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From “Dark Corners” into “the Light”: Literacy Studies in Modern Japan

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 February 2017

Richard Rubinger
Richard Rubinger*
Affiliation:
Indiana University
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Extract

In recent decades the history of literacy has engaged the interests of many Western scholars, particularly those concerned with applying the techniques and approaches of the social sciences to the broad issues of educational history. The simplistic notion that links higher rates of literacy with progress, rationality, modernity, and other benign abstractions, has been challenged by a group of Western historians intent on probing the complex social determinants of literacy in Europe and North America. Eschewing simple quantitative estimates of literacy, they have sought to analyze the quality and meaning of its possession, investigating the revealing problems of who was literate, what was the kind of literacy, when did literacy exist, and for what reasons. Their findings have been provocative, and their research continues to stimulate controversy as well as new insights.

Type
Articles
Information
History of Education Quarterly , Volume 30 , Issue 4 , Winter 1990 , pp. 601 - 612
Copyright
Copyright © 1990 by the History of Education Society 

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References

1. Scofield, R. S., “The Measurement of Literacy in Pre-Industrial England,” in Literacy in Traditional Societies, ed. Goody, Jack (Cambridge, 1975), 318–19.Google Scholar

2. At the end of the seventeenth century, the popular writer Saikaku, Ihara, wrote with scorn of the samurai of substantial income who could neither read nor write: “a retainer sadly behind the times; there is nothing more shameful than being illiterate.” Quoted in Dore, Ronald P., Education in Tokugawa Japan (Berkeley, 1965), 20.Google Scholar

3. Conversation with Professor Rai Kiichi of Hiroshima University, spring 1982.Google Scholar

4. A helpful introduction to this subject is Yωzω, Konta, Edo no Hon'ya (NHK bukkusu #299, 1973).Google Scholar

5. Faulds, Henry, Nine Years in Nipon: Sketches of Japanese Life and Manners (Boston, 1888), 208.Google Scholar

6. Morse, Edward Sylvester, Japan Day by Day, 1877, 1878–79, 1882–83 (Boston, 1917), 1: 120.Google Scholar

7. Kikuchi, Baron Dairoku, Japanese Education: Lectures Delivered in the University of London (London, 1909), 172–73.Google Scholar

8. Dore, Ronald P., Education in Tokugawa Japan, 291–95 and 317–22; Passin, Herbert, Society and Education in Japan (New York, 1965), 47–49 and 310–13. Dore's figures are based on statistics compiled by a Ministry of Education survey undertaken in the 1880s requiring local authorities to describe, as best they could, schools that existed in their area before 1872. Passin's data are based on a similar survey of local terakoya undertaken by Ototake Iwazω and reported in his book, Nihon shomin kyωiku-shi (A History of Popular Education in Japan), vol. 3.Google Scholar

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11. Source for the figures in the chart is Nihon, Kindai kyωiku shiryω sωsho—shiryω hen, comp., Sωtei kyωiku chωsa gaikyω (Tokyo, 1973), vol. 5.Google Scholar

12. The existence of the survey was first reported in Yoshitsugu, Kobayashi, “Meiji 14–nen no shikiji shirabe: toji no Kita Azumi-gun Tokiwa mura no baai,” Nagano ken kindai-shi kenkyū (no. 5, 1973), 51–57.Google Scholar

13. Takahashi's best-known work is Nihon minshū kyωiku-shi kenkyū (Studies in the History of Popular Education in Japan) (Miraisha, 1978). But his most innovative work may be found in the following: “Kinsei shωnω no shωhi seikatsu to kyωku bunka no sωzω” (“Family Expenditures of Small Farmers and the Beginnings of Education and Culture in the Early Modern Period” Rekishi Hyωron) 461 (1988); “Kinsei sonraku ni okeru kodomo no sonzai jωkyω” (“Living Conditions of Children in Early Modern Farming Villages”) Sichω (no. 23, 1988), 11–30.Google Scholar

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15. Primarily known for works on philosophy and the ethical thought of non-elites, Professor Fukawa Kiyoshi's most recent book is an important contribution to the history of literacy. See Kinsei minshū no kurashi to gakushū (Commoner Life and Learning in Early Modern Japan) (Kobe, 1989).Google Scholar