The History of Modern Japanese Education: Constructing the National School System, 1872–1890. By Benjamin C. Duke. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2009. xiv, 416 pp. $65.00 (cloth).

Benjamin Duke's book on Meiji education is the most recent addition to what has become a somewhat crowded historical subfield of English-language scholarship on Japan. In the last twenty years or so, a number of scholars have turned their attention to this subject, producing books on higher education (Byron Marshall), curriculum and pedagogy (Mark Lincicome), women's education (Barbara Rose), literacy (Richard Rubinger), and local implementation (myself). Historians have written on other aspects of Meiji education as well, either in journal articles or in sections of monographs on other Meiji-related topics. Finally, a selection of essays by perhaps the most significant Japanese scholar of Meiji education, Motoyama Yukihiko, has been translated into English (Proliferating Talent: Essays on Politics, Thought, and Education in the Meiji Era [Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1997]).Remarkably, Duke appears to have consulted none of these works. So, yes, this is a review by an author whose own book on the same subject went unreferenced, but I take this as no personal slight, because Duke has not referenced any English-language scholarship on Meiji education published in the last thirty years. Furthermore, he rarely cites recent scholarship on other aspects of Meiji history—and when he does, it is to cull information rather than to engage with the ideas in those works. It is disappointing that neither the editor at Rutgers University Press nor the outside reader(s) noticed this problem or asked the author to address it before agreeing to publish the book.To his credit, Duke has done an admirable amount of research for this book, mainly in Japanese secondary sources and in English-language primary sources relating to Western educators in early Meiji Japan. He uses these sources to construct a narrative of the first two decades of education reform in the Meiji period. Duke weaves into his narrative mini-biographies of major policy makers within the Meiji government such as Tanaka Fujimaro and Mori Arinori, focusing in particular on how their experiences in the United States and Europe shaped their views on education. He also discusses at length the background and influence of prominent foreigners employed by the Meiji government as consultants on matters relating to education such as Guido Verbeck and David Murray. The biographical details are fascinating, such as those regarding Mori's stay in a Swedenborgian commune in New York, or the story of how Rutgers College, based on the recommendation of Verbeck and the hospitality of Rutgers University professor Murray, became home to some three hundred Japanese students in the late 1860s. These details constitute the strength of the book. Not only do they flesh out the key individuals who participated in the debates on educational policy, but also they demonstrate the ways in which personal connections among elites facilitated the global circulation of modern ideas and institutions in the nineteenth century.These individuals—both the Japanese leaders who studied abroad and the Western educators in Japan—function in Duke's narrative as protagonists. They were the “secular progressives” who “championed the cause of western science and mathematics” (p. 283). On the other side were “traditionalists” who “promoted Confucian morality and imperial ideology” (p. 283). The first two decades of Meiji educational reform, Duke argues, were defined by the conflict between these two groups. In Duke's narrative, the modern progressives dominated educational policy during the 1870s, but subsequently met with fierce opposition from traditionalists such as Motoda Nagazane (Eifu). Duke argues that the traditionalists won out in this conflict and carried out a “reverse course” in educational policy during the 1880s, culminating with the 1890 Imperial Rescript on Education.Recent scholarship has argued that this notion of conflict between modernizers and traditionalists is not the most fruitful analytical framework for understanding Meiji education. Motoyama, for example, finds in the Meiji era a complex field of debate on education populated by actors who did not fall neatly into either of the dichotomous categories that Duke sets up. Lincicome points out that liberal Pestallozian pedagogy continued to flourish in the 1880s and beyond, long after Duke's “reverse course” would have taken effect. My own research suggests that Meiji educational policy was generated not merely by debates among central government officials (as it appears to be in Duke's book), but also through a dialogue with local elites. Concerning the 1890 Imperial Rescript, Carol Gluck demonstrated years ago that instead of representing the triumph of Motoda's traditionalism, the document “reflected a confluence of otherwise divergent ideological currents that flowed around issues of school and nation in the 1880s” (see Japan's Modern Myths: Ideology in the Late Meiji Period [Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1985], 103). Duke's research actually turns up details that are consistent with the picture drawn by recent scholarship—for example, the fact that Pestalozzian pedagogy remained influential in the 1880s, or that the Imperial Rescript demonstrates not only traditionalist moral rhetoric but also modern (especially German) concepts of constitutional government. But Duke's framework pushes these details to the margins of his analysis. Thus, my criticism is not simply that Duke violates a central principle of academic scholarship by failing to consult the scholarship in his field; it is that by doing so, he missed the opportunity to benefit from it.

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