Education in old Japan

Front matter

THE UNIVERSITY

OF ILLINOIS LIBRARY

PERCY ALMERIN SMITH

Introduction

The treatment of the subject of the History of Japanese Education in this work is carried only as far as the end of the period or epoch which preceded the Meiji Era, that is, down to, or nearly to 1868. Tt is largely a new field for there has been little effort made to bring to light anything but the barest outlines of many of the educational features of the remoter periods, and not very much more can be found as to the details of more recent times. Besides this, it is often difficult to know how much of the work outlined by the educational authorities at various times was actually carried out and how much was only on paper. However, the statements of fact made in these pages are either taken from the rules and regulations issued for educational purposes or from statements of Japanese or Occidental historians of good authority. In cases where authorities do not agree , the opinion of the best of the authorities consulted has been followed. The estimates of effects or causes or of conditions are based on the condition of the country as revealed by historians, but are liable to error not only from mistaken judgment' on the part of the one making the estimate, but also on account of the fact that there is so far, no real history of Japan in any full and scientific sense of the work beyond the sixteenth century. For the centuries befcre that time, Murdock and Yamagata's work has given a real picture of conditions in a

TT way that no other historians have ventured to do. But, unfortunately, as yet, Mr* Murdoch's work extends only to the end of the Japanese Middle Ages, that is, to about the year 1660.

This has wade the last part of the work especially unsatisfactory, as it is difficult to form a clear idea of conditions which prevailed just previous to the fall of the shogunate, of the most confused and confusing periods in the whole history of the empire. As consequence the last chapters seem to leave one with a feeling that the work is unfinished, which is perhaps more or less true. This feeling is due, partly, however, to the fact that the whole of the work of the shogun's government gradually faded away, or rather decayed internally, with a sort of dry rot, making it very difficult to say what became of more than one branch of its activity.

The work here outlined also presupposes a general knowledge of Japanese history such as one might gain from Griff is1 Mikado's Empire or Murray's Japan, in the Story of t h^ Nations Series .

Lastly many thanks are due to the many Japanese friends whose help in research and translation has been absolutely indispensable from the beginning to the end of the task.

Al

Appendix

Appendix 1. Japanese Chronology.

The table given below is based on the Japanese official chronology, but as the work of recording events and dates did not begin until the year 400 A.D. or thereabouts, all dates earlier than that are extremely uncertain. More than this, the earliest records now extant date from the year 712 A.D.. thus making some of the dates even later than 400 A.D. more or less doubtful. There is however, no consensus of opinion a3 yet among those who oppose the official chronology, among whom are nearly all the leading historians of the country, both foreigners and Japanese, except in the matter of non-acceptance of the government's pronouncement. For this reason, that is, for the sake of convenience, we have followed the older, less accurate way of doing things and have used the dates as they are given in the histories prepared by the Educational Department.

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Chronological Table

Political History Literary History

History of Education

Age of the Old Patriarchal

Government 660 B.C. -645 A.D.

Archaic Period Before 700 A.D.

Age of the Rule of the Civilian Court 645 - 1186 A.D.

Nara Epoch 700-800 A.D.

Kyoto Period 800 - 1186 A.D

Earliest Ages

Chapter 1, Section 1 Semi -barbarous Age 97 B.C. -285 A.D

Chapter 1, Section 1

Period of the Introduction of Chinese Civilization 285 A.D. - 668 A.D.

CHAPTER 11,

Period of Chinese Learning Centered in Kyoto 668-1186 CLhaptara -]

Kamakura Period Ashikaga Shoguns 1186—1333

Kamakura Period Decline of Learning 1186—1333

Namboko Cho, Period of the Two Courts 1332—1392

i^uromachi Period 1392—1603

Namboku Cho and Muroraachi Period Dark Ages

' 1332-1603

Dark Ages

1186 1603

Chapter Xlll

Tokugawa Age. 1603—1868

Tokugawa Age

1603-1868 Revival of Learning

Tokugawa Age 1603-1868 Revival of ^earning

Chapters X1V-XX1

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APPENDIX II

Divisions of the year made by the Emperor Sujin and atill is use among the farmers of Japan.

1- Beginning of Spring Risshun Begins about Feb. 3.

2- Rain Water U-sui " " " 19.

3- Awakening of the Insects .Kei-chitsu- " ■ Mar. 5.

4- Middle of Spring Shum-bun « " "20.

