- Kato Hidetoshi's Data Base -

Development Nineteenth-Century Style

Publication Date:199203
Book title: MEDIA, CULTURE, AND EDUCATION IN JAPAN [A COLLECTION OF PAPERS]
Publisher : National Institute of Multimedia Education


Frontiers

The greatest tourist attraction of the city of Sapporo, the prefectural capital Hokkaido, the northernmost island of Japan, is the campus of Hokkaido University with its statue of Dr. William Smith Clark. The famous words he addressed to his students--"Boys, be ambitious"--are inscribed on many souvenir items. Indeed, the name of Dr. Clark has become so famous that more than 80 percent of Japanese high school and university students today can identify who he was and what he did in Hokkaido. It is doubtful if 10 percent of American intellectuals, or the students of Amherst College, where Clark was president in the 1870s, know his name. Clark is one of the few Americans whose reputation is uncontestably more widespread among Japanese people than among his countrymen.

Clark came to Japan in 1876 at the invitation of the Japanese government to help inaugurate a new agricultural college in Sapporo, and he was appointed schoolmaster. He persuaded Kiyotaka Kuroda, the commissioner of the island, to establish a completely new school system based on his own philosophy. He lived in the dormitory with the students and took them on field expeditions into the wild woodland--Clark was a botanist--opening their intellectual curiosity while instilling spiritual aspirations. Hokkaido at that time was inhabited by a small population of aboriginal Ainu and was not agriculturally developed.

The enrollment of the new college was extremely small, only twenty-four students altogether, but their backgrounds and qualities were extraordinary. They were boys who had already been enrolled as the students of the Tokyo English school (which later became the preparatory school for Tokyo University) but had decided to quit it in order to join Clark's new school. It was as if in the middle of the nineteenth century a group of students from a prestigious East Coast school had suddenly left it and moved to an unknown new school in Minnesota or Nebraska. The twenty-four boys dared to take the chance, partly because the government had promised a generous stipend, but mostly because the whole setting--a vast wasteland, a new school, a new education philosophy--was attractive and challenging.

Clark stayed in Hokkaido for only eight months and then went back to Amherst, so his encounter with the students was extremely brief. At the farewell party held for him, Clark left those three famous words, that was all. But he made an incredible impact. The boys stayed to be "ambitious." Moreover, the words were inscribed in the minds not only of those twenty-four students but of millions of young men who heard about episode. The challenge "Boys, be ambitious" has been inherited from generation to generation, and even today the sentence is one of the most popular English sayings in Japan.

Among the students who studied with Clark were such eminent figures as Shosuke Sato, Kanzo Uchimura, and Inazo Nitobe, who later became leaders of Japanese education. The agricultural college grew into Hokkaido University, one of the seven major national universities in Japan. It is hard to think of any other American who left so extraordinary an impact on a foreign country.

Why was there such an impact? Why did twenty-four boys decide to come to Hokkaido without hesitation? Why did Clark come? The answer to these questions is found in the sociopolitical significance of Hokkaido in the middle of the nineteenth century. Hokkaido had been the land of the native Ainu, covered by heavy woods with millions of deer, bear, and wolves. The sea and inland rivers were rich with salmon, herring, and seaweed, and as early as the fourteenth century small settlements by Japanese were established in the southern part of the island, mainly for trading with the Ainu. Migration from Japan continued, and in the seventeenth century the Matsumae clan occupied the southern peninsula and established it as a part of Japan. From 1799 through 1807, the Tokugawa government sent explorers to the island and declared sovereignty to check the Russians, who were trying to migrate to it from Siberia. A certain ambiguity combined with power politics prevailed in regard to the sovereignty of Hokkaido, but somehow the Tokugawa succeeded in including the island as a part of the Japanese nation.

