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

216 PRIVATE ACADEMIES OF CHINESE LEARNING IN MEIJI JAPANThe Kan Chazan Museum was in part funded with money fromTakeshita Noboru’s 100 million yen grants, received by each ofJapan’s 3,268 local governing towns and villages in 1988. 18 Thegrants can be seen in the context of furusato zukuri or furusatosōsei (“native place making” or “native place creation”), Japan’sanswer to the alienation and insecurity experienced in post-warurban society, especially since the oil shocks of the 1970s. 19 For thegovernment, this style of administration, which aims to forge a“cultural state”, to promote local developments and to include anaffective dimension in its policies. The word furusato (literally“old village”, meaning home village) evokes feelings ofnostalgia, and furusato zukuri serves to produce a sense andpopular memory of the past. It comprises initiatives such as therevival and re-invention of local festivals and the development of“old village”-villages, where city dwellers can enjoy so-calledtraditional pursuits. The 100 million yen grants empowered localcommunities. Many of them spent the money on projectscharacterized by a combination of cultivating the localenvironment, reviving local tradtions to foster local identity andefforts for economic revival, often through tourism.Furusato evokes images of agriculture and traditional crafts,festivals and anything associated with Japanese folklore. Kangakuscholars, representatives of an elite culture, do not fit this image.Nevertheless, the same year, 1992, which saw the completion ofthe Kan Chazan Memorial Museum (plans for which existedbefore Takeshita’s grants), also saw the completion of theMorohashi Tetsuji Memoral Museum in Shitada village, Niigataprefecture, built with money from the Takeshita grants. Themuseum is part of a huge complex, including Morohashi’sbirthplace, a study moved from Tokyo, in which he and hisassistants worked on the Dai kanwa jiten [The Great Chinese-Japanese Character Dictionary], a Chinese- and Japanese-stylegarden, a car park and a restaurant. The whole site isimpressively named kangaku no sato [home of Chinese learning].Morohashi (see Chapter 5) was a modern-day China specialistand teacher at the new schools rather than a kangaku scholar andjuku master (his father had a juku). Still, like the juku and theirmasters, he is commemorated as a representative of “Japanesetradition”. During the last years of the Edo period and perhapseven more so in the early Meiji period, when schoolingincreased, Confucian ideas and morals spread from the rulingelite to the lower classes. Commemorating kangaku scholars as