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

232 PRIVATE ACADEMIES OF CHINESE LEARNING IN MEIJI JAPANare more innovative and appealing than at the public schools.Many children therefore enjoy going to juku.Thus there are some elements characteristic of the earlier juku:the average juku is a casual business, often in the teacher’s home;it can be a source of income for students, who teach part time atjuku; for the pupils the social dimension is as important as theschool work covered. Some juku, mainly those catering for themost ambitious, have turned to “traditional practices” to setthemselves off from the competition and to attract parents whobelieve the public system to be too “liberal”. 64 Pre-war ideasabout the importance of character building and “spiritualism”(seishin shugi) are popular, and practices include long hours,corporal punishment, zazen and militant rhetoric. Although life inthe juku of the nineteenth century could be Spartan and includelong hours of study and harsh punishments, and althoughcharacter training was an integral part of juku education, there islittle real continuity from education at the old juku to today’spiecemeal application of “traditional” elements. Perhaps themain similarity is the importance given to mutualencouragement and friendly competition, the old idea of sessatakuma. The concentrated experience of group effort to meetchallenges in today’s juku has resulted in some juku havingalumni organizations. But the simultaneous emphasis on anegoistic drive for personal success would have shocked scholarslike Ikeda Sōan.If modern juku illustrate a “misalignment between publicpolicy and private conduct”, 65 is that also something that linksthem to the juku of Meiji Japan? Public schools in post-war Japanwere influenced by the democratic and egalitarian idealsintroduced during the Occupation. Reforms have often reflectedan effort to decrease the hold of the examination system, butindividual parents want their children to succeed, which requirespassing examinations. So they send them to juku. In Akita in the1870s and 1880s public policy was to ensure that children wereenrolled in the new schools that taught a curriculum heavilybiased towards Western learning. But parents perceived theeducation offered by the juku as more relevant to their needs andcontinued to send their children there. Unlike today’s parents,who invariably deplore the necessity for juku, the parents ofAkita would not have shared the public policy view. Besides, intheir day the juku may well have offered a more “humanistic”education compared to the utilitarian approach of the modern