The past thirty years have seen increasingly rapid advances in the field of inclusive education since the Salamanca Statement was published (UNESCO, 1994). Although implementing inclusive education is an international agenda, the way people understand the concept and implement it differ by country based on the countries’ cultural and socio-economic backgrounds (Artiles & Dyson, 2005). For example, in Japan, inclusive education is still mostly discussed in terms of educating students with disabilities in mainstream classrooms (Forlin et al., 2015). However, only recently, children who lost access to education by Covid-19 related school closures are included as a target group of inclusive education (UNESCO, 2020). Although schools tried to adapt to the situation (e.g., use of online tools) in Japan, there is a strong need to assess students’ physical and psychological well-being at school especially for those children who are sensitive to environmental changes (Otani et al., 2021). Research into inclusive education has a long history; while the empirical evidence on how students themselves perceive inclusive education and whether it leads to better students’ outcomes is still missing from the literature. The Perceptions of Inclusion Questionnaire (PIQ; Venetz et al., 2015) is a reliable instrument for measuring students’ and teachers’ perspectives on inclusion in the three domains, namely, emotional well-being, social inclusion, and academic self-concept. The scale could be used to monitor the outcome of inclusive education also in the COVID-19 situation; thus, this study aims to adopt the scale in the Japanese context. The data were collected in 2020 under COVID-19 situation. Participants are 678 Grade 5-9 students and their teachers from Japan, 270 (39.8%) were from the elementary level and 408 (60.2%) were from the lower-secondary level. The 12 item Japanese version of PIQ for students has high reliability for the whole scale (α = .87) and each sub-scale (α = .74-.86). The statistical analyses were conducted using Mplus and SPSS. According to multi-group confirmatory factor analysis, partial error variance invariance was achieved between elementary and lower-secondary school students, which confirms that items are equally reliable across groups (Steenkamp & Baumgartner, 1998). In addition, preliminary analysis revealed that students’ perceptions of inclusion were different from those of teachers. The present study raises the possibility that the Japanese version of PIQ can be used to assess the outcome of inclusive practices not only for researchers but also for practitioners during and after the COVID-19 situation.

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