Platt, Brian. Burning and Building: Schooling and State Formation in Japan,
1750-1890. Cambridge, MA & London: 2004.
In Burning and Building, Schooling and State Foundation in Japan, 1750-1890 Brian Platt is trying to find “The Local in the Nation-State.”[1] Platt’s question arises primarily from his reading of earlier treatments of the rise of Japan’s Meiji State, and the role of education in that rise, particularly Marius Jansen and Gilbert Rozman’s edited volume Japan in Transition: From Tokugawa to Meiji. While praising this body of work, the chief fault that Platt finds in that volume and other secondary literature on this topic is twofold: a general lack of attention to the developments in education, as if they were dictated by the state without contest, and a sense that the educational and intellectual changes that occurred during the Tokugawa Period created the “preconditions” for modern education which allowed a smooth transition from premodern to modern (read ‘Western’) educational organization.
Heavily informed by histories of education reform in the modern West, Platt’s primary question in this volume comes from Philip Corrigan and Derek Sayer, and is concerned with the contested nature of educational reform. Platt here is deconstructing the binary opposition view of public education systems imposed by governments on unsuspecting and naïve populations for purposes of molding good citizens of the nation-state.[2]
After posing this question, or rather, having Sayer and Corrigan pose it for him, Platt spends the rest of the book bursting the binary opposition bubble. He takes as his first concept Gramsci’s thoughts on hegemony, and grants to readers that the purpose of the Meiji state in its early education reforms was, “hegemonic – it involved an attempt to secure the dominance of one particular vision of education over other visions.”[3] However, Platt immediately refuses to accept that in a hegemonic system, the hegemon gains complete control, or even ascendancy. Instead, he argues, in the case of Meiji education reform, the battle for hegemony was a cultural, not a physical battle, and that particularly the attempts by American Modernization theorists to view it in a binary way in the past have failed because they did not attribute agency to all of the players in the system.[4]
In fact, Platt wants to show the development of the Meiji Education system as a site of negotiation between the new government, which was engaged in a project of creating a nation-state, and national subjects, and local government, elites, and commoners who were the ones who had to attend school and pay for and carry out education reforms. The fact that the Meiji government not only allowed space for, but saw the need to accede to local demands and contexts Platt argues shows that the achievement of hegemony was only partial. In the same vein, Platt points out that the increasing use by commoners and local officials of designated government channels for their complaints, questions, and participation in education indicates an increasing acceptance of the central authority. This is the contested space that Platt wants to explore.
The book begins with a discussion of education in the late Tokugawa period in the province of Shinano (modern day Nagano), which remains Platt’s focus throughout the book. In this Chapter, Platt is concerned with making two key points. First, that literacy and education were not particularly uncommon in Japan of the Tokugawa Period, and second, that there is some continuity between educational goals and practices in the Tokugawa and Meiji periods in local areas.[5]
In the second chapter, Platt is concerned, as he is throughout the book, with breaking down the binary oppositions with which historians have traditionally looked at education in Japan. Platt begins here with an admonition to pay attention to more than just “the state” and “the People.”[6] Instead, Platt dedicates the entire chapter to a discussion of the village elite and their position in the negotiation of education in late Tokugawa. Beyond just this, Platt even problematizes historians’ view of Japan’s village elite by claiming that there was no standard set of ideas or actions that they followed. Elites became education reformers, resisters of education reform, or even of general education. Some elites became teachers and philanthropists, others reactionaries, and there was a gamut in between. Since these people were critical in carrying out any reform of education, and in the politics that inevitably accompanied it, their positions, and activities, are important to analyze.
In Chapter Three, Platt goes on to discuss the changes in education in the context of the immediate aftermath of the Restoration. He looks at this period as a kind of liminal space – a time in which the old system was finished, and the new undecided, so that a plethora of ideas and policies could coexist, and compete for a share in the ideology and policy to come.[7] This sense of endless possibility gave rise to various possible notions of education that eventually coalesced into the Meiji State’s policy by 1872. the first was heavily influenced by “nativism” – the Kokugaku of Hirata Atsutane through his successor, Hirata Kanetane.[8]
This did not, however, prevent the existence of alternative visions of education, some even responding to the same impulses. Platt mentions a neat triad of individuals, whose names appear in nearly every history of early Meiji, and who had an impact on the education system, remolding it from the nativist vision to a nationalist one. Iwakura Tomomi, who saw education as fulfilling two different purposes: “[first], we see the principle of schooling as a means of training men of talent for government service,” but, “[in] addition, Iwakura articulated the goal of achieving harmony and unity through moral instruction for the masses,” a very Confucian way of thinking.[9] Itō Hirobumi echoed this call for education for the masses – a truly national education – but for purposes of national strength.[10] Finally, Kidō Takahashi saw the goal of creating a system of national education for all Japanese for both economic and national strength purposes.[11] These three, then, began articulating visions of the education system from the top center as a part of their visions of the modernization of the nation. In some ways, Platt wants to show, their ideas resonated with nativist, Confucian, and Western ways of thinking about the nation and schooling that were already popular at the local level. The final articulation of this vision was the promulgation of the Fundamental Code in 1872. The main problem with this vision was that a national, centralized system of education came into contact with many of the education systems already built, or being built in the provinces.[12]