6- Seed Rain Koku-u " " n .20.

7- Beginning of Summer Rik-ka " " May 5.

8- Little Plenty -Sho-man— — " " " 20.

9- Transplanting the Rice Bo-Shu " " June 5

10- Height of Summer — Oe-shi " " " 21

11- Little Heat Sho-sho " " July 6.

12- Great Heat Dai-sho— - " " " 23.

13- Beginning of Autumn- — — Risshu " " Aug. 7.

14- Local Heat . Sho-sho " ■ Aug. 33

16- Middle of Autumn Shu-bun " " " 23

17- Cold Dew Kan-ro — — " " Oct. 8.

18- Fall of Hoar Frost — So-ko » " " 23

19- Beginning of Winter Rit-to " " ITov . 7

20- Little Snow . -Sho-setsu— " » " 22

21- Great Snow Dai-set 3U — " " Dec. 7.

22- Height of Winter, To- ji " " " 22.

23- Little Frost-— Sho-kan " " Jan 6.

24- Great Frost ' Dai-kan " " " 20

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These dates are all put in here according to our present Gregorian calendar, but they were originally intended to fit into a lunar calendar. The hold which these divisions of the year have upon the people may be inferred from the fact that not long ago when it was suggested to an educated Japanese that the Gregorian calendar would have to be adopted even in the country districts he replied that such a change would be very troublesome to the farmers as they would not know when to plant and reap their crops'.

APPENDIX 111.

The Chinese and Japanese Systems of Writing.

The Chinese system of writing, as it came to Japan, was a direct descentant of hieroglyphic writing. Each character was a picture, an ideograph, standing for an idea, though there was also a sound or phonetic value attached to it as well. So at first, they were U3ed by the Japanese as phonetic symbols only, and but a very few, proportionately, of the thousands in existence were needed for this purpose. But this was very awkward, and some Japanese scholars now and then tried using them partly a3 ideographs.

To give an idea, roughly, of how such a thing might be done, let us take the sentence, "These two horses are of equal height". We will take it for granted that all of these sounds can be represented by ideographs used as phonetic symbols. But this is a very clumsy way of writing a sentence for the ideographs are very complicated affairs, and it takes two or three of them for each work in the sentence. Our knowledge of the ideographs is limited, but we know that the character " " stands for the idea of

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"horse". Moreover, the phonetic value of this character is, for our purposes, "equ", the stem of the Latin word "Equusn. We will will not write our sentence, "These two " ^ " are of " , "al height". In the first case, the character is used as an ideograph,, and my knowledge of the language tells me that the word which expresses the idea represented by the character " |^ " is "horse", or in this case "horses", as the numeral "two" precedes the character. In the second place, the character is used simply as a phonetic sign for the sound of "equ" and has no idea connected with it at all. Now suppose that all the sounds which are here written with ordinary English letters were written with such characters and that here and there other characters, were mixed in used as ideographs proper, and one can easily see that such a system would be very difficult to read, for it would be very hard in many places to tell whether a character was used as a phonetic symbol or as an ideograph. It is just this which makes the Kohiki 30 very

difficult to read.

The next step was to simplify certain of the ideographs and use them exclusively and as phonetic symbols only, having no ideographs as such at all. But this did not satisfy some and they took to using 1he full form of the ideograph when it was used as an ideograph proper, and the abbreviated form when it was used as a phonetic symbol only. This made the matter much more simple, for it was very easy to tell which were phonetic characters and which were ideographs. Thus in the following sentence, "Jf^/i 5 V

S- 4 n» w.hich is read, "Uma wa ushi yori ashi ga hayai," "The horse is swifter of foot than the cow," the main ideas, "horse" and"cow", "foot? and "swift ". are represented by ideographs used as such, while the nominative particles "wa" and "ga" which are simply case signs, and the comparative conjunction "yori", as well as the adjective ending of the word "hayai" are all in the shortened forms which are used only as phonetic signs. In a case like this it is perfectly easy to see which signs are used in one way and which in the other, but if all were written in one way, that is in the full forms, it would be more troublesome.

Lateron came the Japanese tendency to use both the Chinese and the native words for the same idea, just as in English we have Latin and Anglo-Saxon words standing for the 3ame concept. For example, there are three or four pronunciations of the character " JfL w which we have just used. In the word " Af> " "Basha"

(Carriage) it is pronounced "3a"; in " ", "Betto" (Groom)

it is pronounced "Bet"; and when it stands alone it is pronounced "Uma". In these cases the prohunc iation of the character is determined by the other characters which are associated with it. The reader knows that the character " ", for example, means

a horse, and that " " means a wheeled vehicle, and he also

knows that the spoken word "Basha" means a carriage, therefore he knows that this is the written form of that word. The same is true of the other words where this character is used.

