Tsunesaburo Makiguchi (1871-1944)

Educational Philosophy in Context

Jason Goulah, Andrew Gebert

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781134915064
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education Theory & Practice

This edited volume focuses on the life and work of Makiguchi Tsunesaburo (1871-1944), a Japanese elementary schoolteacher, principal, educational philosopher, author, activist, and Buddhist war resister who has emerged as an important figure in international education. Makiguchi is the progenitor of value-creating (soka) pedagogy that informs practice in the Soka schools network, which includes two universities (in Japan and the U.S.), a women's college (Japan), two secondary schools (Japan), three elementary schools (Brazil and Japan), and six Kindergartens (Brazil, Hong Kong, Japan, Korea, Malaysia, and Singapore), as well as one of Japan's largest correspondence education programs. In addition, thousands of educators worldwide incorporate Makiguchi's ideas in their own curriculum and instruction, and Brazil has instituted the Makiguchi in Action Project, which has provided literacy training and teacher development for nearly a million people. This edited volume is the first in the Anglophone literature to theoretically and empirically examine the nature and global application of Makiguchi's influential educational ideas.

The book was originally published as a special issue of American Educational Studies.

Reading Resistance: The Record of Tsunesaburo Makiguchi’s Interrogation by Wartime Japan’s “Thought Police”

Takao Ito
Soka University

This article examines the record of Tsunesaburo Makiguchi’s interrogation as a thought criminal following his arrest in July, 1943. By comparing and contrasting his responses and statements against the official government positions, I hope to clarify the nature of his critique of the wartime fascist regime. Makiguchi himself was an educator, and the public education system was a prime vehicle for militarist indoctrination; thus his outspoken criticism of the prevailing belief system represents an implicit and explicit protest against an extreme abuse of the educational process for militarist purposes.

On July 6, 1943, Tsunesaburo Makiguchi, aged 72, was detained on suspicion of having violated the Peace Preservation Law and for having shown disrespect for the emperor. He would remain in prison until his death from extreme malnutrition a year and a half later, on November 18, 1944.

The law under which he was arrested was first passed in 1925 and prohibited activities aimed at the abolition of the system of private property or changing the kokutai, a phrase translated as the national polity or essence, and generally understood to refer to the emperor system. Originally designed to suppress Japanese communists and other leftists, the Peace Preservation Law was revised in 1928, when the death penalty was added to the penalties, and again in 1941, when the scope of prohibited activities was expanded with provision for preventive detention. Under this law, tens of thousands of people were harassed, detained, brutalized, and—on rare occasions—tried.

After his arrest, Makiguchi was interrogated, and excerpts of the record of this were carried in the August, 1943, issue of Tokko Geppo. This was the classified monthly publication of the Special Higher Police who were specifically charged with the work of suppressing “dangerous thought.” The article containing the excerpts fills some 25 pages at the end of this issue under the heading of “research materials.” Such treatment is extremely rare and indicates the degree to which the police considered Makiguchi’s case to be both out of the ordinary and of interest within the larger landscape of dangerous thought. (The interrogation record has been reproduced in the complete works of Makiguchi in Japan, and that is the source used in this article.)

Over the course of the interrogation, Makiguchi was questioned principally about his Nichiren Buddhist beliefs, which were seen by the authorities as providing the basis for his criticism of the militarist regime’s policies. Although the actions of Makiguchi’s final years were directly inspired by his religious beliefs, they are consistent and, in fact, inseparable from his lifetime career as an educator and educational theorist. The oppressive, discriminatory and antihumanist attitudes that he objected to in Japanese educational practices were, in fact, reflections of a deeper malaise infecting Japanese political culture as a whole. There was a deep continuity between his work as an educator and as the leader of a Buddhist lay movement—a concern for the most vulnerable sectors of society, such as children and youth, whose interests and lives were sacrificed for the realization of political goals and ambitions.

There was also a more direct connection. The official doctrines that Makiguchi was arrested for challenging from a religious perspective—such as the absolute, divine status of the emperor—had become a central element of Japan’s public education system in an overt and virulent form since the 1930s. They had been present in more moderate forms and dosages for decades; the authoritarianism implicit in the Japanese education system had always been a target of Makiguchi’s critical attention and energies.

