Education in Tokugawa Japan

Ronald Dore

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781136926938
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Japanese History
• Index: History

Japanese cultural life had reached a low ebb at the beginning of the Tokugawa period. The Japanese society which emerged when Tokugawa Ieyasu had completed the process of pacifying warring baronies was neither literary, nor hardly literate. The rulers were warriors and the people they ruled were largely illiterate. The Japan of 1868 was a very different society: practically every samurai was literate and it was a world in which books abounded. The transformation which had occurred in these two and a half centuries was an essential precondition for the success of the policy which the leaders of the Meiji Restoration were to adopt. An in-depth survey of the development and education during the period, this book remains one of the key analyses of the effects of Tokugawa educators and education on modern day Japan.

Chapter I
SCHOLARSHIP AND EDUCATION: A GENERAL SURVEY OF THE PERIOD

For over a hundred years, from the middle of the fifteenth to the end of the sixteenth century, the country was in confusion. There were few who could read. Even in the temples those priests who were of a bold and robust disposition got themselves a lance and set out for the battlefield. So, too, teachers of Confucian learning, doctors, fortune-tellers, calligraphers or painters—all who had the least inclination in that direction learned to ride and use a bow and set off to seek their fortunes in war. Hence the only people concerned with letters were a few weakly priests, a few weakly Confucian scholars, doctors, calligraphers and painters. And the latter, since the layman was always in danger of being impressed into military service, usually buried themselves in temples. Thus reading books became, as it were, a priestly specialty. Children were sent to temples to learn to read and write. If you wanted a cure for an illness, a horoscope read, a picture painted or a document written it was to a temple that you went. All the arts became the monopoly of priests.

SO A WRITER of the seventeenth century¹ describes. the low ebb which Japanese cultural life had reached by the beginning of the Tokugawa period. It was not a literary society and hardly even a literate society which emerged when Tokugawa leyasu² had finished his campaigns and completed the process whereby a nation of warring baronies was pacified and forced to accept the overarching authority of the Tokugawa house. The nearly three hundred fiefs into which the nation was divided were ruled by men who had gained or kept those fiefs on the battlefield. Their recreations were warriors’ recreations; falconry, hunting, feasting and ceremonial pomp and circumstance. Their religion was a mixture of Zen self-discipline and the salvationist consolations of the more popular sects. In administering their territories they relied a great deal on verbal commands; only their more crucial and binding decisions— and the all-important records of land-holdings—were committed to paper. Their codes and edicts were brusquely straightforward and unconcerned with legal subtleties. The people whom they ruled were largely illiterate.

The Japan of 1868, when the first major battles for two and a half centuries culminated in the Meiji Restoration, was a very different society. The warrior’s arrogant scorn for the effeminate world of books was hardly anywhere in evidence. Practically every samurai was literate, most had at least a smattering of the basic Chinese classics, some were learned in Chinese literature, philosophy or history, in Dutch medicine, astronomy or metallurgy. They were educated in great secular schools. An American who went to teach at one in 1870 describes his surprise on finding it:

so large and flourishing. There were in all about 800 students comprised in the English, Chinese, Japanese, medical and military departments. A few had been studying English for two or three years under native teachers who had been in Nagasaki. In the medical department I found a good collection of Dutch books, chiefly medical and scientific, and a fine pair of French dissection models, of both varieties of the human body. In the military school was a library of foreign works on military subjects… In one part of the yard young men, book, diagram and trowel in hand, were constructing a miniature earthwork. The school library of English and American works…was quite respectable. In the Chinese school I found thousands of boxes, with sliding lids, filled with Chinese and Japanese books.¹

