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

222 PRIVATE ACADEMIES OF CHINESE LEARNING IN MEIJI JAPANclose it the following year because the Occupation authoritiesforbade people purged from government office from engaging ineducation.Apart from the name, it is doubtful whether Bōsei juku hadmuch in common with the traditional juku. Matsumae himselfemphasized the influence of the Danish folk high schools (whichmay have originally had a faint resemblance to juku in that theywere small private board ing schools where young peoplestudied without the expectation of immediate worldly profit).Like the other foundations described here, the emphasis was onthe community of students. The role of the master, who was atthe centre of the traditional juku, was less important. Thefounders of these modern schools were strong personalities, yetit is their conscious development of pedagogical concepts, inwhich the juku formed one (small) part, that motivated them. Bythis time the significance of the juku lay not in a real institutionthat could serve as a model, but in an idea that could be blendedwith other ideas, including those of educational reformers in theWest, and inspire something new and different. The campus ofTamagawa gakuen provides visible evidence of this eclecticapproach. A stroll around it leads past reconstructions of ShōkaSonjuku and Kangien, but also two chaples. Statues include abust of Beethoven and a full statue of Niels Bukh (1880–1950),known for his renewal of Danish gymnastics and today betterknown at Tamagawa than in his homeland.At the same time, the word juku, as Obara rightly observed,was natsukashii; it was familiar and evoked memories of the timebefore a new and for many alien school system was imposed. Inother words, by the 1920s and 1930s, the juku had become a myth.THE JUKU MYTH 36In March 1938 the journal Nihon oyobi Nihonjin announced aspecial section on juku. Readers were asked to submitmanuscripts under the following five headings: (1) The juku atwhich I studied and the person of my revered teacher (onshi); (2)Teaching methods of juku and the relationship between teacherand pupils; (3) Juku which existed into the Meiji period; (4)Strengths and weaknesses of schools (gakkō) and juku; (5) Otheropinions and views about juku education. The editors expectedthe contributions to be useful in the light of the plannededucation reforms. In April, 24 articles were published under the