuin Kumiai |
|---|---|
| Founded | 1947 |
| Members | 290,857 (2009) |
| Affiliation | Rengo |
| Key people | Ryosuke Kato, president; Yasunaga Okamoto, general secretary |
| Office location | Tokyo, Japan |
| Country | Japan |
| Website | Official website |
Japan Teachers Union (日本教職員組合 Nihon Kyōshokuin Kumiai?, JTU), often just called "Nikkyoso" (日教組 Nikkyōso?), is Japan's largest and oldest labor union of teachers and school staff. The union is known for its critical stance against the conservative Liberal Democratic Party government on such issues as Kimi ga Yo (the national anthem), the Flag of Japan, and the screening of history textbooks since its near continuous one-party rule since 1945. It is affiliated to the trade union confederation Rengo. It had 290,857 members as of December 2009.
Established in 1947, it was the largest teachers union until a split in the late 1980s. The union functioned as a national federation of prefectural teachers unions, although each of these unions had considerable autonomy and its own strengths and political orientation. Historically, there had been considerable antagonism between the union and the Ministry of Education, owing to a variety of factors. Some were political, because the stance of the union had been strongly leftist and it often opposed the more conservative Liberal Democratic Party. Another factor was the trade union perspective that the teachers union had on the profession of teaching. Additional differences on education issues concerned training requirements for new teachers, decentralization in education, school autonomy, curricula, textbook censorship, and, in the late 1980s, the reform movement.
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