Who Can't Read and Write? Illiteracy in Meiji Japan

Abstract

A T the end of his long and fact-filled book on the Kennedy assassination, Norman Mailer finally asked, Did Oswald do it? If one's answer is to be anything more than an opinion, he added, is necessary to contend with the question of evidence. Realizing that this amounted to jungle of conflicting estimates, Mailer arrived at a disheartening truth: information, however specific, would never provide a satisfactory answer to the mystery, it is the nature of evidence to produce, sooner or later, a counter interpretation to itself. In his quest for a final judgment, Mailer moved away from the mountains of empirical data he had surveyed toward broader questions of circumstance and character, the province not of the statistician or accountant, but the novelist or historian. 1 This article presents new evidence about levels of literacy among ordinary Japanese during the middle to latter part of the Meiji period. This information is not taken from school attendance, which has been the basis for most discussions of literacy in both Tokugawa and Meiji Japan.2 School attendance data, available in abundance for early modern and modern Japan, can be a useful measure of the institution-building and centralization efforts of the Meiji government, but are far less suitable as an indicator of actual skill levels of children in a period before compulsory education reached near universality. Studies of early modern Europe and the United States have shown that when children go to school irreg-