Background

The contributors to this volume are Japanese scholars, all specialists in the history of Japanese education, who are part of a Literacy Research Group formed in 2001 to investigate the role of literacy in the development of modern Japanese society. The intellectual starting point for the group was an article published by Hisaki Yukio in 1983 that introduced Western methods of literacy research based on signatures to Japanese readers. He pointed out the remarkable fact that despite the enormous attention to education in Japan, there was no work at all on the history of literacy. The group was formed to overcome this glaring omission in the historiography of Japanese education.

From 2002 to 2005 the group received research funding from the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS, Nihon Gakujutsu Shinkōkai), and the project on literacy in premodern Japan began in earnest. From 2006 to 2010 the group received additional funding from JSPS which enabled them to participate in a conference held in November 2006 at Indiana University under the auspices of the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures, where three of the members— Kimura Masanobu, Yakuwa Tomohiro and Kawamura Hajime— had each spent a year working with Richard Rubinger on issues related to the history of literacy in Japan. Each of the members presented preliminary data from their own particular perspectives, which became a pamphlet entitled New Materials for the Study of Literacy in History: Report of the Indiana Conference on Literacy in Japanese History and also appeared on the East Asian Studies Center website.

The group followed this up with a joint presentation at the 55th Annual Meeting of the Japanese History of Education Society held at Kyoto University in 2011. The papers presented were further refinements of earlier work and ultimately became chapters of this book. The JSPS has continued to fund the group, and it has added new members and expanded its purview beyond empirical studies of literacy to broader issues of learning. So, in addition to empirical analyses of literacy based on personal marks on documents and Meiji period literacy tests, there are chapters on the learning experiences of Heian-period nobles, the education of the Ikkō sect members in medieval times, Christian faithfuls in the late sixteenth century, rural villagers and smalltown merchants in the Tokugawa period— a great variety of subjects, places and times.