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

THE DECLINE OF THE JUKU 199and passing the examinations by self-study alone becamevirtually impossible.Tokyo University by the late 1890s already held the dominantposition it still has today, and its graduates provided a highproportion of the political elite and increasingly of the businesselite. Another reason why educational credentials becameincreasingly important was that large companies preferred torecruit members of the educational elite. For those who aspired tothe upper echelons of society, this meant that they had to passentrance examinations into middle and higher schools and finallyinto one of the imperial universities, preferably Tokyo. 79The highest rungs of the educational ladder were stilldominated by former samurai at the turn of the century. For them,education was their only capital and because they showed a clearpreference for government schools and government posts.Wealthy commoners tended to opt for private institutions and ageneral rather than a professional education, since they expectedto return home to run the family business or start a similarenterprise of their own. Study at a kangaku juku was an option, butincreasingly they went to private specialist schools, especially thelaw schools (which taught other subjects besides law) . 80The national education system focused almost exclusively onWestern education, especially on law, political science,economics, the natural sciences and technical subjects. There wasno equivalent to the European “classical education”, even atsecondary (middle school) level, once the new schools hadreplaced the kangaku juku. In the mainstream middle schools,mathematics, English and Japanese (kokugo) became the principalsubjects. Kanbun was thus by no means central to the curriculum,and in 1901 it was abolished as a separate subject and mergedwith kokugo, despite protest from kangaku scholars. As a result,people born after 1880 were much less likely to have abackground in kangaku than even those born only a few yearsearlier, since it was no longer useful for social advancement. 81 Asa generation grew up that had received almost exclusively aWestern education, this became accepted as the norm.Thus the kangaku juku became obsolete because of the decliningimportance of kangaku and diminishing role of the old-style jukuas the modern education system took root. At around the sametime, a new kind of juku emerged, the cram school, to preparestudents for entrance examinations, a function we associate withthe term today. An early example is that of the artist Ishii