The idea that personal cultivation leads to social and material well-being became widespread in late Tokugawa Japan (1600–1868). Practical Pursuits explores theories of personal development that were diffused in the early nineteenth century by a network of religious groups in the Edo (Tokyo) area, and explains how, after the Meiji Restoration of 1868, the leading members of these communities went on to create ideological coalitions inspired by the pursuit of a modern form of cultivation. Variously engaged in divination, Shinto purification rituals, and Zen practice, these individuals ultimately used informal political associations to promote the Confucian-style assumption that personal improvement is the basis for national prosperity. This wide-ranging yet painstakingly researched study represents a new direction in historical analysis. Where previous scholarship has used large conceptual units like Confucianism and Buddhism as its main actors and has emphasized the discontinuities in Edo and Meiji religious life, Sawada addresses the history of religion in nineteenth-century Japan at the level of individuals and small groups. She employs personal cultivation as an interpretive system, crossing familiar boundaries to consider complex linguistic, philosophical, and social interconnections.

Detailed and diverse, Proliferating Talent challenges us to rethink a crucial period in Japanese history. The eight essays translated here broadly cover the eventful half century that witnessed the collapse of the Tokugawa shogunate and the rise of the modern Japanese state to the position of an international power. Edited by J.S.A. Elisonas and Richard Rubinger, professors of East Asian languages and cultures at Indiana University, Proliferating Talent is full of nuances and carefully textured readings in which local developments are carefully balanced against major national events.

"Soon after overthrowing the Tokugawa government in 1868, the new Meiji leaders devised ambitious plans to build a modern nation-state. Among the earliest and most radical of the Meiji reforms was a plan for a centralized, compulsory educational system modeled after those in Europe and America. Meiji leaders hoped that schools would curb mounting social disorder and mobilize the Japanese people against the threat of Western imperialism. The sweeping tone of this revolutionary plan obscured the fact that the Japanese were already quite literate and had clear ideas about what a school should be. In the century preceding the Meiji restoration, commoners throughout Japan had established 50,000 schools with almost no guidance or support from the government. Consequently, the Ministry of Education’s new code of 1872 met with resistance, as local officials, teachers, and citizens sought compromises and pursued alternative educational visions. Their efforts ultimately led to the growth and consolidation of a new educational system, one with the imprint of local demands and expectations. This book traces the unfolding of this process in Nagano prefecture and explores how local people negotiated the formation of the new order in their own communities. "

In this rich and absorbing analysis of the transformation of political thought in nineteenth-century Japan, Douglas Howland examines the transmission to Japan of key concepts--liberty, rights, sovereignty, and society--from Western Europe and the United States. Because Western political concepts did not translate well into their language, Japanese had to invent terminology to engage Western political thought. This work of westernization served to structure historical agency as Japanese leaders undertook the creation of a modern state. Where scholars have previously treated the introduction of Western political thought to Japan as a simple migration of ideas from one culture to another, Howland undertakes an unprecedented integration of the history of political concepts and the semiotics of translation techniques. He demonstrates that Japanese efforts to translate the West must be understood as problems both of language and action--as the creation and circulation of new concepts and the usage of these new concepts in debates about the programs and policies to be implemented in a westernizing Japan. Translating the West will interest scholars of East Asian studies and translation studies and historians of political thought, liberalism, and modernity.

Mark Lincicome offers a new perspective on Japenese educational debates and policy reforms that have taken place under the guise of internationalization since the mid-1980s. By contextualizing these developments within a historical framework spanning the entire twentieth century, he challenges the argument-put forward by education officials, conservative politicians, and their supporters in the academy and the business world-that history offers no guide for addressing the educational challenges that face contemporary Japan. Combining diachronic and synchronic approaches, Lincicome analyzes repeated attempts throughout the twentieth century to "internationalize education" (kyoiku no kokusaika) in Japan. This comparison reveals important similarities that transcend educational policy to encompass Japanese conceptions of individual, national, and international identity; relations between the individual, the nation, the state, and the international community; and the type of education best suited to negotiating multiple identities among the next generation of Japanese subject-citizens. Book jacket.

Women and Public Life in Early Meiji Japan focuses on women’s activities in the new public spaces of Meiji Japan. With chapters on public, private, and missionary schools for girls, their students, and teachers, on social and political groups women created, on female employment, and on women’s participation in print media, this book offers a new perspective on nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Japanese history. Women’s founding of and participation in conflicting discourses over the value of women in Meiji public life demonstrate that during this period active and vocal women were everywhere, that they did not meekly submit to the dictates of the government and intellectuals over what women could or should do, and that they were fully integrated in the production of Meiji culture. Mara Patessio shows that the study of women is fundamental not only in order to understand fully the transformations of the Meiji period, but also to understand how later generations of women could successfully move the battle forward. Women and Public Life in Early Meiji Japan is essential reading for all students and teachers of 19th- and early 20th-century Japanese history and is of interest to scholars of women’s history more generally.

Beyond Citizenship examines the government provision of adult literacy training in early twentieth-century China, bringing to light new ways of interpreting the complex impacts literacy training had on strengthening the state in the republican era.