The political and military importance of Hokkaido was recognized by the officials of the Meiji government. They were deeply concerned with international relations, and believed that Hokkaido was the most urgent problem that the new Japan had to deal with. For Hokkaido to become part of Japan under international law, it had to be legally annexed to the nation and Japan's sovereignty had to be approved by the international powers. In order to strengthen their de facto sovereignty over the island, it was necessary to have Hokkaido inhabited by a large Japanese population. The government encouraged migration to the wilderness. There were, fortunately for the government's policy people who were willing to migrate. They were former samurai, loyal to old regime, who had belonged to the army defeated in the civil war (1864-68) and had thus lost their status and position under the new government, which was dominated exclusively by anti-Tokugawa elements. They needed new jobs and assignments, just as the officers of the Confederate Army did after the American Civil War, and their former status, pride, and discipline seemed to be ideally suited to the new venture in Hokkaido. Kuroda, the newly appointed special commissioner of Hokkaido, encouraged them to go to the island as "special military police," to protect the island from attack, presumably from Russia. They were given individual houses with huge lots of land for cultivation. The heads of households were armed with guns so that in case of emergency they could from an organized militia. In peacetime, they were independent farmers. The first group was recruited from Tohoku (the northern part of Honshu) in 1875, and 208 households migrated to Hokkaido in 1876, the year Clark came to establish the new school. One of these pioneering ex-samurai, Tomohiko Abiko, wrote in his diary, "I came here with the pride of serving for the nation and the aspiration to cultivate the virgin land." Recruitment continued until 1899. By that time the number of households that had migrated to Hokkaido was 7,337, with a total population of more than 40,000 scattered in thirty-seven new village communities; 40 percent of the heads of households were ex-samurai. Other than those selected by the government, there were many civilians who looked to Hokkaido as the land of promise. In 1897 the total population of Hokkaido reached 700,000, mostly farmers. The native Ainu were suppressed, and many of them died. Deer, whose meat was one of their major foods, almost disappeared because of hunting by the immigrants and merchants.

This picture suggests a parallel with American social history of the same period: the ambiguity of territorial sovereignty, the unexplored wilderness, rich natural resources, the encouragement given by the government, the fate of ex-officers of a defeated army (even the timing of the two civil wars coincided, though the scale was quite different), the suppression of native tribal people, the crude exploitation of resources by profit-seeking merchants, the disappearance of the deer paralleling the disappearance of the buffalo, and above all the existence of "frontiers," even though the Japanese frontier was much more modest in size than that of the United States. Genius and wisdom, combined with intuitive judgment, led Commissioner Kuroda to follow the American frontier model. First, he invited Horace Caplon, the U.S. commissioner of agriculture, to be a consultant for the reclamation and development of Hokkaido. Caplon came with a team of experts and proposed a major development plan that called for the investment of some 12,500,000 Yen, or $12,700,000, for a period of ten years, from 1872 through 1881. Kuroda not only invited experts from the United States, but also sent young people to study in America. In 1873 alone, the office of the commissioner sent twenty-three students to the United State with a budget of $22,400.

Kuroda and his officials were adventurous enough to follow much of the advice given by the Americans. For example, in planning the city of Sapporo, they followed American city-planning practice exactly, using a geometrical grid with numerical street numbers, so that the American natural historian Edward Morse, visiting Sapporo in 1878, wrote in his diary, "The streets of Sapporo are wide and cross one another at right angles. The whole town suggests a new but thriving village in our Western States."1 Even today, Sapporo is an exceptional and exotic city in Japan because of its completely american style of city layout. For obvious traditional reasons, the commissioner's office had hoped to develop the island by growing rice, but the technical advisors insisted on converting the land into pasture to feed cattle. The commissioner's office followed the suggestion. Hokkaido thus became cattle country, and it still is famous for its dairy products. In short, the island of Hokkaido was turned into a small-scale frontier society on American lines.

Other American items were brought to the virgin island. For example, Caplon found that the Japanese were not equipped for the extremely cold weather in Hokkaido, except for their small hibachis, and introduced the Franklin stove. The device was so efficient that manufacturers in Tokyo started producing it, not only for the people of Hokkaido, but for the Japanese market at large. Caplon wrote that the stove was a small souvenir to the people of Japan from America.

It was in this historical context that Clark came to Sapporo. It was quite probable that he saw, perhaps to his surprise, the same social and spiritual atmosphere he might have found in the western territories of North America. Like their counterparts on the American frontier, the new immigrants to Hokkaido looked on the island as a dreamland where infinite possibilities might be realized. On the main islands, new, tight administrative organizations were being established, but Hokkaido seemed to have more freedom and elbowroom. That was why twenty-four ambitious young men did not hesitate to go to study with Clark in the wilderness.

