Toward society 5.0: Indonesia and Japan on the 21st century literacy skills

Ever since its declaration in 2016 by the Japanese government, the society 5.0 concept has been largely adopted by global communities. It is argued that to implement the concept successfully, the research and the teaching of foundational skills like numeracy, literacy, or ICT at the elementary school level should be mandatory. This article reports the research and the teaching of the 21 st literacy skills of Japan and Indonesia in the past four years (2016 - 2020). We reviewed the research and the teaching of 21 st century skills at the elementary education level in both countries. The research databases used to search the literature were Google Scholar, ERIC, Education Abstracts, PsycINFO, and Social Sciences Citation Index. The inclusion criteria used to sort the studies were literacy skills/elementary/Japan/Indonesia/digital literacy/information literacy/ITS literacy and limited to studies that were done from 2016 – 2020 After reviewing ten studies, this pilot systematic review study preliminary found that open-access studies on the 21 st literacy skills in Japan’s elementary school were restricted, so it was harder to find than studies that discussed similar topics in the Indonesian context. Existing studies in Japan at the elementary level prioritize the research and the teaching of literacy skills of information, ICT, and foreign language literacies. In contrast, studies in Indonesia focus on basic, scientific, and foreign language literacies.