‘We Stand for Divine Rulership.’ Japan and Education in the 1930–45 Period

Abstract

As in many other countries, the impact of the West on Japan in the nineteenth century led to a nationalistic reaction. Proud, and particularly relatively self-contained, cultures of distinguished history easily resented the unique shock of European technology. Japan might have borrowed heavily from China and Korea in the distant past, but the initiative was usually taken from its side. Europe and its satellite North America came crashing in upon Japan in a way it had never before experienced. Japan from the sixteenth century had been aware of Europe; after all Portuguese trade and missionary activity had started there in the 1540s, but it was the British creation of the Industrial Revolution which made the West’s intrusion in the nineteenth century of unparalleled severity. The gap between the level of Japan’s economy and that of Britain was dramatic. The Industrial Revolution had brought in a quite new meaning to the term ‘contemporary technology’; surprise at such achievements as steam power in Japan was always in danger of bringing in its wake an inferiority complex which for a sizeable minority fuelled ultranationalism.