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ecame a standard sight at Western-inspired ‘household management’
classes at state-sponsored higher schools.
The introduction, in 1881, of the subject of ‘Housework Economics’
(kaji keizai) into primary schools marked the formal beginning of home
economics education in Japan. However, needlework rather than cooking
remained the central topic of this new subject well into the 1940s. 24 Girls’
higher schools, with curricula tailored to educate professional housewives,
became the chief site of culinary education for women in pre-war Japan.
The number of girls enrolled at girls’ higher schools grew rapidly after
World War One; the percentage of female students at primary schools who
continued education at a secondary level increased from 39.7 per cent in
1920 to 46 per cent in 1925, and reached 53 per cent by 1935. 25 These figures
suggest that by the 1930s the middle-class ideal of home cooking was disseminated
beyond that specific class. Sand explains that the combination of
rapidly expanding secondary education and economic stability after World
War One produced new white-collar households ‘with pretensions to bourgeois
status but without the social privilege or financial security of the
generation educated earlier’. 26 These new households, managed on very
tight budgets by housewives educated in higher girls’ schools, set the stage
for the transformation of the bourgeois lifestyle into a national standard.
Experts in the history of Japanese home economics education point
out that before the Secondary School Law of 1943, which placed emphasis
on practical training, cooking lessons at higher girls’ schools were largely
theoretical. 27 Despite this, however, they proved essential for the modernization
and standardization of home meals in Japan. The pre-World War
Two home economics curriculum may not have provided girls with practical
culinary training, but it effectively disseminated knowledge concerning
nutrition and hygiene. Moreover, most importantly, it changed the attitudes
of future housewives towards home cooking. Ōe Sumi (1875–1948),
a prominent reformer of women’s education in Japan, argued that the aim
of home economics did not lie in merely transmitting skills, but was also
to raise women’s interest in housekeeping. 28 Even if formal schooling did
not have enough impact to change directly the way pre-World War Two
housewives cooked, it certainly contributed to the spread of knowledge
and attitudes that laid the foundation for the post-war changes accelerated
by economic growth.
Jordan Sand argues that a characteristic feature of the modern transformation
in Japan with regard to houses and the things kept and consumed
in them was that ‘the mass market in print and images of modern commodities
came in advance of a mass market in the commodities themselves’. 29
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