The Emperor, the Sun, and Olympus: Mythology in the Modern Japanese Education System
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Japan has a cultural history far-removed from that of Greece and Rome. Western education and methods greatly influenced the development of Japanese education after the Meiji Restoration in 1868, but the mythology that was taught was not classical, but Japanese, mythology. This was, in fact, a point of great dissension in the past, with the mythological origin of the Imperial Family taught within the framework of history classes, from the establishment of the educational system in the 1870s onwards. This emphasis on nationalism, reinforced by the teaching of Japanese mythology, was an important element of education right up to World War Two. In their chapter, Ayelet Peer and Marie Højlund Roesgaard examine the role of Japanese mythology and Japanese Classics within the national curriculum, before going on to explore the exposure of Japanese children and youth to classical Graeco-Roman myth, looking at the role of mythology in modern Japanese society. They demonstrate that, whereas previously it had been a strong source of legitimacy and national identity, it has become trivialised into merely a rich store of stories and fantasies about ancient times, which form a common basic repository of narratives and images.\n\nThe complete volume "Our Mythical Education: The Reception of Classical Myth Worldwide in Formal Education, 1900–2020", edited by Lisa Maurice, focuses on school education including a wide geographical and chronological range. The volume covers Eastern and Western Europe, Asia, Africa, the Americas (including Canada, the USA, and South America), Australia and New Zealand.\n\nPublished in the series “Our Mythical Childhood”, edited by Prof. Katarzyna Marciniak, Faculty of “Artes Liberales”, University of Warsaw, Poland.\n\nOpen Access of the complete volume is available at https://www.wuw.pl/product-eng-14887-Our-Mythical-Education-The-Reception-of-Classical-Myth-Worldwide-in-Formal-Education-1900-2020-PDF.html
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.014 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".