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

226 PRIVATE ACADEMIES OF CHINESE LEARNING IN MEIJI JAPANNakayama states that he does not want to talk about himself, anddevotes much more space to Yoshida Shōin’s juku. 45One author gives fairly detailed information about his ownexperience. Hiranuma Yoshirō (1864–1938), the brother of thestateman and later prime minister Kiichirō, 46 was a journalistturned teacher and headmaster, and he tells his readers about theschools that he attended, the teachers who influenced him andthe teaching methods he encountered. Although we learn abouthis personal experiences, they do not come to life in his account.The strongest impression is that of the educator giving us hisviews of education in 1938.Even the person of the teacher, to whom one supposedly owesso much to (onshi), remains strangely remote and hardly evercomes to life in the authors’ reminiscenses. One author tells twostories which are intended to show his teacher’s character and hisrole as a model for his students. 47 He is said to have beenbenevolent and slow to anger, yet students could not defy him.Once he expelled all the pupils at once because they had visited aplay without permission. Another time he praised his pupils forrising early every morning and being up when he swept the yard.Apparently he had not noticed that they had rinsed their faceswith water from the fields rather than at the well, so as not to beseen by their teacher, who would have then known that they hadonly just crawled out of their futons. Cynical readers of this piecemight feel that this teacher did not have his flock under controland attempted desperate measures when he lost his patience.Only one author, Sono Toyoko, limits herself to merely relatingher memories without expressing any judgements on juku ingeneral. It is perhaps significant that hers is the only article by awoman. 48 She attended the juku of Hio Naoko (1829–97;Chapter 4), where she was a boarder from around 1878, anddescribes the daily routine. Some 80 boys and girls between 8 and18 were taught reading, writing, Confucian ethics and wakapoetry. We can only speculate that Sono took the editors at theirword and wrote her contribution with no axe to grind.In sum, only a minority of the authors had spent a significantpart of their school days in a juku and even fewer described theirexperience in a meaningful way. Instead, they addressededucational issues of their day. Moreover, they were not the onlyones to invoke juku as a model at the time. The late 1920s to theearly 1940s saw several publications praising the virtues of jukuand of kangaku, the subject most juku taught. Some compared