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

224 PRIVATE ACADEMIES OF CHINESE LEARNING IN MEIJI JAPAN• Personal, family-like relationship between teacher and pupils(12 mentions).• Importance of teacher’s personal qualities (8).• Value of juku education for character and moral training(kun’iku,seishin kyōiku) and for the development of talentedhuman beings (jinzai, ningen o tsukuru; 10).• The juku does more justice to the development of individualstudents (5).In contrast, the following negative characteristics were ascribedto schools (gakkō):• Large and impersonal (6); three authors compare them to adepartment store or a factory. 38• Too much emphasis on knowledge and worldly success, toolittle on moral and character training.Only rarely are weaknesses of juku mentioned, such as successdepending very much on the individual teacher, the lack ofteachers around, 39 the small numbers of students, and thepossibilites for abuse of the system. 40 Some authors concededthat the modern school system was not without merits. It wasmore suited to transmit knowledge to the masses and met theneeds of modern society. One author regretfully stated that jukuwere no longer in line with the times, 41 and another, the onlyone, simply dismissed them as anachronistic. 42 A few authorsnamed certain juku as examples, although they did not knowthem from personal experience. The juku mentioned by name arenearly always the same: Yoshida Shōin’s Shōka sonjuku (5);Nakamura Masanao’s Dōjinsha (4); Fukuzawa Yukichi’s Keiōgijuku (3). Usually the same author names all three. Two authorsname the juku of Sugiura Jūgō (1855–1924; nationalistic educatorand an editor of Nihonjin). The three juku named most frequentlyare still the most famous today (with the addition of HiroseTansō’s Kangien), and this alone suggests that they wereexceptional.If the juku had virtually disappeared by the twentieth century,how much experience could someone have who wrote for NihonoyobiNihonjin in 1938? I found biographical information for 16 ofthe 24 authors and the age of a further five can be guessed. Mostappear to have attended school in the 1880s and 1890s when