Education in the Empire of Japan
Education in the Empire of Japan was a high priority for the government, as the leadership of the early Meiji government realized the critical need for universal public education in its drive to modernize and westernize Japan. Overseas missions such as the Iwakura Mission were sent abroad to study the education systems of leading Western countries. During the Edo period the common citizens of Japan were given limited means of education. What these low-class citizens did learn was geared towards the basic and practical subjects such as reading and arithmetic; the change came forth during the Meiji period. After sending several learned Japanese representatives to travel abroad, the government was able to learn many aspects of the West, from that developed a new process of education for the country. By the late 1860s, the Meiji leaders had established a system that declared equality in education for all as a means by which to help in the process of Japan entering into a more modernized nation, it was required by law.
This was done for the purpose of not only instilling the values of what it meant to be a Japanese citizen, but to bring about the knowledge necessary for the people to understand how the new nation would work under Western methods. With the change in education there was brought about more opportunities to prosper in the newly evolving and modernizing Japanese nation. Individuals and families moved up in society in ways beyond the freedoms or abilities of their ancestors; as education changed, so too did the range of talents and efforts applied by the Japanese people to enhance their society. In 1871, the Ministry of Education was established, with a school system based on the American model, which promoted a utilitarian curriculum, but with the centrally-controlled school administration system copied from France. With the aid of foreign advisors, such as David Murray and Marion McCarrell Scott, Normal Schools for teacher education were created in each prefecture. Other advisors, such as George Adams Leland, were recruited to create specific types of curriculum.
Private schools run by Buddhist temples and neighborhood associations were nationalized as elementary schools. However, they added a new curriculum which emphasized conservative, traditional ideals more reflective of Japanese values. Confucian precepts were stressed those concerning the hierarchical nature of human relations, service to the new Meiji state, the pursuit of learning, morality; these ideals, embodied in the 1890 Imperial Rescript on Education, along with centralized government control over education guided Japanese education until the end of World War II. In December, 1885, the cabinet system of government was established, Mori Arinori became the first Minister of Education of Japan. Mori, together with Inoue Kowashi created the foundation of the Empire of Japan's educational system by issuing a series of orders from 1886; these laws established an elementary school system, middle school system, normal school system and an imperial university system. Elementary school was made compulsory from 1872, was intended to create loyal subjects of the Emperor.
Middle Schools were preparatory schools for students destined to enter one of the Imperial Universities, the Imperial Universities were intended to create westernized leaders who would be able to direct the modernization of Japan. With the increasing industrialization of Japan, demand increased for higher education and vocational training. Inoue Kowashi, who followed Mori as Minister of Education established a state vocational school system, promoted women's education through a separate girls' school system. Compulsory education was extended to six years in 1907. According to the new laws, textbooks could only be issued upon the approval of the Ministry of Education; the curriculum was centered on moral education, design and writing, Japanese calligraphy, Japanese history, science, drawing and physical education. All children of the same age learned each subject from the same series of textbook. During the Taishō and early Shōwa periods, from 1912-1937, the education system in Japan became centralized.
From 1917-1919, the government created the Extraordinary Council on Education, which issued numerous reports and recommendations on educational reform. One of the main emphases of the Council was in higher education. Prior to 1918, "university" was synonymous with "imperial university", but as a result of the Council, many private universities obtained recognized status; the Council introduced subsidies for families too poor to afford the tuitions for compulsory education, pushed for more emphasis on moral education. During this period, new social currents, including socialism, communism and liberalism exerted influences on teachers and teaching methods; the New Educational Movement led to teachers unions and student protest movements against the nationalist educational curriculum. The government responded with increased repression, adding some influences from the German system in an attempt to increase the patriotic spirit and step up the militarization of Japan; the Imperial Rescript to Soldiers and Sailors became compulsory reading for students during this period.
