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

8 PRIVATE ACADEMIES OF CHINESE LEARNING IN MEIJI JAPANother critics of the education system. So pervasive is its influencethat it is difficult to study the juku of the Tokugawa and Meijiperiods without looking through the lens of the “mythmakers”.Much of what has been written about juku is by authors whoidealize it and in the process create a tradition, in a way thatillustrates what Carol Gluck has described as “the invention ofEdo”. 19 Instead of discarding this invention or merely contrastingit with the “real” juku, I have chosen to make it part of my study.After all, its beginnings can be traced to the period underinvestigation. Moreover, even if the “juku myth” is not history, ithas certainly “made” history in the sense that a certain image ofjuku (rather than first-hand experience or accurate knowledge ofthem) inspired educators like Obara Kuniyoshi and othersdescribed in Chapter 6.The public education system is in need of reform in manycountries, including Japan. Although it is hardly appropriate toadvocate the revival of juku—a product of certain historicalcircumstances—as a solution to present day problems, examiningthe history of juku can remind us that education was once viewedand organized very differently from today, and encourage us tochallenge our assumptions about education. My main hope is thatthis work will contribute to a better understanding of educationin the Meiji period and become a starting point for furtherresearch into the history of juku and of private education ingeneral.NOTES1 Carol Gluck, “The Past in the Present”, in Andrew Gordon, ed.,PostwarJapan as History (Berkeley: University of California Press,1993), 64–95.2 Tokutomi Kenjirō, Footprints in the Snow: A Novel of Meiji Japan.Translated by Kenneth Strong (London: George Allen and Unwin,1970), 80.3 Hosoya Toshio et.al.,eds, Shin kyōikugaku daijiten (Daiichi Hōki,1980), 415; Umihara Tōru, Nihonshi shōhyakka: Gakkō (Kondōshuppansha, 1979), 70–71. The accepted English translation, alsoquoted in the Shinkyōikugaku daijiten, is “private academy”, butthroughout this book “juku” will be used for conciseness.4 Hiroshima-ken rekishi hakubutsukan, ed., Fukuyama-han no kyōikutobunka: Edo jidai kōki o chūshin ni (Fukuyama: Hiroshima-kenhakubutsukan tomo no kai, 1994).