The Black Forest in a Bamboo Garden: Missionary Kindergartens in Japan, 1868-1912

Abstract

The spread and adoption of German educator Friedrich Froebel's kindergarten idea in Japan occurred early in the history of the international kindergarten movement. Kindergartens were introduced as one among the vast array of Western educational ideas that flowed into Japan from Europe and the United States between 1868 and 1880. The years after 1880, however, were marked by increased governmental efforts to centralize authority, a strong shift in attitude away from Western learning, and government efforts to strengthen its control of education in Japan's movement toward modernization. During the Meiji Era (1868-1912), a period of profound transformations in Japan, the conditions that paved the way for kindergartens to become a permanent part of the educational landscape also transformed the kindergarten from a Western into a Japanese institution. The kindergarten has been considered an international movement since the middle of the nineteenth century. Moreover, historians of the kindergarten recognize that in countries that successfully adopted the kindergarten, the pedagogical content of kindergartens developed uniquely to serve both the educational goals and the ideological needs of the educators themselves.' While the national differences have been noted, however, there are no studies that directly address the influence of a new national context on the process of transformation. Because the kindergarten in Japan began as a deliberately borrowed educational institution, the history of the kindergarten is a model case study of the