Early Twentieth-century Japan Research Articles

The Role of Pedagogy in Secondary Teacher Training in Early Twentieth-Century Japan: Theory of Pedagogical Research in College by Kumaji Yoshida of Tokyo Imperial University

ABSTRACT The secondary teacher training curriculum at the College of Literature of Tokyo Imperial University in early twentieth-century Japan made pedagogy-related subjects compulsory. Kumaji Yoshida, the leader of the institutionalisation of pedagogy at Tokyo Imperial University at the time, considered scientific research in pedagogy essential for the training of secondary school teachers as well as for college education. Through Yoshida’s theories, this article demonstrates how Japan attempted to link secondary teacher training and pedagogy at Tokyo Imperial University during the early twentieth century.

Notes on Contributors

Notes on Contributors

Making raw materials: innovation and imported technology in Meiji Japan

ABSTRACT This article explores coal and wood manufacturing in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Japan as the empirical sites for understanding the material gaps between industrial inputs available locally and the affordances of imported technology. It demonstrates how the process of making coking coals for steel smelting and wooden boards for furniture-making challenge a conceptual framework that assumes that raw materials exist on one side of a binary and manufactured goods on the other. Instead, this article foregrounds the creative ways in which actors approached, redesigned and manufactured raw materials locally, to make them comply with the constraints of imported technologies. In doing so, the article provides a useful counterbalance to scholarly explorations that anchor modern Japan in notions of technology transfer and appropriation, thus failing to recognize the creative labour necessary to making imported technologies work on local ground. By focussing on the labour of matching materials to hardware, this article restores to the historical record the creativity and innovation that formed the fabric of the first wave of Japan’s industrialisation and nuances our understanding of raw materials in the history of technology in general.

Arai Ōsui and the Transnational Reimagination of Civilization in the Late Nineteenth-Century United States

AbstractCivilization discourse hierarchically ordered nation-states and people of different traits, including race and gender, in the Western modern concept of progress. This civilizational ideology of modern nation-states has underpinned narratives of many historical works, including transnational historical studies. This article showcases the ideas and practices of transnationalism that challenged such civilization discourse and pursued a more egalitarian and mutually interdependent vision of the world at the non-state level. This article does so by focusing on the Brotherhood of the New Life, a mixed-race religious agricultural community in late nineteenth-century rural America, and one of its Japanese members, Arai Ōsui, who joined the community after his defeat in Japan's Boshin Civil War. I argue that this non-state transnational perspective illuminates the Brotherhood members’ endeavour to free gender and race – the key conceptual underpinnings of the ideology of civilization – from this very discourse. This article further reveals, through Ōsui, that the community's egalitarian ethos developed to instigate new, anti-imperialist, and anti-hierarchical thoughts and actions in early twentieth-century Japan, in opposition to the state's imperialist endeavour to progress.

The History of Aesthetic Surgery in Early Twentieth-Century Japan

The History of Aesthetic Surgery in Early Twentieth-Century Japan

The role of pawnshops in risk coping in early twentieth-century Japan

This study examines the role of pawnshops as a risk-coping device in Japan in the early twentieth century, when the poor were very vulnerable to unexpected shocks such as illness. In contrast to European countries, Japanese pawnshops were the primary financial institution for low-income people up to the 1920s. Using data on pawnshop loans for more than 250 municipalities and exploiting the 1918–20 influenza pandemic as a natural experiment, we find that the adverse health shock increased the total amount of loans from pawnshops. This is because those who regularly relied on pawnshops borrowed more money from them than usual, and not because the number of people who used pawnshops increased. Our estimation results indicate that pawnshop loan amounts increased by approximately 7–10 percent due to the pandemic. These findings suggest that pawnshop loans were widely used as a risk-coping strategy.