The next three chapters of the book concentrate on the theme of negotiation/contestation at various points in the formation of the Meiji education system. Chapter four is concerned primarily with early formation of local schools according to the Fundamental code, and the way in which the context in which local schools were created – both physical, in terms of geography, financial capability of villages, and available expertise, and ideologically, in terms of political and curricular organization. Platt’s first point in this chapter is a claim that even the strongest state, in order to rule, has to negotiate terms with those it rules. Platt wants to say that the Meiji state was neither strong nor stable at the point in which these reforms were being promulgated.[13] In a way, what Platt is talking about here is a kind of extension of the liminal space found earlier in Meiji history. He wants to set up a view of the 1870’s as an interstitial period, in which the opportunity for reinvention, liminal space style, coexisted with the growing stability and hegemony of the Meiji state in all areas of society.[14] As education professionals (and those interested in education policy) redefined themselves, and as the Meiji state took for itself the ideas from that group that suited its needs, the possibilities remained numerous, and the realities fluid enough that rather than a simple imposition of hegemony, the Meiji state needed to negotiate its way to hegemony through accommodation of the needs and ideas of those whose services it required in order to carry out educational reform at all. One excellent example that Platt gives is the fact that, as soon as the Fundamental Code was promulgated, education professionals in prefectural schools began to pepper the Ministry of Education with questions about application of the regulations. The fact that the ministry took these questions seriously Platt says is an indication that just as the Meiji state was influencing local education, local elites and educators were influencing Meiji education policy.[15]
In the fifth chapter, Platt addresses the fact that resistance, both to the Meiji government, and to its school reforms, existed in the same places, and often in the same people, as cooperation. Not everyone signed on to the project of creating a new school system, and many who did, signed on at least in part to achieve other goals.[16]
These goals were often personal, reactionary, or both, and in fact, one of the areas where Platt takes issue with the Modernization School is here. Platt sees the 1870’s revolts in which schools were burned not as acts of demonstration against the Meiji reforms in general, but as having an element that specifically targeted schools. He relates the general protest to the specific targeting of schools through the ideas of Herman Ooms, whose discussion of the naturalization of Tokugawa era cultural norms, including status hierarchy, and the perception of foreigners as dangerous and evil (and the idea of schools as catering to foreign needs) combined with local and individual concerns about how to pay for schools (everyone had to, not just parents of the students), and about the removal of children from work for school.[17] For Platt, it is clear that schools were not on the periphery, incidentally related to local fear and anger over the reforms that were creating Meiji state hegemony, but were at the center of the question.
In his final chapter, Platt uses the combination of the Nagano and Chikuma perfectural school districts (the prefectures were combined in 1876) as an example of the general set of problems, protests, and realities in the creation of a national education system in Meiji Japan.[18] Ultimately, Platt’s conclusion is that the creation of a national education system was central to the Meiji state’s claim to hegemony in the creation of policy for Japan – and even in the creation of the concept of Japan, but that like other institutions, this process was not an imposition, but the product of a negotiation between local people and the state itself, with the participation of a very complex set of actors. Elites, both supported and rejected the project. Villagers protested, refused to pay, and yet agitated for local schools to be built close to them. Teachers rejected the Meiji state’s vision and curriculum, but ended up working within it. In fact, by 1890, according to Platt, controversy was not over, but protest and argument was conducted within the policies and pathways provided by the Meiji state.[19] Hegemony had been achieved. Still, contrary to the impression given by earlier books on the topic, attendance was never full, even in the so-called “education prefecture” of Nagano, nor were local schools prostrate before the central government. Even when the basic shape of the education system was settled, the possibility for negotiation, compromise, and reform continued to exist.[20]
Overall, with this nuanced treatment of educational reform through the early Meiji period Platt has achieved a useful synthesis of evidence and theoretical framing. The book is influenced by Gramsci’s theories of hegemony, but not dominated by them. Rather, Platt has done a nice job of finding complexity in the evidence, and then using Gramsci’s ideas to help him explain that complexity, so that he neither ignores his evidence and oversimplifies, nor becomes overwhelmed and incapable of making narrative judgments about it. This is a sophisticated, and inspiring, book that has broadened my understanding of the early Meiji period substantially.
[1] Brian Platt, Burning and Building, Schooling and State Foundation in Japan, 1750-1890, (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Asia Center, 2004), p 255.
[2] Ibid., p.7.
[3] Ibid., p. 6.
[4] Platt, p. 6
[5] Ibid., p. 57.
[6] Ibid., 66.
[7] Platt, p. 100.
[8] Ibid., p. 102.
[9] Ibid., p. 104.
[10] Ibid., p. 105
[11] Ibid., p. 105.
[12] Ibid., p. 130.
[13] Ibid., p. 144.
[14] For more on the idea of liminal space, see Victor Turner, Dramas, Fields and Metaphors: Symbolic Action in Human Society (Ithaca: Cornell University Press), 1974, and Arnold Van Gennep, The Rites of Passage, (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press), 1960.
[15] Ibid. p. 149-155.
[16] Platt, p. 193.
[17] Ibid., pp. 190-195.
[18] Ibid., p. 216. Platt here says that the combination of the two school districts created a microcosm of the problems and opportunities faced by the Meiji state and local entities in the early 1870’s.
[19] Platt, p. 258.
[20] Ibid., 254.