Tocqueville refers in a famous passage to the difference in the patterns of colonization of North and South America, saying that the colonizers of the former conformed to a pretentious morality and legality, while those of the latter occupied the territory with violence. Japanese policy toward the Ainu was somewhere between the two, and the government headed by Kuroda must be condemned for handling the Ainu tribes as their counterparts in the "wild West" handled the Indians. (As a matter of fact, inspired by the recent activism of Native Americans, a social movement on behalf of the Ainu population has arisen in Japan in the 1970s.)

Because the island was so underpopulated, and because there were so many people who wanted to make the move, immigrants from widely different social classes, localities, and backgrounds crossed Tsugaru Strait, the fifty kilometers that separated the island from the mainland of Japan. The immigration pattern was extraordinary in that, for the first time in Japanese history, people from various parts of the nation mixed on the frontier. A man from a small southern island might meet and work with a man who came from a mountain village of central Japan. In that respect, Hokkaido became a melting pot on a tiny scale, an exceptionally "cosmopolitan" territory compared with the local, even chauvinistic, territories of mainland Japan. Here again, it can be argued that there was a certain resemblance between the frontier cultures of the American West and Hokkaido. Even today there is no distinctive dialect in Hokkaido, for people picked up their vocabulary from the various dialects of Japan. Traditions of many areas of mainland Japan were mixed and more or less integrated. A traditional New Year's card game was transformed into something unique with which mainlanders are quite unfamiliar. Though the context is very different, the process of assimilation of many immigrant cultures in America found a miniature counterpart in Hokkaido, ten thousand miles west across the Pacific. In other words, the historical and cultural situation and conditions of Hokkaido in the early Meiji era prepared it, by a historical coincidence, to respond to the "frontier spirit" represented by Caplon, Clark, and other American advisors.


Equality and Mobility

Hokkaido provided a geographical frontier, but more important for Japan generally was the social and psychological mobility that characterized Japan after the Meiji revolution. As a matter of fact, the leaders of the new government themselves demonstrated the possibilities of upward mobility. As E.H. Norman has pointed out, the new leaders who overthrew the lid establishment, that is, the traditional Tokugawa elites, came from the lower-ranking samurai classes, and some were unknown common men. Though there were strong factions inside the new government, the new leaders shared one thing in common: they had been at the bottom of the Tokugawa social structure and had never dreamed of coming to the top. Saigo, the first modern Japanese army general, was from a lower-ranking samurai family of Satsuma. Iwakura was the son of a noble family in Kyoto, but his family's position in the court was peripheral, and it never had any significant power. In spite of his noble title, he lived poorly until the revolution took place. Ito, one of Japan's most famous politicians and the prime minister who was responsible for the construction of the Imperial Constitution, came from a poor samurai family of Choshu. Indeed, the new elites came to power by chance. The life of Kawaji, the first superintendent general of the metropolitan police, was an extreme example of success by chance. He had been another young, unknown, poor samurai of Satsuma. On the day that Saigo left the port of Satsuma to lead a troop of his army against the Tokugawa, Kawaji happened to be at the pier. Noticing him, Saigo shouted from the deck, "Hey, why don't you come with me," and Kawaji suddenly decided to join. Two years later, Kawaji was sent to France to study the police system, and upon his return, he was appointed head of the police. Appointments to key positions were often arbitrary. When the new leaders found intelligent young men, they thrust them into high-ranking positions in the government. The leaders could say to a young man, "I think you should come to the Department of Justice," and the next day he would appear in the office as the chief of a section. The leaders themselves were young, too. In the 1860s many of them were in their mid-thirties, and some were in their late twenties.

The government needed bright people, regardless of their birth or family status, though the Satsuma-Choshu factions were dominant, and boys from these territories had far better chances than others of getting good government appointments. Thus the Meiji revolution stirred up the stagnant Tokugawa system, and the society became extraordinarily mobile. What Daniel Lerner labeled "psychic mobility" was released with incredible velocity and on a huge scale. Everybody, especially young men, looked for success, and Risshin Shusse, meaning "raise yourself and make your way in the world," became their motto. Dore has remarked that " the prevalence of this belief that courage, energy, and initiative could carry a man anywhere, however humble his origin, is clear enough in the biographies of those who were young at the time."2

The theme of "success" was dominant in the literature of the Meiji period, especially in the 1870s. The translation of Smile's Self-Help was very widely read, and many people looked forward to making a bright personal future. As in the America of the 1870s, optimism prevailed in the minds of the younger generation. It is true that there was misery in the Japan of the 1870s, but one should not ignore the fact that the society as a whole was mobile, or at least many people thought it was. David McClelland was right when he inferred that between 1800 and 1920, "obviously a number of countries experienced the 'take-off' into rapid economic growth--e.g., Germany France, the United States, Japan," and that in these countries "a wave of achievement motivation should have preceded the economic 'take-off.'"3 He exemplified this hypothesis by a case study of America, where the peak of achievement motivation was observed sometime around the 1870s. Probably the same trend could be observed in Japan almost simultaneously, although no systematic survey has yet been made.

