The History of Education in Japan (1600 – 2000)

Masashi Tsujimoto, Yoko Yamasaki, Masashi Tsujimoto, Yoko Yamasaki

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781317295747
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Éducation
• Subtopic: Histoire de l'éducation

As one of the most rapid and earliest nations to achieve "Western modernisation", much of Japan's success stems from its fruitful literacy history during the Tokugawa shogunate as well as later influences from Western educational ideals and consequent economic and democratic conflicts in Japan. This book seeks to enlighten readers on how education and schooling contributed to Japan's particular process of modernisation and industrialisation. These historical insights can be applied to crises in formal and systemised education today, and form the basis of potential solutions to controversies faced by formal education in Japan and other nation-states. A book that bridges the international information gap in Japan's history of education will be immensely valuable to historians of both international and Japanese education.

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Formation and growth of an education-based society 1600 to 1868

Masashi Tsujimoto

Formation of a writing-based society in the early modern period

Tenarai writing schools and professional teachers

The Tokugawa period refers to the period from 1600, when Tokugawa Ieyasu gained political control over all of Japan, until 1867, when the shogunate went out of existence. This chapter will sometimes refer to the Edo period as the ‘early modern’ period, particularly when highlighting differences from the medieval and modern periods.

From the perspective of the history of education, early modern Japan saw the establishment of an ‘education-based’ society in which educational institutions that transmit knowledge to succeeding generations are deemed an indispensable component for social stability.

The use of written documents was a prerequisite for the development of early modern Japanese society. Private writing schools for children (tenarai juku, hereafter referred to as ‘tenarai writing schools’) were set up in various local neighbourhoods (Irie, 1996). Such schools spread in varying degrees according to the time period and particularly location. Thus literacy rates were by no means uniform across time and space (Matsuzuka and Yakuwa, 2010). Nevertheless, except for Ezochi, present-day Hokkaido, most regions of Japan had some places of learning where professional teachers (writing masters, or tenarai shisho) taught children basic reading and writing. In Japanese history, the early modern period marked the beginning of permanently existing schools for children. It was also when professional teachers emerged for the first time in history. In sum, the early modern period marked the birth of an ‘education-based’ society in Japan.

Formation of a writing-based society

The spread of tenarai writing schools in the seventeenth century coincided with the formation of a ‘writing-based’ society, which can be defined as one that requires the use of writing in order to function. The use of writing was an integral part of early modern Japanese society. Extant historical documents from that period far outnumber those dating from the medieval period. Also, the types of historical documents became far more diverse in the early modern period, whether in urban or rural areas, ranging from political documents to contracts, diaries, letters, and those related to litigation, commerce, and household affairs, compared to the medieval period when written texts were mostly political. A large portion of surviving early modern documents consists of private papers of ordinary people, which clearly demonstrate that they lived in a writing-based society.

The question of why early modern Japan developed as a writing-based society can be approached from two sides: the separation of warriors and farmers, and the kokudaka system, a system of taxation based on rice yields. First, early modern Japanese society came into being as warriors and farmers began to live and work separately. At the beginning of the early modern period, warriors, who had lived in villages alongside farmers and governed them directly, moved away from villages to urban towns, from where they governed the farmers, who constituted the majority of Japan’s population. Since the warriors governed from a distance, they relied on written communications, including regulations and other documents. As rulers expressed their intent through writing, written documents became the main medium of governmental administration. The ruling class could make use of this medium because a certain fraction of the common people could read and write. Indeed, written pleas and litigations were directly addressed to the ruling class from the lower strata of society. Such papers were also created in accordance with accepted templates and protocol, suggesting that the early modern writing-based society required all of its social strata to possess the ability to read and write.

Since warriors were absent from villages in early modern Japan, villagers practised self-government. Prominent local individuals served as officials (mura yakunin), and people were responsible for administering the payment of taxes by themselves (murauke). These officials also administered village-wide expenses (mura nyuyo), which they paid for by themselves. They undertook the complex task of assigning each household a percentage of the tax burden based on the cadastral register, which listed the yield and other information for each plot of land. Village officials thus needed to have a superior command of reading, writing, and arithmetic.