Specialized schools for the blind and for the deaf were established as early as 1878, were regulated and standardized by the government in the Blin
Filial piety
In Confucian and Chinese Buddhist ethics, filial piety is a virtue of respect for one's parents and ancestors. The Confucian Classic of Filial Piety, thought to be written around the Qin-Han period, has been the authoritative source on the Confucian tenet of filial piety; the book, a purported dialogue between Confucius and his student Tseng Tzu, is about how to set up a good society using the principle of filial piety. Filial piety is central to Confucian role ethics. In more general terms, filial piety means to be good to one's parents. Filial piety is considered a key virtue in Chinese and other East Asian cultures, it is the main subject of a large number of stories. One of the most famous collections of such stories is The Twenty-four Cases of Filial Piety; these stories depict. While China has always had a diversity of religious beliefs, filial piety has been common to all of them. R. Baker calls respect for the family the only element common to all Chinese people; the western term filial piety was derived from studies of Western societies, based on Mediterranean cultures.
However, filial piety among the ancient Romans, for example, was different from the Chinese in its logic and enactment. Filial piety is illustrated by the Chinese character xiao; the character is a combination of the character lao above the character zi, that is, an elder being carried by a son. This indicates. In Korean Confucianism, the character 孝 is pronounced hyo. In Vietnamese, the character 孝 is written in the Vietnamese alphabet as hiếu. In Japanese, the term is rendered in spoken and written language as 親孝行, oyakōkō, adding the characters for parent and conduct to the Chinese character to make the word more specific. Confucian teachings about filial piety can be found in numerous texts, including the Four Books, the Great Learning, the Doctrine of the Mean and the book Mencius, as well as the works Classic of Filial Piety and the Book of Rites. In the Classic of Filial Piety, Confucius says that "ilial piety is the root of virtue and the basis of philosophy" and modern philosopher Fung Yu-lan describes filial piety as "the ideological basis for traditional society".
For Confucius, filial piety is not ritual outside respect to one's parents, but an inward attitude as well. Filial piety consists of several aspects. Filial piety is an awareness of repaying the burden born by one's parents; as such, filial piety is done to reciprocate. However, it is practiced because of an obligation towards one's ancestors. According to some modern scholars, xiào is the root of rén, but other scholars state that rén, as well as yì and li should be interpreted as the roots of xiào. Rén means favorable behavior to those. Yì refers to respect to those considered worthy of respect, such as superiors. Li is defined as behaving according to cultural values. Moreover, it is defined in the texts as deference, respectful submission, reverence, meaning deep respect and awe. Filial piety was taught by Confucius as part of a broad ideal of self-cultivation toward being a perfect human being. Modern philosopher Hu Shih argued that filial piety gained its central role in Confucian ideology only among Confucianists.
He proposed that Confucius taught the quality of rén in general, did not yet emphasize xiào that much. Only Confucianists such as Tseng Tzu focused on xiào as the single, most important Confucianist quality. Confucian ethics does not regard filial piety as a choice, but rather as an unconditional obligation of the child; the relationship between parents and children is the most fundamental of the five cardinal relationships described by Confucius in his role ethics, filial piety, together with fraternal love, underlies this system. It is the fundamental principle of Confucian morality: filial piety was seen as the basis for an orderly society, together with loyalty of the ministers toward the ruler, servitude of the wife toward the husband. In short, filial piety is central to Confucian role ethics and is the cardinal virtue, that defines, limits or eliminates all other virtues. According to the traditional texts, filial piety consists of physical care, service and obedience. Children should attempt not to bring their parents in disgrace.
