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“Monasticism” and the Paradox of the Meiji Higher Schools
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 March 2011
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When Nitobe Inazō became principal of the First Higher School (Ichikoō) in the fall of 1906, he was immediately perplexed by the customs and rituals of his students. Here on the campus of Japan's most prestigious university preparatory school was an isolated community of students immersed in a subculture that seemed totally unrestricted by the mores of civilized twentieth-century society. There was a “rustic barbarism” in the students' daily behavior as they swaggered around the campus in worn-out uniforms and battered geta, bellowing out incoherent lyrics of “dormitory songs.” No one thought twice about using a sleeve for a handkerchief, or making “dormitory rain” from the second-story windows of the residence halls (instead of using the appropriate ground-floor facilities.) At night, some students might be seen stripped down to their underpants and dancing wildly around open bonfires, while others were strolling aimlessly through the grove in front of the dormitory, intoning lines from Hamlet or The Sorrows of Young Werther. For Nitobe—the Christian theologian, the international diplomat, the impeccably well-dressed and wellmannered gentleman—the first sight of the Ichikō students was something of a shock. How strange it was that those young men destined to become the leaders of an emerging world power should be conducting themselves in a way that seemed, on the surface at least, to be in proud defiance of the codes of civic responsibility and social acceptability.
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References
1 Sukeo, Kitasawa, The Life of Dr. Nitobe (Tokyo: Hokuseido, 1953), p. 52Google Scholar; Nitobe's arrival at Ichikō is discussed in my Ph.D. dissertation, “Schooldays in Imperial Japan” [hereafter “SIJ”] (University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1975), Chap. 8.
2 Nitobe Inazō, “Rōjōshugi to soshiarichī to ni tsuite, “printed in Dai Ichi Kōtō Gakkō Kōyūkai zasshi, No. 195 (1907), pp. 13–16. Like a number of his students, Nitobe used the English term “monasticism” interchangeably with the Japanese term ”rōjōshugi,” although the latter might be more literally, if awkwardly, translated as “seclusionism” or “bastionism.”
3 Nitobe's homilies on “sociality,” “cheerfulness,” “spiritual sympathy,” and the importance of being “inclusive” are sprinkled through his speeches beginning with the one cited above. For more examples, see Tadao, Yanaihara (ed.), Nitobe hakushi bunshū (Tokyo: Tajima Michiji, 1936), pp. 292–321Google Scholar; Yanaihara also discusses Nitobe's idea of “cheerfulness” in Yanaihara Tadao zenshū, XXIV (Tokyo: Iwanami, 1965), pp. 147–48.Google Scholar
4 Essays Ancient and Modern (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1932), p. 184.Google Scholar
5 The designation “higher middle school” (kōtō chūgakkō) was used until 1894, when a special ordinance changed the name to “higher school” (kōtō gakkō).
6 See Hall, Ivan, Mori Arinori (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1973).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
7 Hensankai, Kyōikushi (ed.), Meiji ikō kyōiku seido battatsushi, III (Tokyo: Kyōiku Shiryō Chōsakai, 1964), p. 153Google Scholar. Before 1900, there were provisions in the higher school curriculum for a small minority of students to follow a terminal vocational training course; the overriding purpose of the higher schools, however, was to prepare students for the university (Tarō, Nakajima, “Kyūsei kōtō gakkō seido no seiritsu,” Tōhoku Daigaku Kyōikugakubu nempō, V [1957], pp. 7–8)Google Scholar. In the Higher School Ordinance of 1894, an attempt was made by the Ministry of Education, under the leadership of Inoue Kowashi, to place greater emphasis upon the “technical course” (senmon gakka) over the “university preparatory course” (daigaku yoka). The majority of students and faculty adamantly opposed what they saw as the “vocationalization” of the curriculum; as a result, the “technical course” was quickly phased out. It was eventually reestablished in the national technical schools (senmon gakkō), which were founded in 1903. Thereafter, the higher schools remained an unchallenged preserve for the liberal arts as the only base for university preparation. (Characterization of the higher school as a “prep school” would be misleading, given the age of the students—usually between 17 and 20, sometimes even older. In comparison with the American educational system, they more closely resembled liberal arts colleges, with the Imperial Universities functioning more like graduate schools.) For more on Inoue's attempt to restructure the higher schools, see Tokiomi, Kaigō (ed.), Inoue Kowashi no kyōiku seisaku (Tokyo: Tokyo Univ. Press, 1968)Google Scholar, Chap. 3.
8 According to Kubota, Akira (Higher Civil Servants in Postwar Japan [Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1969], pp. 60–67)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, over 75% of the upperlevel “core” of the bureaucracy between 1949 and 1959 was made up of higher school graduates; and one-third of that group came from the First Higher School. The high percentage of First Higher School graduates in the bureaucracy is, according to Kubota, “extraordinary”; graduates of Eton, Harrow, or Rugby were never able to account for more than 6% of the top bureaucracy in Britain in any given year. A 1930 survey found 4,859 First Higher School graduates in the following occupations: 833 university faculty and administrators; 447 higher school and technical school faculty; 56 honorary professors; 4 cabinet members; 12 Privy and Court Councilors; 58 members of the House of Peers; 27 members of the House of Representatives; 12 prefectural governors; 86 diplomats; 257 judges; 389 lawyers; 329 business executives; 5 court physicians; 1,022 general physicians; 166 military officers; 57 technicians; 1,099 national and prefectural officials (Shūgetsu, Takayama, Kōtō gakkō to sakei mondai [Tokyo: Nihon Hyōronsha, 1932], p. 223).Google Scholar
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11 Special schools were maintained by local feudal domains during the latter half of the Tokugawa period; these provided Confucian learning and cultivation for samurai youth. See Dore, R. P., Education in Tokugawa Japan (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1965).Google Scholar
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13 Passin, Herbert, Society and Education in Japan (New York: Teachers College Press, 1965), p. 120.Google Scholar
14 DIKGR, p. 105.
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16 Kōryōshi (n. 12 above), p. 4.
