ABSTRACT
Although training was a critically important tool used to build the new Japanese infrastructure during the Meiji era, nonetheless modern education simply extended two venerable traditions in Japan. First, education continued to provide the path to elite status (and thus supplied leadership to guide the Japanese through the Meiji transition). Second, education was deliberately used to reinforce among the masses the policies of Japan's leaders (who thought of themselves as modernizers). Thus educational policy was an illustration of the axiom that tradition can not only coexist with, but also can often be instrumentally significant to, the modernization process.