Radium traffic: radiation, science and spiritualism in early twentieth-century Japan

AbstractThe emergence of modern health-related commodities and tourism in the late Meiji and Taishō eras (1900s–1920s) was accompanied by a revival of spiritualist religions, many of which had their origins in folk belief. What helped this was the people’s interpretation of radiation. This article underscores the linkages between radiation, science and spiritualism in Japan at the time of modernisation and imperialism. In the early twentieth century, the general public came to know about radiation because it was deemed to have special efficacy in healing the human body. In Japan, the concept of radiation harmonised with both Western culture and Japanese traditional culture. One can see the fusion of Western and traditional culture both in people’s lives and commercial culture through the popularity and availability of radium hot springs and radioactive commodities. Radium hot springs became fashionable in Japan in the 1910s. As scholars reported that radium provided the real potency of hot springs, local hot springs villages seized on the scientific explanation and connected their developments with national policies and industries. This paper illustrates how the discourse about radium, which came from the field of radiation medicine, connected science and spiritualism in modern Japan.

The Currency of Innocence: Children’s ‘Emotional Capital’ in the Japanese Empire

Abstract In early twentieth-century Japan, a large body of pictures and narratives connected children with soldiers and war-making, producing a multi-sensory emotional register. An operationalised ‘emotional capital’ was employed primarily through the unapologetic insinuation of sentiments, such as Japanese children’s admiration for and affinity with soldiers, those children’s empathy for other children in Japanese-occupied territory, and ‘occupied’ children’s gratitude for the protection soldiers supposedly provided. Altogether, children’s supposed vulnerability and innocence were enlisted, until 1945, to legitimise Japan’s imperialist war – offering a sense of redemption in the wake of extreme mass violence; and, after the defeat, to embody peace as ‘icons of humanitarianism’.

Imperial Portraiture and Popular Print Media in Early Twentieth-Century Japan

Imperial Portraiture and Popular Print Media in Early Twentieth-Century Japan

Watanabe Kaigyoku and Buddhist Responses to the ‘Labour Question’ in Early-Twentieth Century Japan

Watanabe Kaigyoku and Buddhist Responses to the ‘Labour Question’ in Early-Twentieth Century Japan

Education through the study of English: Yoshisaburô Okakura as a conservative reformer

ABSTRACT This article advances understanding of Yoshisaburô Okakura (1868–1936), the doyen of English teaching in early twentieth-century Japan, by examining his evaluations of European language teaching methods. Okakura expressed doubt towards the Natural Method and preferred the Reform Method in terms of school education. However, Okakura was more conservative than the Reform Movement theorists, as he was in favour of the use of the mother tongue and literary language as an important educational principle. His educational views were implemented in his teaching practice in the pioneering Radio English Course that he produced from 1925 onwards.

'The present state and statistical observation of mental patients under home custody', by Kure Shūzō and Kashida Gorō (1918).

This text, dealing with the private confinement of the mentally ill at home, or shitaku kanchi, has often been referred to as a 'classic text' in the history of Japanese psychiatry. Shitaku kanchi was one of the most prevalent methods of treating mental disorders in early twentieth-century Japan. Under the guidance of Kure Shūzō (1865-1932), Kure's assistants at Tokyo University inspected a total of 364 rooms of shitaku kanchi across Japan between 1910 and 1916. This text was published as their final report in 1918. The text also refers to traditional healing practices for mental illnesses found throughout the country. Its abundant descriptions aroused the interest of experts of various disciplines.