In this article, I examine the record of Makiguchi’s interrogation to clarify what were his ideas in the late 1930s and early 1940s, the period that corresponds to the zenith (or nadir) of militarism in Japan. I also attempt to clarify what it was in his words and actions that attracted the attention of the Special Higher Police and that they considered to be a threat to the existing order.

In the course of his interrogation, Makiguchi made no effort to amend or tone down the statements for which he had been detained. Quite the opposite, he took the opportunity to restate them in further clarity and detail. For example, he declared without hesitation that: “The emperor is a common mortal.¹ When he was crown prince, he attended Gakushuin University, where he studied in order to be emperor. Nor is the emperor without error” (CW, 10:202–03).

Today, Japanese of the generations that grew up in the postwar period have difficulty seeing this quote as anything other than a statement of the obvious, as common sense. But in prewar Japan, especially from the 1930s to the defeat in 1945, this was a sentiment that required immense courage and integrity to voice in any circumstance—much less to direct these words at one’s interrogators in confinement.²

Obviously, a living god, taken literally, would have no need to study or learn to fulfill a particular role. The fact that Makiguchi considered the emperor’s studies as evidence of his humanity can be taken as proof of the centrality that Makiguchi accorded education in human affairs. As benign and self-evident as Makiguchi’s views may strike us today, in the social conditions of his time possessing such opinions was enough to bring a person into conflict with the law.

To more fully set the stage for Makiguchi’s struggles, I reference the pamphlet, first issued by the Ministry of Education in 1937 (March 30): Kokutai no hongi (The True Significance of the National Essence). In the 1943 copy in my possession, the total print run is listed as 1.73 million copies, meaning that nearly 300,000 copies were printed per year. According to the writer, Fumio Kadoya (1973):

Right up until the end of the war, The True Significance of the National Essence retained its status as a sacred text of secondary education. Teachers in elementary and secondary schools organized reading and study circles in order to correctly understand the content of the book, and it was used in many secondary schools as a morals textbook. It was considered required reading for anyone sitting the test for entry into the elite high schools [that fed students into the national universities], colleges or military schools. (125)

Indeed, this was a text that represented the official view of the government from the mid-1930s to the defeat.³ In the first section of The True Significance, the founding of the Japanese nation is described in the following terms:

The Great Empire of Japan has received the divine edict of the imperial ancestor and founder [the sun goddess] and is governed by the Emperor, whose unbroken lineage endures for all time. This is the eternally unchanging national essence of Japan. (Ministry of Education 1943, 9)

Following this, the earliest classics of Japanese literature, the Record of Ancient Matters (C.E. 712) and the Chronicles of Japan (C.E. 720), are cited, and the mythic founding of Japan by the sun goddess is presented as historical fact:

The Sun Goddess Tensho Daijin, to ensure that her grand divine will and undertakings would be realized eternally, coeval with heaven and earth, and would flourish without limit, caused her grandson to descend to the face of earth, and issued the divine edict which determined the great moral law of sovereign and subject, thus establishing the foundation for the rites, politics and education of Japan. (Ministry of Education 1943, 13)

Because of this origin, “The politics of our country enshrines the divine spirit of imperial ancestors and are ruled and governed by the Emperor who leads the people as a living god” (Ministry of Education 1943, 15).

When we consider that this view was officially sanctioned and integrated into public school education, and that mastery of such “knowledge” was a requisite for entrance into the reaches of higher education, the full weight and significance of Makiguchi’s assertion that the emperor was a “common mortal” comes more clearly into view; he was directly challenging the central political orthodoxy of wartime Japan, the divinity of the emperor.

Looking back at such ideas, issued by the Ministry of Education, that today can only amaze one with their irrationality, parochialism and chauvinism, one might ask: Did people really believe such dogma? The best answer is probably that a small fanatical minority did take the divinity of the emperor to its most literal extreme. A much larger portion of the population acquiesced to the carefully constructed consensus with varying degrees of personal commitment. Even among those sectors of Japanese society that were, by training or character, disposed to a more skeptical approach—such as those who had received advanced education and been exposed to modern historical and textual criticism—an enforced silence prevailed that prevented people from pointing out the obvious (Saito 2004).