Confucian texts such as Book of Rites give details on. Respect is envisioned by detailed manners such as the way children salute their parents, speak to them or enter and leave the room in which their parents are, as well as seating arrangements and gifts. Care means making sure parents are comfortable in every single way: this involves food, clothes, to have them "see and hear pleasurable things", in Confucius' words, to have them live without worry, but the most imp
Imperial Seal of Japan
The Imperial Seal of Japan called the Chrysanthemum Seal, Chrysanthemum Flower Seal or Imperial chrysanthemum emblem, is one of the national seals and a crest used by the Emperor of Japan and members of the Imperial Family. It is a contrast to the Paulownia Seal used by the Japanese government. During the Meiji period, no one was permitted to use the Imperial Seal except the Emperor of Japan, who used a 16 petal chrysanthemum with sixteen tips of another row of petals showing behind the first row. Therefore, each member of the Imperial family used a modified version of the seal. Shinto shrines either displayed the imperial seal or incorporated elements of the seal into their own emblems. Earlier in Japanese history, when Emperor Go-Daigo, who tried to break the power of the shogunate in 1333, was exiled, he adopted the seventeen-petal chrysanthemum to differentiate himself from the Northern Court's Emperor Kōgon, who kept the imperial 16-petal mon; the symbol is a orange chrysanthemum with black or red outlines and background.
A central disc is surrounded by a front set of 16 petals. A rear set of 16 petals are half staggered in relation to the front set and are visible at the edges of the flower. An example of the chrysanthemum being used is in the badge for the Order of the Chrysanthemum. Other members of the Imperial Family use a version with 14 single petals, while a form with 16 single petals is used for Diet members' pins, orders and other items that carry or represent the authority of the Emperor; the Imperial Seal is used on the standards of the Imperial Family. National seals of Japan Chrysanthemum Throne Imperial Seal of Korea Order of the Chrysanthemum Mon Media related to Imperial seals of Japan at Wikimedia Commons
Hideki Tojo
Hideki Tojo was a Japanese politician and general of the Imperial Japanese Army who concurrently served as the Imperial Rules Assistance Association's leader and 27th Prime Minister of Japan during much of World War II. He was among the most outspoken proponents for preventive war against the United States before the attack on Pearl Harbor and one of the leading perpetrators behind Japanese war crimes against prisoners of war and civilians during the Pacific conflict. After the end of the war, Tojo was arrested and sentenced to death by the International Military Tribunal for the Far East, hanged on December 23, 1948. Hideki Tojo was born in the Kōjimachi district of Tokyo on December 30, 1884, as the third son of Hidenori Tojo, a lieutenant general in the Imperial Japanese Army. Under the bakufu, Japanese society was divided rigidly into four castes. After the Meiji Restoration, the caste system was abolished in 1871, but the former caste distinctions in many ways persisted afterwards, ensuring that those from the former samurai caste continued to enjoy their traditional prestige.
The Tojo family came from the samurai caste, though the Tojos were lowly warrior retainers for the great daimyōs that they had served for generations. Tojo's father was a samurai turned Army officer and his mother was the daughter of a Buddhist priest, making his family respectable, but poor. Hideki had an education typical of a Japanese youth in the Meiji era; the purpose of the Meiji educational system was to train the boys to be soldiers as adults, the message was relentlessly drilled into Japanese students that war was the most beautiful thing in the entire world, that the Emperor was a living god and that the greatest honor for a Japanese man was to die for the Emperor. Japanese girls were taught that the highest honor for a woman was to have as many sons as possible who could die for the Emperor in war; as a boy, Tojo was known for his stubbornness, lack of a sense of humor, for being an opinionated and combative youth fond of getting into fights with the other boys and for his tenacious way of pursuing what he wanted.
Japanese schools in the Meiji era were competitive, there was no tradition of sympathy for failure. Tojo was of average intelligence, but was known to compensate for his limited intelligence with a willingness to work hard. Tojo's boyhood hero was the 17th-century shogun Tokugawa Ieyasu who issued the injunction: "Avoid the things you like, turn your attention to unpleasant duties". Tojo liked to say: "I am just an ordinary man possessing no shining talents. Anything I have achieved I owe to my capacity for hard work and never giving up". In 1899, Hideki entered the Army Cadet School; when he graduated from the Japanese Military Academy in March 1905, he was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the infantry of the IJA. In 1905, Tojo shared in the general outrage in Japan at the Treaty of Portsmouth, which ended the war with Russia, which the Japanese people saw as a betrayal as the war did not end with Japan annexing Siberia as popular opinion had demanded; the Treaty of Portsmouth was so unpopular that it set off anti-American riots known as the Hibiya incendiary incident as many Japanese were enraged at the way the Americans had cheated Japan as the Japanese gains in the treaty were far less than what public opinion had expected.