Editorial

We didn’t set out to have a theme; this is a pick-and-mix volume, filled with a wide array of subjects, regions and approaches, from the intricacies of a local fray between assailants in sixteenth-century Weymouth to a utopian experiment in communal living in early twentieth-century Japan: a History Workshop smorgasbord of different regions and historical characters. Yet as we set ourselves to editing, one theme clearly emerged in a number of the articles. The things – particularly personal and household possessions – which people have kept close to them in the past, and the ways in which such possessions can help us to reconstruct histories and meanings in the present. This is most explicitly (in more than one sense) set out in Caspar Meyer’s article on Greek vases. He takes ‘the side-lining of materiality in historical writing’ as a direct target, and explains how the study of Greek sexuality suffers in important ways from a lack of attention to the materiality of its evidence. The images on the vases have been too readily harnessed to discourse. These ceramic objects – which were, after all, ordinary household items – need to be seen, handled and examined in all their three-dimensionality, he argues, before we start theorizing about Greek sexuality. These vases are featured prominently, if in only two dimensions, on Bernard Canavan’s wonderfully bold cover.

Health and education during industrialization: Evidence from early twentieth century Japan

By exploiting the detailed information available from the household surveys conducted in Tokyo after the First World War, this study investigates children's status in working-class households in Japan. Our analysis suggests that parental health shocks reduced the probability of girls attending secondary school by 29% in the case of maternal illness and 32% in the case of paternal illness. The sizable effect of parental health shocks on the schooling of girls confirms the gender bias in educational investment in urban working-class households in the early 1920s in Japan. Our finding also sheds light on the possibility that general improvements in parental health improved the educational attainment of their daughters. Although less than conclusive, part of human capital accumulation through educational investment in the prewar period, which accelerated postwar sustainable economic growth, might have been accelerated by improvements in the health status of people in the early 20th century.

Kerry Ross. Photography for Everyone: The Cultural Lives of Cameras and Consumers in Early Twentieth-Century Japan.

Kerry Ross. Photography for Everyone: The Cultural Lives of Cameras and Consumers in Early Twentieth-Century Japan.

近代日本における「遠洋漁業型水産教育」の形成過程 : 官立水産講習所の遠洋漁業従事者養成に注目して

近代日本における「遠洋漁業型水産教育」の形成過程 : 官立水産講習所の遠洋漁業従事者養成に注目して

(Il)legibility and Handwriting in Meiji Letters: A Media History

This article explores the intermedial as a conceptual framework for Asia media critique and history. Although not a new concept in media studies, it proves useful for troubling the divide often imposed on old and new media forms—including technologies of communication—and for theorizing their movement in and across sociocultural contexts. The article both proposes and carries out an intermedial critique of handwriting in early twentieth-century Japan, setting it in the context of changing ideas and practices of written communication. Using model-letter guides and handwriting manuals, as well as examples from epistolary fictions, the author constructs a graphological discourse of the period, arguing for the need to think through the newness of “old” media to understand the complex ways they are (re)enfolded, both technically and conceptually, into evolving local mediascapes.

Reception of Chinese bronze antiquities in early twentieth-century Japan

Reception of Chinese bronze antiquities in early twentieth-century Japan

Haunted by Defeat: Imperial Sexualities, Prostitution, and the Emergence of Postwar Japan

This article addresses sexuality and prostitution as key elements in the emergence of postwar Japanese nationalism. It analyzes discursive practices, which Japan's authorities used to conceptualize the recreational facilities aimed at "comforting" the Allied occupiers during the still imaginary encounter of occupier and occupied in the immediate post-surrender period. The conceptualization of prostitution at the end of WWII is a pivotal example for the clash of competing empires, the disintegration of Japan's empire, and postwar imagination of the Japanese nation-state. Since the early twentieth century Japan's aggressive war and colonial rule in Asia exported sex workers as well as specific notions of sexuality—often mediated through further global entanglements with the West and its colonies—that had shaped the understanding of Japan's empire and Japanese imperial subjectivity. With defeat in 1945, Japan's imperial dreams shattered, but imperial experiences of sexuality and prostitution continued to shape ideas of Japanese belonging.

Photography for Everyone: The Cultural Lives of Cameras and Consumers in Early Twentieth-Century Japan by Kerry Ross

Photography for Everyone: The Cultural Lives of Cameras and Consumers in Early Twentieth-Century Japan by Kerry Ross