THE POLITICAL BACKGROUND

The elevation of the emperor’s divinity to official state doctrine had a specific constitutional background and was conducted with clear political objectives in sight. By making the emperor absolute as a living god, entirely beyond the possibility of being held accountable, the military that claimed to act under his direct command also become absolute and beyond challenge. The emperor’s divinity solidified the military’s hegemonic domination of national politics.

Two years prior to the issuing of The True Significance, a controversy erupted in which Tatsukichi Minobe (1873–1948), one of the Japan’s leading constitutional scholars and a member of the House of Peers, was purged for asserting that the Japanese emperor exercises sovereignty as an organ of the state; a constitutional monarchist position that had, for several decades, been the most widely accepted interpretation of the constitution. In this view, the emperor’s exercise of such functions as the convening of parliament, the appointment and dismissal of officials, etc., was always conducted with advice of the ministers of the government (Minobe 1912). It was this interpretation that linked and reconciled the following two key provisions from the 1889 Constitution.

Article 3. The Emperor is sacred and inviolable.

Article 55. The respective Ministers of State shall give their advice to the Emperor, and be responsible for it. (2) All Laws, Imperial Ordinances, and Imperial Rescripts of whatever kind, that relate to the affairs of the state, require the countersignature of a Minister of State.

This interpretation also insulated the emperor from political responsibility for actions taken in his name. For the militarist faction, a key priority was to sever the linkage between these two clauses. By elevating the emperor to the status of a living god, it was possible at once to circumvent the influence and input of elected politicians, to issue commands directly in the emperor’s name, while shielding the emperor from the possibility of being held responsible. With the denunciation of Minobe and the official elevation of the emperor to the status of a god, the concept of accountability was effectively erased from Japanese political culture (Suzuki 1993).

Within the military itself, absolute reverence for the emperor was translated into unquestioning submission to superior officers, all of whose orders were said to reflect the emperor’s will. Thus, the constitutional monarchist view treated him as “merely human,” and this was seen to undermine discipline and the chain of command culminating in the emperor, as well as a military education. (After being purged from the House of Peers, Minobe’s books were banned, and in 1936 he was seriously wounded in an attack by an assassin, part of the larger pattern of political terror that was a consistent aspect of Japanese politics in the 1930s.)

MILITARIZED EDUCATION

As mentioned, submission to authority was one of the values inculcated through the Japanese education system throughout the pre-1945 period. In the years following the 1931 Manchurian Incident, in which Japanese forces overran large regions of northern China, the militarization of education became steadily more pronounced. It became particularly extreme after 1941, when Japanese elementary schools were reorganized as National People’s Schools (kokumin gakko), where they implemented a form of highly regimented and militarized education that took both its name (a direct translation of Volksschule) and inspiration from Nazi Germany.

This extremity can be seen in the morals textbook for third year elementary school students issued in 1942, where one can find the following lesson, titled “Japanese Children:”

There are many different countries in the world, but there is none, other than Japan, that is governed by the Emperor whose bloodline goes back to a god, and which thus flourishes without cease. Now Japan, in accord with the great spirit with which the gods founded the nation, is striving to lead the people of the world in a correct direction.

Our fathers, older brothers and uncles are all fighting bravely. Now is the time when those who do not go themselves to the battlefield must unite with their hearts as one, in order to protect the nation.

It is the duty of Japanese people to ensure that the right thing is done [an elementary school level of expression meaning “ensure that justice prevails”]. Following the sacred teachings of the gods, we must ensure that the people of the world can enjoy happiness. (Ministry of Education 1942, 9–10)

Needless to say, an unbridgeable gulf separates these childish sentiments and the atrocities being committed by the Japanese Imperial Army on the Asian continent and in the Pacific at the time.

Likewise, the fifth grade elementary school morals textbook, published in 1943,...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Foreword
• Tsunesaburo Makiguchi: Introduction to the Man and His Ideas
• 1. Reading Resistance: The Record of Tsunesaburo Makiguchi’s Interrogation by Wartime Japan’s “Thought Police”
• 2. The Role of Community Studies in the Makiguchian Pedagogy
• 3. Voice in EFL Education in a Japanese Context: Makiguchi’s Perspectives in the Concept of “Voice”
• 4. Practical Implementation of Soka Education: A Dialogue With Monte Joffee
• 5. Makiguchi in the “Fractured Future”: Value-creating and Transformative World Language Learning
• 6. Media Review
• 7. Time Exposure
• Index