Few Japanese at the time had understood that the war with Russia had pushed their nation to the verge of bankruptcy, most people in Japan believed that the American president Theodore Roosevelt who had mediated the Treaty of Portsmouth had cheated Japan out of its rightful gains. Tojo's anger at the Treaty of Portsmouth left him with an abiding dislike of Americans. In 1909, Hideki married Katsuko Ito, with whom he had four daughters. In 1918–19, Tojo served in Siberia as part of the Japanese expeditionary force sent to intervene in the Russian Civil War. Tojo served as Japanese military attache to Germany between 1919-1922; as the Imperial Japanese Army had been trained by a German military mission in the 19th century, the Japanese Army was always strongly influenced by intellectual developments in the German Army, Tojo was no exception. In the 1920s, the German military favored preparing for the next war by creating a totalitarian Wehrstaat, an idea, taken up by the Japanese military as the "national defense state".
In 1922, on his way home to Japan, Tojo took a train ride across the United States, his first and only visit to America, which left him with the impression that the Americans were a materialistic "soft" people devoted only to making money and to hedonistic pursuits like sex and drinking. Tojo boasted that his only hobby was his work, he customarily brought home his paperwork to work late into the night, he refused to have any part in raising his children, which he viewed both as a distraction from his work and a woman's work, having his wife do all the work of taking care of his children. A stern, humorless man, Tojo was known for his brusque manner, his obsession with etiquette, for his coldness. Like all Japanese officers at the time, Tojo slapped the faces of the men under his command when giving orders, saying that face-slapping was a "means of training" men who came from families that were not part of the samurai caste, for whom bushido was not second nature. In 1924, Tojo was offended by the Immigration Control Act passed by the American Congress b
Japanese nationalism
Japanese nationalism is the nationalism that asserts that the Japanese are a monolithic nation with a single immutable culture, promotes the cultural unity of the Japanese. It encompasses a broad range of ideas and sentiments harbored by the Japanese people over the last two centuries regarding their native country, its cultural nature, political form and historical destiny, it is useful to distinguish Japanese cultural nationalism from political or state-directed nationalism, since many forms of cultural nationalism, such as those associated with folkloric studies, have been hostile to state-fostered nationalism. In Meiji period Japan, nationalist ideology consisted of a blend of native and imported political philosophies developed by the Meiji government to promote national unity and patriotism, first in defense against colonization by Western powers, in a struggle to attain equality with the Great Powers, it evolved throughout the Taishō and Shōwa periods to justify an totalitarian government and overseas expansionism, provided a political and ideological foundation for the actions of the Japanese military in the years leading up to World War II.
During the final days of the Tokugawa shogunate, the perceived threat of foreign encroachment after the arrival of Commodore Matthew C. Perry and the signing of the Kanagawa Accord, led to increased prominence to the development of nationalist ideologies; some prominent daimyō promoted the concept of fukko. The terms were not mutually exclusive, merging into the sonnō jōi concept, which in turn was a major driving force in starting the Meiji Restoration; the Meiji Constitution of 1889 defined allegiance to the State as the citizen's highest duty. While the constitution itself contained a mix of political Western practices and traditional Japanese political ideas, government philosophy centered on promoting social harmony and a sense of the uniqueness of the Japanese people; the extreme disparity in economic and military power between Japan and the Western colonial powers was a great cause for concern for the early Meiji leadership. The motto Fukoku kyōhei symbolized Meiji period nationalistic policies to provide government support to strengthen strategic industries.