17 DIKGR, p. 104. An excellent statement on the role of the higher school as a surrogate family may also be found in Reizō, Atoda, Nikō o kataru (Sendai: Dai Ni Kōtō Gakkō Kyōsaibu, 1937), p. 97Google Scholar. In a similar vein, the family was a model for organizing American boarding schools; see McLachlan, James, American Boarding Schools (New York: Scribner, 1970), p. 86.Google Scholar
18 The competitive atmosphere in the middle schools can be explained in part by the fact that about one of every twenty middle school students could expect to enter a higher school. (The competition among primary school graduates for entrance into the middle schools was even more ruthless.) For example, in 1898 there were 49,684 public middle school students compared to 4,664 higher school students. Ten years later the number of public middle school students had shot up to 92,944 while higher school enrollment rose only slightly to 5,375. By 1918, there were 121,178 public middle school students compared to 6,731 higher school students. (Figures are taken from the appendixes for vols. IV and VI of Meiji [n. 7 above].) It was no wonder, then, that middle school students, whose expectations for the future were not nearly as secure as those of the higher school students, enjoyed reading the popular success literature—which glorified the pettybourgeois achiever—contained in magazines like Chūgaku sekai. By contrast, higher school students tended to look down on such periodicals, even though they themselves may well have been avid subscribers three or four years earlier. (My thanks to Earl Kinmonth for calling my attention to Chūgaku sekai.)
19 DIKGR, p. 103.
20 The importance of both natural and historical environment for the foundation of each of the original five higher schools is discussed in “SIJ,” Chap. 4.
21 Ibid., Chap. 4.
22 Atoda (n. 17 above), p. 8.
23 DIKGR, p. 119.
24 Kinnosuke, Ishizaka, Meizenryō shōshi (Sendai: Dai Ni Kōtō Gakkō Meizen Ryōshi Hensanbu, 1942), p. 83.Google Scholar
25 DIKGR, p. 126.
26 Ibid., p. 103; he used the same words as Mori for “society's uppercrust” (skakai no jōryū).
27 Ibid., p. 104.
28 Kōryōshi (n. 12 above), p. 2.
29 Fuyuhiko, Yamauchi, “Rōjōshugi o ronzu,” Dai Ichi Kōtō Gakkō Kōyūkai zasshi, No. 119 (1902), p. 3.Google Scholar
30 “SIJ,” Chap. 6.
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33 As described in “SIJ,” Chap. 5.
34 In psychoanalytical terms, this impulse for “primitive traditionalism,” as Erikson has called it, is characteristic of adolescents who, in the absence of more sophisticated “stabilizing mechanisms” (such as intellectualization or artistic creativity), resort to brute force and negative injunction in an attempt to control instinctive energies; see Blos, Peter, On Adolescence (New York: Free Press, 1962)Google Scholar, Chaps. 3 and 5. While initially the policy of monasticism and self-government catered to the primitive and categorical conscience of the students, the opportunities for intellectualization and artistic expression increased dramatically after 1900; for more on this, see “SIJ,” Chaps. 7, 8, 9.
35 The following descriptions are from “SIJ,” Chap. 6.
36 Ibid.
37 Ibid.
38 Perkinson, Henry J., Two Hundred Years of American Educational Thought (New York: McKay, 1976), pp. 204–05Google Scholar
39 Nitobe's later confidence in Ichikō's role as an institutional pillar of the nation is seen in his introduction to Kōryōshi (n. 12 above), written in 1913.
40 Identity: Youth and Crisis (New York: W. W. Norton, 1968), pp. 156–58.Google Scholar
41 For a related perspective on university education and bureaucratic recruitment, see Silberman, Bernard, “The Bureaucratic Role in Japan, 1900–1945” in Silberman, & Harootunian, H. D. (eds.), Japan in Crisis (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1974).Google Scholar
42 Gerth, Hans & Mills, C. Wright (eds.), From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1958), pp. 186–91.Google Scholar
43 The same educational pattern of elite socialization can, of course, be seen in the West. Ariès, Philippe (Centuries of Childhood [New York: Vintage Books, 1962], p. 174)Google Scholar has argued that, dating back to the 15th and 16th centuries, European educators have adopted the model of the monastic community as a means of insuring that a student elite could stand above “the temptations of secular life.” The value of seclusion as an instrument of educational policy continued to attract attention among 18th- and 19th-century educators (notably Rousseau in Emile and Schiller in Essays on Aesthetic Education) before being institutionalized in the modern European and American boarding schools. As a “total institution,” completely self-contained and cut off from the industrializing society, the boarding school was ideally suited for molding the character of students in conformity with a given typology. This was the hallmark of the British public school, where a policy of seclusion, in the wake of the Arnoldian reforms, permitted the socialization of rising middle-class boys to the values of a dying aristocracy. (See, for example, Weinberg, Ian, The English Public Schools [New York: Atherton Press, 1967].)Google Scholar The extent to which the architects of the higher schools were influenced by the boarding school traditions in the West (or by the “family school” traditions of Tokugawa domain academies) is discussed in “SIJ.”