Review of 'The history of modern Japanese education: constructing the national school system, 1872-1890', by Benjamin C. Duke, New Jersey, Rutgers University Press, 2009, 416 pp., US$65.00 (hardback), ISBN 9-780-81354403-8

Abstract

Benjamin Duke's latest book closely examines key political actors and state bureaucrats who pursued the modernization of Japanese education in the late nineteenth century. Just as with some of his earlier works, Duke engages substantively with existing studies written in Japanese language by Japanese scholars, something hardly seen in many English-language writings on Japanese education by Anglo-American scholars. While serving as a "secretary" to Japanese historians, Duke enriches their accounts with his own research of English-language primary sources. The book is aptly published by Rutgers University Press, one of the American institutions which, as detailed in the book, played a critical role in the early modernization of Japanese education. Following the Japanese historians, Duke breaks the period under investigation into two stages. In the first stage, which begins with the 1873 issue of Gakusei, the first national educational plan, Japanese leaders modelled the educational modernization after the decentralized United States system and its liberal curricular orientation. The liberal reform movement driven by the Western-influenced modernizers, however, eventually faced what Japanese historians call the "reverse course" in the early 1880s, which marked the beginning of the second stage. During the reverse course, many changes modelled after US education were criticized by cultural traditionalists who demanded Confucius teaching and inculcation of loyalty to the Emperor in schools. Duke illuminates the intense political contestation between these two dominant political forces in the context of the rising popular movement for political rights in the late nineteenth century. By stitching together multiple historical accounts offered by Japanese historians, Duke presents a fascinating tapestry of personal narratives of the key political figures and the state bureaucrats who were deeply involved in this political struggle. While there are a number of English-language accounts of the early modernization of Japanese education (e.g., Aso & Amano, 1983; Horio, 1988), Duke's work is by far the most comprehensive in its historical details.