The assignment of taxes often proved a life or death question for farmers and frequently led to fraud. Ordinary people needed to be good enough readers and arithmeticians in order to see through any fraudulent behaviour. In the late seventeenth century and onwards, small farmers began to point out the fraudulent activities of their village officials more and more frequently, raising their voices and causing so-called village conflicts (murakata sodo). The rise in literacy amongst the common people played a role here. In addition, farmers made use of surveying and engineering techniques for irrigation and opening new rice fields. The common people became more powerful as their abilities in reading, writing, and arithmetic improved.

Second, under the rice yield (kokudaka) system, farmers paid taxes with the rice they harvested. Domain lords who lived in towns participated in a money-based economy, and thus needed to exchange their tax revenues, received as rice, for money. Exchange of rice to money required a large trade and transportation network that spanned all parts of Japan. Large volumes of rice were transported via sea. The second half of the seventeenth century saw development of shipping routes encircling the coasts of the Japanese archipelago. Three cities, each with a population of 350,000 to 1,000,000 – Osaka, the central market for commercial goods; Kyoto, the traditional political, economic, and cultural centre; and Edo, the centre of political power – became the nodes in trade routes connecting all of Japan. Also, since domain lords needed to travel between Edo and their domains every year under a system of alternate-year residence in Edo (sankin kotai), land routes rapidly developed as well. Trade and transportation routes, both on land and sea, were established all across Japan in the seventeenth century, connecting the three cities and all regions, causing people, goods, money, culture, and information to travel with greater speed in larger volumes.

The development of cities and a money-based economy depended on people’s ability to read, write, and calculate. In 1627, Yoshida Mitsuyoshi, who hailed from the Suminokura family of Saga, a wealthy merchant family in Kyoto, published the first edition of A Record of Minute and Giant Numbers (Jinkoki), an arithmetic manual. More reprints of the same title followed. This manual included practical explanations, along with illustrations, on how to use arithmetic in daily situations, such as using an abacus, money exchange, calculating interest rates, purchase and sale of rice, calculating areas and volumes, land surveys, calculating taxes, and taking measurements for large-scale construction work. The manual allowed readers to learn and acquire the skills on their own. Jinkoki became so popular that its title came to be used as a general term for all pragmatic arithmetic manuals. Similar manuals, up to four hundred different titles, including the ones published during the Meiji era, continued to be published. These manuals were used at tenarai writing schools to teach children arithmetic. The spread of such arithmetic manuals demonstrates the extent to which arithmetic skills were in high demand in early modern Japanese society.

The early modern period was an era in which ordinary people, whether they lived in towns or rural villages, needed to be able to learn to read and write. As mentioned earlier, a much larger volume of historical documents were produced in this period compared to the medieval period. The emergence of the writing-based society marked a new period in Japanese history.

Emergence of a shared writing culture

The tenarai writing schools taught the following skills: 1) reading and writing skills, to be acquired by copying model texts; 2) calligraphy, or beautiful penman-ship; 3) various social and vocational skills; and 4) everyday moral values. In addition to these four, however, the most important skill that they taught was writing etiquette (shosatsurei).

Writing in this period usually involved the exchange of information with others, which required some form of interpersonal ‘etiquette and manners’ (rei). Writing etiquette was part of a complex system of manners surrounding the act of writing. For instance, letters needed to have appropriate greetings that corresponded to 24 seasonal periods, as well as appropriate calligraphic styles and vocabulary determined by the writers’ social rank and gender. They also needed to use appropriate expressions for celebrations, sympathy (mimai), and season of the year. Celebra-tory letters, for example, were further broken down into smaller categories, such as marriage, birth, coming of age, promotion, or longevity, each with its own appropriate vocabulary and template. There was a lot to learn regarding just the composition of letters. Moreover, the tenarai writing school also taught how to write political documents, including pleas and litigations, as well as commercial and legal documents such as receipts, invoices, contracts, and bonds. The early modern way of thinking was that children should be taught the documents that they would eventually need to be able to read or write when they got older.

