Burning and Building: Schooling and State Formation in Japan, 1750-1890 (review)

Brian Platt's study of the development of a modern elementary school system in Nagano prefecture centers on two dynamics: the Meiji government's attempts to impose a radically new system of education on local societies and the attempts by commoner elites to shape this process based on their remarkably extensive experiences of attending, funding, and administering schools prior to the Meiji Restoration. His analysis sheds new light on the nature of Japan's nineteenth-century transformation and adds new layers of complexity to longstanding debates on the relationships between the local and the national and "the people" and "the state."

According to Platt, two main trends led to the growth of schooling for commoners in late Tokugawa Shinano, the region that subsequently became Nagano prefecture. First, schools emerged as centers of high cultural transmission to commoner elites seeking to tap into literary and intellectual networks centered on castle towns and more distant places such as Kyoto and Edo. Second, amid the socioeconomic crises of the early nineteenth century, commoner elites saw the provision of schooling to children from ordinary families as a means of revitalizing rural communities and reaffirming their own status as community leaders. The Meiji Restoration then opened a new "atmosphere of fluidity and possibility" in which the visions and initiatives of these local elites could "mesh unproblematically with the early state-building efforts of prefectural authorities" (p. 130).

The Meiji government's promulgation in 1872 of the Fundamental Code of Education signaled the state's intention to eliminate this fluidity-not by simply asserting control over the myriad educational practices then in play, but by imposing a singular definition of "school" on society and delegitimizing all alternative conceptions and practices. This project, embodied in new regulations and bureaucratic protocols, formed part of the state's broader mission of bringing "civilization and enlightenment" to what was described as a dark and backward society. Nonetheless, the implementation of the Fundamental Code depended primarily on local notables whose experience in educational activities and attention to administrative details actually gave substance to the law in ways that its authors had not considered. These elites' shared commitment to the goal of enlightenment thus "generated a powerful local momentum for the Meiji government's goals of centralization and integration" (p. 172) while leaving room for negotiating the terms of local integration into the nation-state.

Nagano and Chikuma prefectures (the latter being a short-lived entity that was eventually incorporated into the former) did not experience the sort of violent uprisings against the new order, of which schools were a powerful symbol, that erupted in various regions in 1872-1873. Platt identifies other forms of opposition to new education policies in these two prefectures during the 1870s, however, all of which reflected the enduring influence of pre-Meiji conceptions of school and its relationship to the local community. But while some protesters rejected the premises of the Fundamental Code, many others accepted the basic parameters of the Meiji government's educational projects and utilized the code's language and procedures to pursue their own objectives. Intralocal conflicts rather than tensions between the locality and the new state, moreover, frequently lay at the heart of the protests Platt describes. Negotiations over the terms of integration into the nation-state would continue through the mid-Meiji years, informed by shifting governmental approaches to local society and by educators' and elite activists' engagement with ideas of local autonomy, popular rights, educational freedom, and professional autonomy. The result, Platt argues, was not "the subordination of local or professional concerns to the political goals of the state," but rather "a more enduring legal framework and administrative structure-one that would continue to be shaped, however, by a process of negotiation among competing forces and interests" (p. 254).

Burning and Building engages with several important historiographical questions. First, Platt convincingly moves the terms of analysis of Tokugawa education away from the modernization school...