ABSTRACT
BEFORE DISCUSSING JUKU IN GENERAL, the following GENERAL, the following portraits of individual teachers and their juku will give some idea of the varying patterns the word can describe. Four of the juku portrayed here, run by Yasui Sokken, Ikeda Sōan, Murakami Butsusan and Tsunetō Seisō, were established in the first half of the nineteenth century and continued well into the Meiji period, three of them over several generations. Mishima Chūshū’s juku, Nishō gakusha, established in the late 1870s when many of the older juku were closing, is the only one of its kind to have become a private university. Miwada Masako ran several different kangaku juku before establishing a private girls’ school, which exists to this day. All these juku in some way filled a gap in government provision, whether temporary or long-term. The examples also help explain why most juku eventually disappeared, though others survived, albeit after some transformation.
