ABSTRACT
Moral education, known as shūshin before World War II, has been a feature of Japanese education most of the time since its formalization in Meiji times. At the time of the Meiji restoration (1868), education, under the slogan of ‘Rich Country, Strong Military (Fukoku Kyōhei)’, was to fulfil two purposes: One was to educate the human resources necessary to excel as a modern country. The other was to help cultivate a consciousness in people as one nation, ‘the Japanese’, a unification of the inhabitants of the Japanese archipelago that had not existed under the previous feudal system dominated by relatively autonomous domains (the bakuhan system), each with their ‘national’ identities (Fridell, 1970, 823; Kaizuka, 2009b, 24-25). The problem with this task of creating a common culture is pinpointed by Todorov, who writes that though it is sometimes recommended that schools should be places where children learn to recognize themselves in a common past, this is a problem where no such thing as a common past exists (Todorov, 2010, 73) – as indeed was the case in Japan at the time of the Meiji restoration. Adding to the problem of creating a common culture is the fact that it took until 1910 to get all of the elementary school-aged children into school. In 1875, 35.19 percent of the target population attended school; in 1880 41.06 percent, twice as many boys as girls (Tokiomi in Tsurumi, 1974, 248). The attempts to create a common culture and morality via school education thus would not have had an impact on a large part of even the relevant age-groups in the beginning, so one should keep in mind that the effectiveness of whatever training one attempted to impart via education in the beginning would have been limited. Although spreading education was a national project, it was thus by no means an effort that reached everyone from the beginning, not even in the target groups.
