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

EDUCATION IN TRANSITION FROM THE TOKUGAWA TO THE MEIJI PERIOD 33had attended public schools that taught a curriculum based onWestern knowledge, but also including moral instruction basedon Confucian principles. Kangaku had transformed into a seriesof modern disciplines, which included the literature, philosophyand history of China and involved the application of Westernmethods.The demise of the juku coincided roughly with the “newgeneration” 66 critically examining the modernity created by theMeiji Restoration. It is surely significant that Tokutomi Kenjirō(Roka, 1868– 1927) has provided us with an early example of the“juku myth”. The new schools were for many the first placewhere they confronted modernity in their own lives: sitting onchairs, a teacher with Western clothes, new teaching methods(see the wall charts in Figure 10), books filled with foreign ideas.It is therefore hardly surprising that criticism of modernityincluded criticism of the modern schools, contrasting themunfavourably with the juku that had until so recently provided analternative to them.In fact, already in the late Meiji period and even while the lastjuku still operated in some rural areas, they had becomesufficiently a thing of the past to be used as history is often used,that is, for criticizing and condemning the present.NOTES1 Rubinger, “Education”, 195–230.2 The standard work on the subject in English is R.P.Dore, EducationinTokugawa Japan (London: The Atholone Press, 1984; first publ.1965). See also Herbert Passin, Society and Education in Japan(Kodansha International 1982; first publ. 1965). Nihon kindai kyōikuhyakunenshi 3 (ed. and publ. Kokuritsu kyōiku kenkyūjo, 1974).3 Dore, Education in Tokugawa Japan; for details on life and study atthe Shōheikō and especially the shoseiryō see Suzuki Miyao,Shōheikōmonogatari: bakumatsu no shoseiryō to sono ryōsei(Shibunkai: 1973). Kume Kunitake, Kyūjūnen kaikōroku, 2 vols.(Waseda daigaku shuppanbu, 1934) vol.1, 521–540. ShigenoYasutsugu, “Tokugawa bakufu shōheikō no kyōiku ni tsuite” and“Futatabi Tokugawa shōheikō no kyōiku ni tsuite”, in ŌkuboToshiaki, ed., Zōtei Shigeno hakushi shigaku ronbunshū, 4 vols.,(Satsumashi kenkyūkai, Meichō fukyūkai, 1989), 1:371–382, 382–389. Kume and Shigeno themselves studied at the Shōheikō.