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

INTRODUCTION 7Chapter 1 positions the kangaku juku in the history of educationfrom the late Tokugawa into the Meiji period. The fate of thekangaku juku in this general context is summarized in the finalsection of Chapter 1, and readers familiar with the generalhistory of education my wish to go straight to this section.Chapter 2 shows the importance of juku after 1868 in terms ofnumbers, largely based on Nihon kyōikushi shiryō, which lists 1,505 juku nationwide. 17 There were considerable regionalvariations in the distribution of juku.The fascination of the juku to this day, however, does not lie intheir number, but in their perceived special characteristics.Chapters 3 and 4 therefore present some of the core material of thisbook. They describe what life at a juku was like, by looking atindividual juku in detail and by comparing information fromseveral juku. While I have aimed to include a representativesample, my choice was determined by the availability ofaccessible sources. How well the history of education on aregional level has been investigated and publicized variesconsiderably. For example, Kii-Wakayama was home of the lastbut one shogun and was noted for its efforts to introduce reforms,including a Prussian-style army, after 1868. Nevertheless, andalthough education was a key area in most reform efforts atregional and national levels, no history of education in Wakayamaprefecture has been compiled, and the multi-volume generalhistory of the prefecture says next to nothing about juku. 18The decline of the traditional juku and the emergence of a newtype of juku is treated in Chapter 5. In this process there are noclear boundaries. If we want to name one event as a watershed, itmust be the Education Law of 1872, since it laid down the principleof education as a route to worldly success, thus creating the basisfor a social order based on academic achievement rather thanbirth. But although the government aimed to control and at timeseven suppress juku, government measures were only the indirectcause for the institution’s decline in that they brought about thesocial changes that rendered the juku obsolete.While my interest in the juku of Meiji Japan was fuelled by thequestion, “What happened to the juku of Tokugawa Japan?”rather than by any wish to understand the juku and private schoolsof today, there are undeniable continuities. Chapter 6 providessome examples. Above all, I have devoted much space to what Icall the “juku myth”. It appeared early, as the passage fromFootprints in the Snow shows, and it inspired many educators and