Over the recent years, there has been a notable increase in the number of English-language publications by Japanese sociologists of education. Just to name a few, they include High School for All in East Asia, edited by Shinichi Aizawa, Mei Kagawa and Jeremy Rappleye (2019) and Education in Japan: A Comprehensive Analysis of Education Reforms and Practices, edited by Yuto Kitamura, Toshiyuki Omomo and Masaaki Katsuno (2019). The succession of these published books might suggest a slight shift in the publication patterns of Japanese scholars: more and more Japanese scholars, based in Japanese institutions, are looking for opportunities to publish internationally (see Chapter 14 by Taeko Okitsu, Eriko Yagi and Yuto Kitamura). As the editors of Japanese Education in a Global Age stress, great sociological research has been produced in Japan, and yet its important insights remain within Japan due to linguistic barriers. The book under review marks the 70 th anniversary of the Japan Society of Educational Sociology. It refl ects the society's collective eff ort, showcasing the exemplary works of Japanese sociological scholarship of education "to initiate open, cross-border, and transnational dialogue among researchers both within and outside of Japan" (Chapter 1 by Yonezawa, Kitamura, Yamamoto and Tokunaga 2018, p. 9). The need to reach out to the international readership is also expressed by Takayasu Nakamura (Chapter 15) whose extensive review of the Japanese sociology of education scholarship led to the call for Japanese sociologists "to demonstrate the signifi cance of their research on Japanese education to international sociology of education markets" (p. 278). To achieve what is proposed here, however, is a complicated task, as it requires in the fi rst instance a sociological understanding of the global structure of academic knowledge production.Elsewhere, I have closely examined this structure and elaborated upon both the challenges and promises associated with what Nakamura proposes (Takayama 2017(Takayama , 2016(Takayama , 2011. In one of these texts, I have used two concepts to illuminate the predicaments of writing about