Indeed, "success stories" were one of the most popular kinds of literature in Japan as well as in the United States, and these two countries were, and still are, rather exceptional in the degree to which success stories have become established as a genre of popular literature. It is difficult, for instance, to find success stories in the British or French literary tradition, except for certain works of Dickens and Stendhal. But "success" was the great objective for the younger generation in the early Meiji period. One good example is an autobiographical novel of Kenjiro Tokutomi (1868-1927), Notes of Reminiscence (Omoide no ki). Born at the time of the Meiji revolution, the hero was an ambitious boy, like many of his contemporaries. With a small amount of money he received from his mother, he went to a prestigious university, studying hard while working as a newspaper delivery boy. Finally he became a successful and famous author, with a happy family and a comfortable life. The competition with his classmates and friends was extremely severe, and the hero's attitude toward competitive situation is crude and arrogant. For him the world is a place where only the hard-working can win the battle for success and fame.

It is interesting to note in this connection that the tradition of severe competition has continued and even been strengthened in contemporary Japan. It may be seen in the severe entrance examinations for prestigious schools from kindergarten to the graduate level: in the entrance examination to a school like Tokyo University, fewer than one in ten can succeed. Although there is much less chance of success today than there was in the early Meiji era, many people still believe in "success," like their counterparts in the United States. A cynic might say that "success" is a myth in an organized, or even overorganized, society like contemporary Japan. But surprisingly large numbers of people in the Japanese upper-middle class--business executives, lawyers, doctors, and other professionals--today come from rather poor families. Many of these people are "self-made" men and women, and there are indications that Japan is still a very mobil country where one can grasp one's chance and become a success. For instance, according to Dore's comparative study of social mobility, the percentage of "farmers' and agricultural workers' sons entering non-manual occupations" in Japan is 22 percent (in the United States, 24 percent; in France, 16 percent), and the percentage of "farmers' and agricultural workers' sons entering professional and managerial occupations" is 7 percent (in the United States, 8 percent; in France, 3 percent; and in Great Britain 2 percent).4 The prototype of success made in the 1870s is still functioning in Japan a hundred years later. Indeed, as Bellah suggested in his scheme of social organization, Japan is a country where "achievement" orientation was dominant rather than "ascription."5

A survey reveals that the contemporary author most widely read among business people is Ryotaro Shiba. A study of the contents of his works shows that his themes are more or less "success" oriented. Shiba likes to write about heroes who live in a mobile world, where a peasant's son, by a strange quirk of fate and by effort, becomes a famous general or an influential political figure. His touch is always realistic and semidocumentary. Readers of Shiba's novels may well identify themselves with his heroes, based on men who helped to make Meiji Japan, who usually demonstrate extraordinarily high aspiration and effectiveness in decision making. The fact that his biographical novels are popular with millions of readers suggests that, for modern Japanese, the late nineteenth century was the time when people enjoyed change and mobility, both social and psychological. Many biographies and autobiographies of successful businessmen, politicians, and professional people of the Meiji era (as well as many who were born after the Meiji revolution) boast of the poverty of their families and the misery of their early lives. Indeed, the heroes of success stories in modern Japan must come from poor family backgrounds. Here again, one is impressed by the parallelism between the United States and Japan-the nineteenth century was the time when the log cabin mythology of the Midwest became dominant, and self-made men replaced the East Coast quasi-aristocracy. And like presidents of the United States from Jackson to Hoover, Japanese prime ministers found it an advantage to come from poor agrarian backgrounds.