Only with a strong economic base could Japan afford to build a strong, modern military along Western lines, only with a strong economy and military could Japan force a revision of the unequal treaties, such as the Kanagawa Accords. Government policies laid the basis of industrialist empires known as the zaibatsu; as a residue of its widespread use in propaganda during the 19th century, military nationalism in Japan was known as bushidō. The word, denoting a coherent code of beliefs and doctrines about the proper path of the samurai, or what is called generically'warrior thought', is encountered in Japanese texts before the Meiji era, when the 11 volumes of the Hagakure of Yamamoto Tsunetomo, compiled in the years from 1710 to 1716 where the character combination is employed, was published. Constituted over a long time by house manuals on war and warriorship, it gained some official backing with the establishment of the Bakufu, which sought an ideological orthodoxy in the Neo-Confucianism of Zhu Xi tailored for military echelons that formed the basis of the new shogunal government.
An important early role was played by Yamaga Sokō in theorizing a Japanese military ethos. After the abolition of the feudal system, the new military institutions of Japan were shaped along European lines, with Western instructors, the codes themselves modeled on standard models adapted from abroad; the impeccable behaviour, in terms of international criteria, displayed by the Japanese military in the Russo-Japanese War was proof that Japan had a modern army whose techniques and etiquette of war differed little from that of what prevailed among the Western imperial powers. The Imperial Rescript for Seamen and Soldiers, presented Japan as a "sacred nation protected by the gods". An undercurrent of traditional warrior values never wholly disappeared, as Japan slid towards a cycle of repeated crises from the mid-Taishō to early Shōwa eras, the old samurai ideals began to assume importance among more politicized officers in the Imperial Japanese Army. Sadao Araki played an important role in adapting a doctrine of seishin kyōiku as an ideological backbone for army personnel.
As Minister of Education, he supported the integration of the samurai code into the national education system. In developing the modern concepts of State Shintoism and emperor worship, various Japanese philosophers tried to revive or purify national beliefs by removing imported foreign ideas, borrowed from Chinese philosophy; this "Restoration Shintōist Movement" began with Motoori Norinaga in the 18th century. Motoori Norinaga, Hirata Atsutane, based their research on the Kojiki and other classic Shintō texts which teach the superiority of the Sun Goddess Amaterasu; this formed the basis for State Shintōism, as the Japanese emperor claimed direct descent from Amaterasu. The emperor himself was therefore sacred, all proclamations of the emperor had thus a religious significance. After the Meiji Restoration, the new imperial government needed to modernize the polity and economy of Japan, the Meiji oligarchy felt that those goals could only be accomplished through a strong sense of natio
Privy Seal of Japan
The Privy Seal of Japan is one of the national seals and is the Emperor of Japan's official seal. It is cubic, its inscription 天皇御璽 is written in seal script, it has two lines of vertical writing, with the right-hand side containing the characters 天皇, on the left-hand side containing the characters 御璽. The seal is printed on Imperial rescripts, proclamation of sentences of laws, cabinet orders, instruments of ratification, ambassadors' credentials and their dismissal documents, documents of general power of attorney, consular commissions, letters authorizing foreign consuls, letters of appointment or dismissal of government officials, whose appointment requires the Emperor's attestation, appointment documents and documents of the Prime Minister and Chief Justice, their respective dismissals; the history of the Privy Seal of Japan dates back to the Nara period. Although it was made from copper, it was manufactured from stone in 1868 and was made from pure gold; the present Privy Seal is about 3 sun in size and weighs 4.5 kg.
The master-hand of the seal was Abei Rekido of Kyoto. He was commissioned to manufacture the State Seal of Japan within one year, in 1874; when not in use, the seal is kept in a leather bag. The seal is used with special cinnabar seal ink specially made by the National Printing Bureau. If the State Seal or the Privy Seal are illegally reproduced, the penalty is at least two years or more of terminable penal servitude according to the first clause of Article 164 of the Criminal Code of Japan. National seals of Japan Lord Keeper of the Privy Seal of Japan Heirloom Seal of the Realm Emperor Showa signing documents and using the State and Privy Seal of Japan