It was a world in which books abounded. Their production (by printing from carved wooden blocks) gave employment to several thousands of persons in the official school presses and in the free-enterprise publishing houses which sold their wares to the public. Works of scholarship now accounted for only a small part of the total output. There were story books for children, illustrated books, technical books, popular medical books, pornographic books, travel guides, novels, poems, collections of sermons; and they were bought, or borrowed at so much a day from book pedlars, not simply by the samurai, but also, or even chiefly, by members of the other classes. By this time the majority of town-dwellers with a settled occupation, and a good proportion of the farmers of middling status, were literate. Even illiterate parents sent their children in increasing numbers to schools in which many thousands of teachers earned a livelihood by teaching them to read, write and do arithmetic. It was a society which now depended on the written word for its efficient operation. A system of fast postal runners made letter correspondence an important means of communication along the main routes, on which many business operations depended. The overripe bureaucracy consumed vast quantities of paper and ink with its complicated system of ledgers and of file copies and acceptance-signature copies for all official directives.

The transformation which had occurred in these two and a half centuries was an essential precondition for the success of the policy which the leaders of the Meiji Restoration were to adopt —the policy of converting Japan into a militarily powerful industrial state. The nature of this relation between precondition and outcome is a theme to which we shall return in the final chapter. This first chapter will be devoted to a brief survey of the development of scholarship and education during the period. But first, for those readers who are not familiar with the history of Tokugawa Japan, there follows a brief outline of the main characteristics of its social organization.¹

Tokugawa Society

The main political institutions of Tokugawa society were established in the first four decades of the seventeenth century, by Tokugawa Ieyasu himself—the man who won supremacy for his family by defeating coalitions of his opponents at two great battles in 1600 and 1614—and during the rule of his two immediate successors, his son Hidetada and his grandson Iemitsu. In assuming control of the country Ieyasu did not eliminate the old Imperial Court in the ancient capital city of Kyoto any more than did the other military rulers who had dominated Japan in the previous four centuries. Instead? like them, he received from the Court the title of Sh

gun—Generalissimo—a traditional committal of temporal authority, which became the hereditary prerogative of the Tokugawa family.

There was only a blurred distinction between the Tokugawa family itself and the Bakufu (literally ‘camp government’ or ‘Shogunate’ as it is often called in English), the whole complex of military formations and governmental institutions staffed by the vast body of Tokugawa retainers whose residences were grouped around the Shogun’s castle in Edo (the modern Tokyo). The family as an actual descent group (in fact often perpetuated by adoption) and the public institution of government were not fully separated either conceptually or for budgetary purposes. There was nothing to prevent funds which might otherwise be used to buy charcoal for the huts of the military guard being diverted to purchase jewellery for the Shogun’s mistress.

The funds of the Bakufu came from its own extensive territories. In all it controlled directly over 15 per cent of the total arable area of the country—or rather of total agricultural production, for land holdings were normally assessed in terms not of area but of ‘taxable yield’, at so many koku of rice (or rice equivalents), one koku of rice being roughly the amount that a man would eat in a year. The Bakufu’s direct holdings amounted (the figure is for around 1690) to some 4,2 million koku. In addition it p...

Table of contents

• CONTENTS
• PLATES
• TABLES
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• Chapter I SCHOLARSHIP AND EDUCATION: A GENERAL SURVEY OF THE PERIOD
• Chapter II THE AIMS OF SAMURAI EDUCATION IN THE TOKUGAWA PERIOD
• Chapter III THE FIEF SCHOOLS
• Chapter IV THE TRADITIONAL CURRICULUM
• Chapter V INNOVATIONS
• Chapter VI TALENT, TRAINING AND THE SOCIAL ORDER
• Chapter VII THE GOMMONER AND HIS MASTERS
• Chapter VIII TERAKOYA
• Chapter IX THE CONTENT OF TERAKOYA EDUCATION
• Chapter X THE LEGACY
• Appendix 1 SCHOOL ATTENDANGE AT THE END OF THE TOKUGAWA PERIOD
• Appendix II A SET OF TERAKOYA PRECEPTS1
• SOURCES CITED
• INDEX AND GLOSSARY