Calligraphic style taught at early modern writing schools was almost always the oie-ryu (noble household) style. This style can be traced back to the shoren in-ryu style of the late Kamakura-period, and is an elegant cursive hand that was developed in Japan. The Edo shogunate adopted it as the standard style to be used in official communication, and the domains that had frequent contact with the shogunate via written documents also followed suit. As a result, the same oie-ryu style of handwriting spread to all parts of Japan. Common people also learned to write in the same style, even though they were never coerced or officially encouraged. Certainly, the fact that this style was used in the shogunate’s official documents impacted the way in which it spread universally, but the shogunate never enforced its use. The fact that the oie-ryu style spread throughout not only the warrior class but also amongst the common people is probably not merely a reflection of the shogunate’s political power or the ubiquity of text-based governmental administration. More importantly, it points to cultural, rather than political, factors particular to the early modern period that facilitated the standardisation of writing. Calli-graphic styles grew more homogenous in the early modern period compared to the medieval period, when different styles coexisted. Yet one should note that highly educated literati of the early modern period did not use the oie-ryu style when they wrote academic or literary texts. For instance, when they handwrote classical Chinese (kanbun), they tended to use square or running forms of calligraphy more often than the cursive form.

In Japan, the ability to write involved being able to choose appropriately and precisely amongst three scripts – Chinese characters (kanji), katakana, and hiragana – as well as amongst the three calligraphic forms of square (kaisho), running (gyosho), and cursive hand (sosho). Each type of document or occasion required using an appropriate combination of orthographic styles and calligraphic forms. Knowing how to do so well by mastering the writing etiquette constituted a part of general education and culture in the early modern period.

Early modern divorce documents were called ‘three-and-a-half-liners’ (mikudari han). The ‘three-and-a-half’ lines constituted a brief text that included the title of the document, date, and the names of sender and addressee written on a single sheet of paper. Despite slight regional variations in format and vocabulary, the general ‘three-and-a-half-liner’ model spread throughout the whole country. As this example illustrates, the standardisation of writing in early modern Japan largely took place via the standardisation of calligraphic styles and templates used in letters and documents (Takagi, 1999).

In early modern times, stark regional differences in the spoken language existed. Each region or local area had a distinct dialect (okuni namari), to the point where it was possible to tell exactly where someone had grown up by his or her speech. People from different regions and with strong dialects likely had difficulty communicating with one another via the spoken language. Yet there were no significant regional differences in written documents, from templates and etiquette to expressions, vocabulary, and calligraphic styles. People in Edo, Osaka, Ezochi in north-ernmost Japan, and Satsuma in southernmost Japan thus all belonged to a shared and uniform writing-based culture.

The formation of a shared writing-based culture stemmed from the fact that writing was understood primarily as a way to exchange thoughts and information with others using a proper ‘etiquette’. The spread of this common culture across the Japanese archipelago was a distinctively early modern phenomenon, which cannot be explained solely by political factors. The shared use of writing laid crucial foundations for the eventual establishment of a modern Japanese nation-state and a rapid spread of modern education throughout Japan.

According to W. J. Ong, a national language forms when a certain regional dialect becomes closely linked with writing and achieves a higher status than the other dialects. Language becomes ordered and turns into a shared national language through the act of writing (Ong, 1982). Literacy in early modern Japan was geared more heavily toward writing than reading. Calligraphy was highly valued in particular. Instruction at tenarai writing schools also emphasised the act of writing. If we accept Ong’s theory, the early modern emphasis on writing at tenarai schools facilitated the spread of a uniform writing-based culture.

Meanwhile, classical Chinese (kanbun), which literati regularly read and wrote, was a shared written language common to the Sinitic cultural sphere, spanning China, Korea, and Japan. Even though the spoken languages in that sphere were mutually incomprehensible, classical Chinese made it possible to communicate via writing amongst those who possessed knowledge of Chinese classics. Classical Chinese had developed, in the first place, as a written language that had veered far from the spoken language. Across East Asia, young children were encouraged t...