The basic question, then, is why japan, which had been so stagnant and hierarchically organized, transformed itself rapidly into such a mobile society? Several factors that encouraged mobility and the philosophy of mobility must be carefully examined here. In the first place, it should be noted that at the time of the establishment of the new government, the principle of "equality of four peoples" (Shimin Byodo)was propagated-meaning that the four social classes (samurai, farmers, craftsmen, and merchants), rigidly defined during the feudal era, had to be abolished. In the new era created by the rebellions against the Tokugawa regime, an individual could choose, at least theoretically, his or her own occupation and career. A farmer's son was no longer constrained to stay in the village. He could go to a big city and look for a job or study at any school to which he was admitted. The "equality" principle officially declared by the government meant the total disorganization of the feudal hierarchy. It is in this context that Fukuzawa asserted, at the beginning of his enormously influential book, An Encouragement of learning, "It is said that heaven does not create one man above or below another man. This means that when men are born from heaven they are all equal. There is no innate distinction between high and low"6

Scholars agree this passage may have been a modified translation of the American Declaration of Independence, but the important thing is that Fukuzawa not only advocated equality, but also tried to practice the principle in his everyday life. For example, in his autobiography he describes a visit by a friend in the government who wanted him to accept a position of honor for his contribution to the nation. Fukuzawa refuses the offer, saying, "What is remarkable about a man's carrying out his own work? The cartman pulls his cart; the bean-curd makers produces bean-curd; the student reads his books. Each one follows what is his obligation. If the government wants to recognize the ordinary work of its subjects, let it begin with my neighbor, the bean-curd maker. Give up any such ideas about my special work."7 Many of his contemporaries approved this radical equalitarian attitude.

Another source of equalitarian thinking was the teaching of American missionaries. Dr. Clark himself was a devout Protestant, and taught the Gospel of Christ along with the new agricultural technology. At the end of his stay in Hokkaido, his twenty-four students assembled and signed a pledge as believers of Jesus Christ. For those young people, every individual, regardless of origin, was equal in the light of Christian universalism. As a result, Sapporo Agricultural College produced such devout Christians as Kanzo Uchimura, who went to Amherst and became an extremely puritanical Christian. However, in his case there seemed to be elements inherited from Japanese culture that were attuned to the missionary spirit of nineteenth-century America. In A Diary of a Japanese Convert, published in 1895, he describes his grandfather, who lived in the late Tokugawa period, as a crystalization of honesty and his grandmother as a diligent woman for whom "vivere est laborare." The asceticism of the samurai spirit that Uchimura inherited found a real kinship with the individualistic Protestant ethic of nineteenth-century New England. He idealistically admired American Puritanism and criticized simple-minded American missionaries in Asia. Upon his return to Japan, he argued the essentials of true Christianity against eleven American missionaries in Niigata, basing his defense of Buddhism on his belief in a law of the universe, rather than in the narrow interpretation of biblical documents. He quit his appointment at a Christian college after serving only three months.

Not only the samurai tradition, based on Confucian philosophy, but also certain sects of Buddhism, could be connected with nineteenth-century American Puritanism. For example, a group of young Buddhists belonging to the Shinshu sect, in which Bellah found certain parallels with Protestantism, began publishing in 1887 a magazine called Temperance (Hanseikai Zasshi), whose main purpose was to propagate abstinence from alcohol. They gathered news from abroad, especially from america, and saw in temperance a social issue that they could share with Protestant asceticism. In short, the government's declaration of "equality of four peoples" remobilized latent individualistic, achievement and mobility-oriented traditions, which were stimulated and encouraged by the intellectual and spiritual atmosphere of mid-nineteenth-century America.


Education

In this world in which everyone believed that success was possible, education was emphasized as the means to take advantage of opportunity and rise in the world, in Japan even more than in the United Stated, One indication of the extraordinary appeal of education was Fukuzawa's An Encouragement of Learning. According to Fukuzawa's own records, this book, first published in 1872, with continuous editions through 1876, sold 220,000 copies. The population of Japan at that time was approximately thirty-five million, and a simple calculation tells us that one out of every 160 Japanese purchased the book. Presumably younger people between the ages of fifteen and twenty-five were the most attracted, and one may estimate, taking account of the book reading and borrowing habits of the day, that Fukuzawa reached more than 50 percent of the youth of the 18702. Fukuzawa presents his argument simply. After emphasizing the theme of the equality of man, in a passage we have already quoted, he stresses the vital importance of education as the way to get ahead; "There are no innate status distinctions separating the noble and base, the rich and the poor. It is only the person who has studied diligently, so that he has a mastery over things and events, who becomes noble and rich, while his opposite becomes base and poor." Differences in status and wealth "are entirely the result of whether one has or does not have the powers which learning brings."

