Meiji School Classroom

To contrast with the previous image depicting a Meiji Era school, here we see an image depicting a Tokugawa-era classroom. Immediately when we see this image we notice the lack of dimensionality in the depiction of the school. The Meiji-era classroom had a clearly defined floor, walls, and ceiling; furthermore, it had a clear sense of depth as parallel lines were set to converge at a vanishing point and further away objects got smaller. In this image, by contrast, we have no walls or floor. The only clear parallel lines are those on opposite sides of the same desk. The students are also all jumbled on top of one another at random, giving the image a flat feel. Finally, the vibrant colors of the human figures that are absent everywhere else help to place emphasis on the people, making the viewer almost forget that they should be in some room. This comes in stark contrast with the image of the Meiji school, which puts emphasis equally on the space as on the students.

If we again analyze the depiction of the relationship between teacher and student in this work, we can draw conclusions about how Japan wanted its schools depicted in each era. Where in the Meiji-era school the teacher was depicted as at the clear front of the room with all the students focusing intently on his back, here we have a ‘disoriented’ room with each student facing a different direction and the teacher at the back. It is interesting to note that here we have several teachers, each focusing on different students as the students themselves work – literally the opposite of what was depicted in the Meiji-era. Finally the students in this work are quite clearly doing some sort of writing or calligraphy as opposed to math as was illustrated in the previous image.

Viewing these last two images and taking them in to account with each other gives us a lot of insight in to the differences the Meiji government was advertising in its new school system. The new western classroom orientation was the least of these changes; the real cultural shift came in the form of a major shift in subject matter and in the teacher student relationship. As we will hopefully see in my paper, these shifts caused significant discontentment amongst the masses who did not immediately see the value in westernizing Japan’s system of education and were part of the reason for the divide we see on the issue of education in the Meiji period.