ABSTRACT
Understanding the history of modern education in Japan would necessarily entail unravelling the ways in which education and the formation of the nation-state came to be inextricably linked. In Meiji Japan, education became a means of integrating the diverse and multi-layered social ranks, regional identities, and cultural mores of Edo-period feudal society, and forming a newly centralised and unified system of values. A point that characterised Fujimaro Tanaka's policies was seeing the goal of education as achieving the welfare of the nation-state rather than ensuring the welfare of individuals through processes of self-reliance and personal advancement. Mass migration of the rural population to urban areas, and the growth of cities after the Russo-Japanese War, delivered a blow to the foundations of the family and household and local communities that had buttressed the idea of national morality.
