Private Academies of Chinese Learning in Meiji Japan: The Decline ...

THE DECLINE OF THE JUKU 195reflecting the content of their head, passing through thetunnel of education in what Upton Sinclair called goosestepfashion and put out as if from a conveyor belt. (p.318)Even men born as late as the 1880s could still have experiencedinformal schooling, including kangaku juku. Unsurprisingly,many examples can be found among the scholars of China, themodern successors of the kangakusha. One of them is MorohashiTetsuji (1883– 1982), best known for the compilation of the Daikanwa jiten (Great Chinese-Japanese Character Dictionary), butalso the author of several other works on China. His father was ateacher, and Morohashi learnt to read kanbun before he enteredthe public elementary school. After graduating he studied forthree years at the kangaku juku Seishū gijuku, opened by OkubataBeihō in 1894. Then he attended teacher training colleges inNiigata and Tokyo, and after a short spell of teaching in Gummahe taught at the middle school attached to the higher teachertraining college in Tokyo and at several other institutions. Unlikethe kangaku scholars of previous generations, he was able tostudy in China, first for two months in 1918 and then for twoyears, from 1919 to 1921. Morohashi’s experience of juku life laterinspired him to establish his own juku of sorts, together with hisfriend Ichijima Tokuhiro (Chapter 6). 65By the time Morohashi’s generation reached school age, themodern school system was largely in place and attending the newschools had become the norm. If students still went to kangakujuku, they usually attended part time and in addition to themainstream schools. Ōsugi Sakae (1885–1923), left-wing radicaland political activist, was the son of a low-ranking army officerwho came from a family of village headmen near Nagoya. Hegrew up in the former castle town of Shibata in Niigataprefecture, a small, isolated place. Although not from a samuraifamily, he was from a background where we could have expectedhim to be sent to a kangaku juku for at least part of his educationhad he been born a decade earlier. As it was, his exposure to akangaku education was minimal, unlike that of other socialistsand anarchists, for example Kōtoku Shūsui (1871–1911), whospent several of his formative years in the juku of Kido Mei (1835–1916) in Nakamura and Kōchi in the 1880s. 66 While he attendedhigher elementary school from 1895, Ōsugi studied the Chineseclassics with a private tutor from a former samurai family thathad fallen on hard times; with him he read the Four Books, The