Burning and Building: School, Community, and the Creation of the Modern Japanese State 1750-1900

Brian Platt

The Meiji government's effort in the 1870s to build a nationwide, centralized school system in the image of those in Europe and America was accompanied by a simultaneous effort to delegitimize previous schooling practices. The thousands of schools and teachers that filled the rural and urban landscape in Japan before the Meiji government came to power in 1868 were now the targets of a defamation campaign. They were deemed "backwards," "narrow-minded," and "corruptive," unfit for a country seeking desperately to take its place among the modern nation-states of the West. Such views were embraced readily by intellectuals and local elites, many of whom participated enthusiastically with the educational reforms of the new government. By the early 1900s, however, after three decades of breathtaking changes in Japanese society, people began to feel differently about the pre-modern school-now known by the term terakoya, or "temple school." Looking back on the changes of the previous decades, people began to remember terakoya in distinctly nostalgic tones. Individuals began to write of their childhood experiences in the local terakoya, associating it with feelings of community and authenticity-in contrast to the increasingly fragmented, alien world they perceived around them. Local educational associations began to conduct investigations of these terakoya in an attempt to record and catalogue what they viewed as the folk practices of a vanishing world. In this paper, I will trace this shift in the collective memory of terakoya, paying particular attention to how this memory was used as a critique of the changes in society and education associated with modernization.

About Brian Platt

Brian Platt is Assistant Professor in the department of history at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia. He received his Ph.D. in Japanese history from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1998 after spending two years at the University of Tokyo on a Fulbright fellowship. His book manuscript, "Burning and Building: Schooling and State Formation in Japan, 1750-1890," is currently being reviewed for publication. His next research project is on nostalgia and autobiography in nineteenth century Japan.