He was well aware of the revolutionary possibilities for social change in the principle of "equality of four peoples," and wrote, "Looking back upon the developments of recent times, we see that the peasants, artisans, and merchants have risen in dignity a hundred times over their former statuses, and have gradually reached the point of standing on equal terms with the former Samurai families. so today, employment in government service is open to men of character and talent among the formerly non-Samurai groups." Under these new circumstances, he wrote, "...the state is now grounded on the principle that all men are socially equal. Therefore, from the present day forward, there will be no such thing as hereditary class rank among the Japanese people. A man will have rank only on the ground of his talents, virtues, and accomplishments."

Undoubtedly these words encouraged and motivated ambitious young people, and many of them, like the hero of Notes of Reminiscence, tried to enter competitive academic institutions and test themselves against their age-mates. Thus, Yorozu Oda, a well-known professor of law and a practitioner in international law, recalls in his autobiography the competitive entrance examination for the government law school; "There were more than 15,000 applicants who took the examination. Many of them came from various local prefectures, and the first screening test continued for several days. Those 150 who passed the test had to take a second test, and finally 50 students were selected." The chances of success were one in 300, but once accepted, a student was provided with free tuition and a stipend by the government, so that he could concentrate on learning. The examination was open to all applicants without bias. The sole purpose of selection was to recruit bright young people who could take key positions in the government.

Those who failed were able to try again the next year, or to try other schools, though in private schools the tuition fees came to be burdensome. But students were proud of their statues for they knew that good job opportunities awaited them. A student's song of the day ran, "Don't laugh at poor students, all the ministers were once poor students, too."

Emperor Meiji himself was very much concerned with higher education, and in 1872, the year when Fukuzawa published his book, the emperor visited Tokyo Kaisei Gakko (later Tokyo University), where he inspected each department and gave his greetings; "His Majesty celebrates the progress of knowledge. The schools of professional knowledge are the places where talents grow. His Majesty expects the expansion of higher education of various branches. You should be reminded of His Majesty's deep concern." The "encouragement of learning" was thus everywhere, not only in the title of Fukuzawa's book. A Chinese poem written by a Japanese Confucian scholar of the eighteenth century was revived. It may be translated; "With ambition, I, a man, leave my home country. If I cannot fulfill my aim to study, I will not come back, not even to die. The place of my tombstone is not destined to be my home country. For me, green mountains are everywhere." All possible sources, old and new, from east and west, that could ignite the desire for achievement of a new generation, were mobilized and propagated.

As a result, in the 1870s Tokyo became a vibrant city to which thousands of young people came from every corner of the country, mostly on foot. High aspirations for learning prevailed; as Daikichi Irokawa aptly said, Clark's slogan, "Boys, be ambitious," was "strong gunpowder thrown into a fire."8 According to one study, several hundred compositions written by school children and appearing in a children's magazine of the 1870s and 1880s were dominated by the themes of "study," "diligence," "fighting handicaps," "hard work," and other achievement-oriented motives. The "encouragement of learning" was a fever that attacked the new generation of the early Meiji period.

The recognition of the importance of education was, however, not the result of the Meiji revolution only. Rather, it was a continuation from the late Tokugawa period, as Passin has suggested in his intensive study of modern Japanese education.9 Elementary schools called "terakoya" had been established in many communities since the beginning of the eighteenth century, and by the time of the Meiji revolution, it is estimated, almost 100 percent of samurai, 70 to 80 percent of merchants, and 50 to 65 percent of artisans in the big cities were literate. In rural villages, the heads of communities were 100 percent literate, and even among small tenants 20 percent were able to read and write. Respect for intellectual achievement was part of the Japanese tradition. Indeed, as early as the 1780s, Chikuzan Nakai advocated a compulsory education system on a national scale, and many people were aware that education was the basis for national development. It was no wonder, therefore, that the elites of the Meiji government felt mass education was their most urgent task.

