Japanese Education

The reason for citing this event is not to depict it as an epochal turning point in the history of Japanese education, foreshadowing more recent efforts by the Japanese state to manipulate education for ideological purposes. For, on the contrary, as will be explained below, Matsudaira's heavy-handed gesture did not silence the Tokugawa period heretics. It merely altered the conditions under which competing interests subsequently contested bakufu power and authority and eventually helped topple it less than eighty years later.

The following historical survey of Japanese education begins, therefore, with the premise that for any society, in any age, efforts to articulate, build, and sustain a viable educational formation confront a common set of fundamental problems-concerning the definition of knowledge, access to knowledge, and the uses to which it is put-that lacks a common set of corresponding answers. Resolution of these problems must occur historically, through the action of that society upon itself.

Consequently, this particular interpretation of the activity guiding the development of Japanese education resists the common tendency simply to plot its trajectory as a smooth and orderly path along an evolutionary continuum. Instead, an attempt will be made to analyze that activity, both diachronically and synchronically, as a product of social relations subject to tension, confusion, contestation, and discontinuity.

In the post-Restoration period, then, the history of Japanese education is marked by a long, circuitous path between the ruling alliance's initial "conservative reaction" in the early 1880s, and the government's recourse to harsher measures of coercion and repression in the 1930s and 1940s. It is as much a record of forceful subjugation dictated by the state as one of nationalistic indoctrination orchestrated by the state; a record punctuated by occasional acts of resistence by various segments of the population.

Before and during World War II, American policymakers saw Japanese education as a conscious vehicle for carrying out the intent of the 1890 Imperial Rescript on Education. This document promulgated by the Emperor Meiji on October 30, 1890, remained the official statement of the principles underlying Japanese education until it was scrapped by the Occupation authorities. The rescript gave both legal form and, perhaps more significantly, moral force to an educational system that supported the rise of militarism and ultranationalism during the late 1920s and 1930s.

A second major set of reforms took place immediately following World War II as a key element in the Allies' determination to transform Japan from an aggressive military dictatorship into a peace-loving democracy. When Japan surrendered to the Allies in August 1945, those Americans charged with planning the eventual occupation of Japan shared an essentially common view of prewar and wartime Japanese education and the role it had played in Japan 's military expansion into much of Asia and Oceania . Since the Meiji Restoration of 1868, they believed that education had been consciously used by Japan 's political leaders as an instrument to advance the ends of the state, including economic development, national integration, and military power and conquest.

What appeared to be wrong with Japanese education, in the eyes of most American policymakers, was that it was not like the American system. Americaninitiated educational reforms were, therefore, designed to reform Japanese education along the lines of the American model. This meant that the Occupation authorities would have to transform the prewar orientation of the Japanese into one that would be congruent with the goals of the United States in Japan .