Beauty in the Age of Empire: Japan, Egypt, and the Global History of Aesthetic Education by Raja Adal (review)

In 1964, Princeton University Press published an edited volume of conference papers titled Political Modernization in Japan and Turkey.¹ A brief comparison of its chapters on education with Raja Adal’s monograph, which pairs Japan with a different eastern Mediterranean country, allows for some preliminary observations concerning the arc of historical scholarship on education and modernization in Japan and beyond during the ensuing fifty-five years.

Writing during the formative period of area studies and the apogee of modernization theory, contributors to the Princeton volume approach modernization as “a process of long-range cultural and social change accepted by members of the changing society as beneficial, inevitable, or on balance desirable.”² Turkey and Japan are singled out for analysis because they share an “Asian background and culture” and avoided “outright colonial rule,” which enabled them to chart their own paths to modernization independently and selectively between the mid-nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries.³ These similarities notwithstanding, it is left to the reader to draw any meaningful comparisons between Ronald Dore’s entry on education in Japan and Frederick Frey’s chapter on education in Turkey.⁴

Measured against the Princeton volume, Adal’s monograph is a product of a very different era of scholarship, marked by the rise of transnational or globalization studies. While it focuses on the same time period, and modernization remains a central theme, it harbors no underlying assumption that modernization is inherently beneficial or desirable. Rather, societies are compelled to modernize in order to attain and preserve national independence in the face of Western imperialism. This compulsion is as true for Japan, irrespective of its Asian background and culture and its avoidance of outright colonial rule, as it is for non-Asian, colonial Egypt. Adal’s goal—alluded to in the book’s subtitle—to place their histories in global context benefits from his command of primary and secondary sources in Japanese, Arabic, French, and English. This transnational approach yields a detailed comparative analysis among Japan, Egypt, and their mentors in Europe and North America that is missing from the Princeton volume, which simply juxtaposes Dore’s chapter on Japan and Frey’s chapter on Turkey.

Adal’s other notable contribution to existing scholarship on the relationship between education and modernization is to articulate a broad category of “aesthetic education” encompassing subjects taught in primary and middle schools that hitherto have been studied sporadically and separately. Among scholars of Japanese education, including the aforementioned Ronald Dore, accounts of the introduction of compulsory education and its role in fostering modernization—through the cultivation of practical skills vital to industry, a shared national identity, and allegiance to the state—have tended to focus on reading, arithmetic, natural science, and moral education. By rescuing the subjects of music, writing (calligraphy), and drawing from comparative neglect and incorporating them into his “aesthetic” category, Adal invests them, as well as the work of his predecessors, with new relevance and brings a new perspective to the modernization project. And apropos of its focus on aesthetic education, the book is liberally illustrated with contemporaneous photographs and drawings taken from its primary sources.

Throughout the book, the author employs the legend of the Pied Piper of Hamelin as a metaphor to explain the appeal of aesthetic education for those in charge of educational reform. Between the mid-nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries, leading educators in every society with a modern education system “sought to use aesthetic education to inculcate children with attractions toward a nation, an ideology, or any other normative object of attraction” (p. 3). Since aesthetics govern “the way in which our physical senses mediate our experience of the world” and since “it is through such mediations that our attractions and desires are born,” these educators hoped to cultivate in children emotions and desires supportive of the...