The zeal for education was thus the product of the acceleration of the aspirations that had been latent in the pre-Meiji period. In 1871 the Ministry of Education was founded, and in 1872 four years of compulsory education were instituted. The legislation asserts in its preface that "learning is the basis for a person to be independent, and every individual person is obliged to learn." The purpose of compulsory education was clearly stated as "to let no household in a community remain unlearned and to let no individual in a household remain unlearned." The tone of the legislation was quite similar to that of Fukuzawa's book, though the latter was more radical and had greater impact. There was little disagreement among government policy, liberal thinkers like Fukuzawa, and, above all, the general public. Everyone welcomed the new era as far as the diffusion of education was concerned.

It is worthwhile to observe an almost parallel development in the United States at approximately the same historical point. Preceded by pioneering movements such as the Pennsylvania Society for the Promotion of Public Schools (established in 1827), Horace Mann succeeded in 1852 in getting legislation passed establishing compulsory education in Massachusetts, though the actual enforcement of the law had to wait until the late 1860s. In 1871, New Hampshire, Michigan, and Washington decided to enforce compulsory education; in 1872, Connecticut and New Mexico; in 1873, Nevada; and in 1874, New York, Kansas, and California adopted similar legislation. This movement fulfilled the hopes of Jefferson's "Bill for the More General Diffusion of Knowledge" (1779), in which he stated that "those persons whom nature has endowed with genius and virtue should be rendered by liberal education worthy to receive, and able to guard the sacred deposit of rights and liberties of their fellow citizens, and that they should be called to that charge without regard to wealth, birth or other accidental condition or circumstances." Indeed, what Fukuzawa emphasized in 1872 almost coincides with Jefferson's statement, though the sociohistorical context was rather different.

As suggested before, the 1870s were the age of the frontier in America, when mobility, both geographical and social, was accelerated, and ambition and success came to be basic American values. A close observation of the American scene of the 1870s amazes a historian of Japan, because developments in education and popular aspiration are so similar. One suspects that if Fukuzawa had ever had a chance to meet Jefferson, they would have been surprised at how much they had in common. Furthermore, the United States and Japan seem to have shared a common orientation toward "practical" education. Fukuzawa was extremely insistent on this point. He was critical of the nonpractical, philological approach to knowledge, which had been dominant in Japanese higher education in the pre-Meiji period, and emphasized the need for "practical" knowledge. He wrote, for instance, "Letters are the instruments of learning. They are like hammers and saws to build a house. Although hammers and saws are indispensable tools for building a house, a person who only knows their names but not how to build a house cannot be called a carpenter. For this reason, a person who only knows how to read letters but does not know how to discern the principles of things cannot be called a true scholar." In another passage he wrote; "The object of one's primary efforts should be practical learning that is closer to ordinary human needs. For example, a person should learn the forty-seven letter Kana syllabary, methods of letter writing and accounting, the practice of the abacus, the way to handle weights and measures, and the like." Fukuzawa was undoubtedly a "pragmatist," one who preceded John Dewey.

Another parallel in education was the positive acceptance of Social Darwinism, especially the work of Herbert Spencer. It is well known that Darwinism was not immediately accepted in Europe, but found much less resistance in the United States and Japan, and Spencer's Social Darwinism became a dominant theme in the social sciences in both countries in the late nineteenth century. The japanese people were rather happy to learn that the ancestors of mankind were primates, because it fitted so well into the scheme of the Buddhist cycle of reincarnation. Japan was a paradise for Darwin, and his theory as well as Spencer's, simplified and misinterpreted, was used to justify the competitive new world, where the "survival of the fittest" was the rule. Shoichi Toyama, who is regarded as the founder of sociology in Japan, was a student of Spencer's, and the first book of sociology translated into Japanese was Lester Ward's Dynamic Sociology. The Principles of Sociology, by Franklin Henry Giddings, was translated into Japanese in 1899, only three years after its original publication.