Again, if we take the character " "f7 " when used as verb, it may mean either to go down or cause to go down. If it is written " *JT il^ n , it is read "Kudaru" because the phonetic character ■ «ru" follows it. If it is written " it is read "Kadasu", since it is followed by the phonetic character " ~\ " M3un. The former means to go down and the latter to cause to :o down. Besides this it may be read in other ways in other places as well, there being five or six or more readings for this one

(I

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character depending upcn the characters which follow it and the context in which it is found. It is not always easy even for educated Japanese to know the special reading of every character in every place where it occurs, although if he knows the character at all he will know the meaning perfectly well.

To illustrate a similar thing which might occur in English let us go back to the first character which we used," 1^ ■ meaning "horse", and use it in the place of the various root forms of word3 which mean "horse" in our own language. We should have, then" ^ " read as "Horse", when it stands alone; " " Estria.."

would be read "Equestrian"; and ■ ^ " drome" would be "Hippodrome A person who could read the ideograph and knew its meaning would be able to tell much of the meaning of the words, though he might be absolutely unable to pronounce the words at all. Whether he could understand the full meaning of the words or not would depend upon whether he could get the significance of the latter part of them from the phonetic characters.

This then, was the solution of the problem as it was worked out by the Japanese centuries ago, and the system of combining the two kinds of characters is still in universal use. The percentage of ideographs used in proportion to the number of phonetic character varies very much according to the amount of education supposed to be possessed by the readers and according to the style, as the pure "written language" of Japan has many homonyms which can be distinguished in meaning only by means of the ideographs. There are however, three distinct styles or methods of writing now in use which have grown out of the mixing of these two sets of characters.

The first of these, is exactly .that previously described,

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in which only enough phonetic characters are used to make the meaning of the ideographs or their relation to each other in the sentence clear. For example, in the sentence, ";h^^"^ - J^/u "Kodomo ga ki ni agaru", "The child climbs up the tree", there are only three phonetic characters used. The first one, " 'v ", "gan, is only the sign of the nominative case of the subject "Kodomo"; the second, " — ", "ni", is a post-position, performing the same office as a preposition; and the last one" )l/ ", "ru", indicates how the verb represented by the ideograph " _b_ ", is to be read.

The second method is exactly like the first except that the phonetic characters are used alongside of the ideographs in order to assist those not familiar with them in reading them. The same sentence, written in this style, would be this, "/I*

-t-jf"- " • Here we have every sound in the whole sentence represented by the phonetic characters, so that anyone can read it and yet the ideographs are retained so that the meaning is very clear to anyone v/ho can underatand their significance. In such a sentence as this the retention of these ideographs is not an absolute necessity, as the meaning is very simple, but in some cases it is not so easy to tell what the expression means without their aid.

The third style is the one in which only phonetic characters are used. Our sentence now looks like t'-.is: " 3- y x. t-

^ -f ?)" iu As we have just ssid, there is little liklihcod that this sentence would be misunderstood, but in cases where there are too many words of the same sound but of different meaning, it might be difficult to read such a style and be sure of understanding it . . • ..

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The first of these three styles is used in books and other work intended for educated people only, people who are familiar with all the ideographs likely to be used; the second is used in newspapers and other work intended for all kinds of persons; and the last is used for books for children or other such simple matters where the ideopgraphs would be useless because the readers would not know anything about them and besides they are not needed as the meaning is too simple for any confusion to arise on account of too many homonyms .

APPENDIX IV.

There seems to have been a fifth department, a higher one, called the Monjo, added sometime later, but the nature of it, its purpose, and its date are all obscure. The students of such a department are mentioned, however, in the laws of Engi . See Appendix VI.

APPENDIX V.

Extracts from Text-books.

In learning to read, as we have said, the various books had to be learned separately as there were so many ideographs in each one which were different from those in the others. The following page is taken from chapter Xll of the Analects.

On page 12 are the first sixteen characters, that is, the first four sentences, of the Thousand Character Essay, used for teaching writing. The actual copies used were larger than the ones given here, these being about medium size.

Extracts f rom the xyusho .