The History of Modern Japanese Education: Constructing the National School System, 1872–1890 (review)

Publication of the book here under review—the fifth in the long career of Emeritus Professor Benjamin Duke—presents an occasion to reflect upon the development of English-language scholarship on Japanese education over the last 50 years. In 1959, when Duke joined the faculty of International Christian University (ICU) as professor of comparative and international education, there were not enough publications on the subject in English to identify Japanese education as a distinct field of study. That began to change in 1965 with the appearance of widely read works by R. P. Dore on Tokugawa education and Herbert Passin on the modernization of education in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Japan.¹ Duke and Donald Thurston, in turn, broke new ground eight years later with the publication of their respective monographs on the left-wing teachers' movement, centered on the Japan Teachers Union.²

Between 1973 and his retirement from ICU in 1996, Duke went on to publish three more books related to Japanese education. All three were published within a notable five-year period between 1986 and 1991, best remembered as the historic watershed when "Japan, Inc." gave way to Japan's "lost decade" as the country's "economic bubble" finally burst. Like his monograph on the left-wing teachers' movement, what these three works lacked in theoretical and methodological sophistication they seemed to make up for in their choice of timely topics. His second monograph, The Japanese School: Lessons for Industrial America (Praeger Publishers, 1986) appeared on the heels of A Nation at Risk: The Imperative for Educational Reform—prepared by President Ronald Reagan's National Commission on Excellence in Education—and rode the wave of American angst over the economic threat posed by Japan, Inc. This was followed by a collection of biographical essays written by Japanese historians of education, which Duke compiled, edited, and published under the title Ten Great Educators of Modern Japan (University of Tokyo Press, 1989). The major contribution of this volume was that it introduced to an English-language audience some less prominent educational reformers and innovators active in late nineteenth- and twentieth-century Japan—including Sawayanagi Masatarō, Shimonaka Yasaburō, Nanbara Shigeru, and Munakata Seiya—and the distinguished contemporary Japanese historians who wrote about them, such as Mizuuchi Hiroshi, Nakano Akira, and Terasaki Masao. Duke's final book during this period picked up on a theme similar to The Japanese School. The major difference is that instead of examining the role of Japanese education in producing a literate, loyal, hardworking labor force rivaling that of the United States, his Education and Leadership for the Twenty-first Century: Japan, America, and Britain (Praeger Publishers, 1991) examined how the Japanese school was shaping the attitudes of the country's future leaders.

Regrettably, the book here under review marks a disappointing coda to Duke's prolific scholarship on Japanese education. Woe to the unsuspecting reader who reaches for Duke's The History of Modern Japanese Education solely on the basis of Thomas R. H. Havens's hyperbolic praise gracing the book jacket, which erroneously proclaims it "the first analysis in any western language of the creation of the Japanese national school system based primarily on Japanese-language documents," "a major step forward in the scholarship on this important subject," and "fresh and thorough." Anyone familiar with previous historical treatments of Japanese education during the late nineteenth century will quickly discover that this is a work of limited vision and originality, written by a seasoned scholar who has failed to stay abreast of the field he helped to establish.

Indeed, the problems that plague Duke's narrative are presaged in his decision to dedicate the book "To the Japanese samurai who led their nation into the modern era," a line that smacks of the heroic narrative that dominated an earlier generation of English-language surveys covering Japan's transformation from insular, feudal backwater to modern nation...