In the 1880s and 1890s, as protest against compulsory schooling decreased and atten
dance rose, the government also changed the curriculum. It became clear that com
moners were using their education to read newspapers and sign petitions that criticized the government. The Ministry of Education responded with a more state-centered, moralistic curriculum. The leader in this shift away from the more liberal and prag
matic spirit of public education in the 1870s was Mori Arinori, a former Satsuma samurai who served as minister of education from 1886 to 1889. Under his leadership the ministry put in place tighter central controls over textbooks. Mori also introduced a regimented system of teacher training in government schools, complete with military drills. The government promoted Confucian ideals of loyalty, obedience, and friend
ship in the schools. It also turned to German advisors as it adopted a moralistic curriculum that stressed lessons of filial piety and loyalty to the state.
The culminating statement of this conservative reform came in the Imperial Re
script on Education, promulgated in the name of the emperor on October 30, 1890.
The document reflected the beliefs of high government officials and their advisors that the goal of education was learning to serve society and the state. These officials argued that the early Meiji education system betrayed this objective by stressing individual initiative. But officials disagreed on the wisdom of grounding a statement of the state- centered purpose of education primarily in Confucian rhetoric. Confucian scholars such as Motoda Eifu, a tutor to the Meiji emperor, wanted to establish loyalty and filial piety as unshakeable social values. Pragmatists such as Ito¯Hirobumi resisted a narrow imperial statement of orthodox morality. They feared it might draw the throne into political debates.
The result of this debate was a somewhat schizophrenic document. Parts of the rescript invoked core Confucian values concerning human relations:
Ye, Our subjects, be filial to your parents, affectionate to your brothers and sisters; as husbands and wives be harmonious, as friends true; bear yourselves in modesty and moderation; extend your benevolence to all. . . .
Other phrases invoked a spirit of allegiance to the state that was common to the nationalism of nineteenth century Euro-American political systems:
. . . advance public good and promote common interests; always respect the Consti
tution and observe the law; should emergency arise, offer yourselves courageously to the State. . . .
Binding together these moralistic injunctions to filial piety and patriotism were statements linking such values directly to the emperor and his ancestors. The rescript began with the claim:
Our Imperial Ancestors have founded Our Empire on a basis broad and everlasting, and have deeply and firmly implanted virtue. . . .
It ended with a stirring charge:
The way set forth here is indeed the teaching bequeathed by Our Imperial Ancestors, to be observed alike by Their Descendants and the subjects, infallible for all ages and true in all places.
In the years after its promulgation, this document took on a sacred aura of re
markable power. Together with a portrait of the emperor, a copy was enshrined in every school in the nation. It was read to the assembled students on ceremonial oc
casions. Stories circulated of heroic school principals who risked—or lost—their lives when they dashed into burning buildings to retrieve the imperial rescript or photo
graph. Students had trouble making full sense of the rescript’s archaic language. But they could understand the basic messages: The imperial institution made Japan a special place and subjects should obey authorities ranging from parents all the way to the emperor.
The spirit and structure of higher education were rather different from that of the rescript and the elementary schools. By 1905, about 104,000 students, roughly 10 percent of the eligible population, went on to attend a variety of middle schools. The
“normal schools” trained students, young boys as well as some girls, for careers as teachers. In addition, a huge variety of vocational middle schools prepared youths for careers as technicians, clerks, or engineers. A small minority of middle-schoolers continued to climb the education ladder by attending private and public higher schools.
Some of these schools undertook to educate young women. In 1899 the government required each prefecture to found at least one higher school for girls. A number of Western missionary groups also opened higher schools for young women. The most prestigious higher schools were seven national institutions for young men. Beginning with the First Higher School, in Tokyo, these were founded between 1886 and 1901.
Together they admitted 5,300 male students per year.
Beyond this, at the pinnacle of the system, stood seven imperial universities, also for men only. Among the universities, it was Tokyo Imperial University, its law faculty above all, that provided the best ticket to the upper reaches of the bureaucracy or the business world.
Schooling beyond the lower elementary level was voluntary. It was limited to those who could pass the entrance examinations and whose parents could afford the tuition and the loss of a working child’s income. Ironically, as students climbed to the higher reaches of this very hierarchical order, they were encouraged to think more freely. The higher schools and universities in particular gave the students a large degree of autonomy. Students organized the school’s extracurricular life on their own. In the classroom they were encouraged to read widely in Western philosophy and political thought. This openness at the top reflected the thinking of Mori Arinori, the minister of education who oversaw the founding of the higher schools. His goal was to nurture an elite of patriotic future leaders of the nation. He believed such people needed to learn initiative and responsibility. For this purpose, they had to be given autonomy in their formative years.
Literature offers one view of the social and psychological world of the students of this era. One of the great writers of the era, Natsume So¯seki, framed his memorable novel of 1914, Kokoro, around the experience of two generations of university- educated characters. In a tale of death and suicide, he offered a grim but powerful
An artist’s rendition of the ceremony of reading the Imperial Rescript on Education to ele
mentary school students in the early twentieth century. The principal holds and reads the rescript. The photograph of the emperor’s portrait is on view in the ark in the center behind opened curtains. This ritual mimics precisely the ceremony of 1889 at which the emperor handed over the constitution itself, as his “gift” to the prime minister and the nation.
Yushima Elementary School, Tokyo.
statement of the alienated existence of the modern man. So¯seki’s novel was preceded by the real case of one unfortunate Tokyo Imperial University boy named Fujimura, who threw himself off the famous Kegon waterfall in 1903. He left a note that could have been written by a character in Kokoro:
Ensconced in the vastness of space and time, I with my meager body, have tried to fathom the enormity of this universe. But what authority can be attributed to Horatio’s
philosophy? There is, after all, only one word for truth: “incomprehensible.” My agony over this question had brought me, at last, to a decision to die, and yet now, standing at the precipice, there is no anxiety in my heart. For the first time, I realized that great sorrow is at one with great happiness.
This suicide became a media event: Postcards, picturebooks, and souvenirs were spawned by it, as well as imitators. One historian claims there were almost two hun
dred death leaps from the same falls over the next eight years.10
Such episodes capture only one aspect of the culture of late Meiji Japan. Other memoirs and novels (such as Soseki’s slightly more cheerful Sanshiro¯) show the city and the university as sites of dreams, adventure, and longing. Young boys, and young girls at a few private higher schools, came to the city with ambition and energy. They fell in love with its anonymity and excitement. They cherished its sense of motion and change. Reading Western literature and philosphy was a standard element of higher education at the time. It sometimes sparked a flamboyant sense of rebellion and assertion. Meiji youths read Kant, Rousseau, and Mill, among others. The decades around the turn of the century were exciting times for many youths privileged to go beyond elementary education and think about their role in the “new Japan.”