Patterns of Development

Both the United States and Japan were "developing countries" in the mid-nineteenth century. By historical coincidence, the 1860s were a period of civil war in both countries, and the effect of the civil wars was to strengthen both countries as independent nation-states. A dominant theme in both was the exploration and exploitation of the frontier, and its incorporation into the central society. Though the United States was far ahead of Japan industrially, the hegemony of industry was in the hands of European nations, especially Great Britain, and thus both countries may be seen as "trying harder" because of their number 2 position. Both countries were optimistic about their future, and their peoples responded to opportunities and hoped for individual success. The Protestant ethic, whether Christian or Buddhist, worked as a driving force. Social mobility was encouraged, and radical equalitarian philosophies were advocated and practiced. "Progress," with all its infinite possibilities, was believed in by many, and catching up with the "developed" world--Great Britain and other European nations--became a major national goal in both countries. Indeed, Commodore Perry's aggressive descent on Japan in 1853 was for dual purpose of investigating the possibility of direct American trade with China, which until then had been monopolized by the British, and exploring the sea route across the Pacific so that American trade with the Far East might compete with the European trade via the Indian Ocean. It was an adventure appropriate to a number 2 nation competing with a number 1 nation.

Japan at that time was unaware of the international pecking order among nations. Her concern was rather to avoid becoming another China, which was being exploited by the West. But as soon as the new course was established by the Meiji government, Japan aspired to compete with the industrial nations of the world, and as suggested at the outset of this paper, some government officials, including Kuroda, intuitively looked to America for a "model" of development. As the experience of the American frontier seemed to be applicable to the Japanese frontier, Japan thought that America, as a "developing" nation, could give her more insights than a "developed" country like Great Britain could, though missions were sent to Europe, too.

In order to achieve the national goal of industrialization, Japan emphasized the role of education. Though there was no such term as "social investment in education," what Japan did in the nineteenth century was what twentieth-century development experts would call adopting a "manpower strategy." In a lesser degree, American also was aware of the importance of education for social development.

Though there were, and are, many obvious historical and cultural differences between the two countries, the United States and Japan had, and have, one significant similarity as "developing" countries of the nineteenth century. Their patterns of development were fundamentally different from those of the eighteenth century, which may be represented by Great Britain, in which colonial exploitation was the basic mode. The two developing nations of the nineteenth century concentrated their efforts on education and technology, based on pragmatism.

One hundred years later, the United States and Japan appeared on the international economic scene as giants. The "developing" countries of the nineteenth century found themselves ahead of the former "developed" nations, having become a second generation of "developed" countries. It is interesting and important to note, however, that a number 2 consciousness still persists in the two countries. It is my impression that there is a strong belief that the present is "imperfect" and that "perfection" can never be achieved, or that it may be achieved someday, but not now. Therefore, something "new" is always being tried. The sense of "imperfection" is one of the basic themes in both American and Japanese culture. From the number 2 point of view, number 1 is a model: in city planning, for instance, Victorian London or Napoleonic Paris. Unlike London and Paris, the big cities of number 2 are imperfect. They need modification, rezoning, redevelopment, and new planning constantly: Tokyo and New York are always "under construction." There must be something better, something newer. In this sense, the two cultures are metabolic, or at least quasi-metabolic, and the cult of sociocultural metabolism is the basis of the "American dream," and, in a lesser degree, of the "Japanese dream."

Are these dreams and beliefs disappearing or declining? With the arrival of a radical left, an ecology movement, consumerism, and the women's liberation movement, in both societies, one must ask this question, but no definite answer seems to be presented yet. It should be noted that we may see another style of development, which may be called "development twentieth-century style," in the "developing countries" or the "Third World," different from both the eighteenth-century and the nineteenth-century styles. A fundamental historical question--one which we will have to leave of the future--is whether the twentieth-century style, perhaps represented by China, is going to succeed the nineteenth-century-style counties, as they have succeeded the eighteenth-century-style countries.



Notes
  1. Edward Morse, Japan Day by Day (Boston: Houghton, 1917), p. 9.
  2. Ronald Dore, ed., Aspects of Social Change in Modern Japan (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1967).
  3. David McClelland, The Achieving Society (Princeton: Van Nostrand, 1961), pp. 149-50.
  4. Dore, Aspects of Social Change.
  5. Robert Bellah, Tokugawa Religion (Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1957).
  6. Yukichi Fukuzawa, An Encouragement of Learning (Tokyo: Sophia University, 1969).
  7. Yukichi Fukuzawa, Autobiography (Tokyo: Hokuseido, 1953).
  8. Daikichi Irokawa, Kindai Kokka no shuppatsu: Nihon no rekishi [The beginning of a Modern Nation: History of Japan], vol. 21 (Tokyo, 1966).
  9. Herbert Passin, Society and Education in Japan (New York: Bureau of Publications, Teachers College, Columbia University, 1965), p. 57.

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