Terakoya Temple School for Girls
My first image is of a Meiji Era school; it was likely meant to spread the notion of the reforms that would be taking place in schools after the Restoration. To this end the author includes myriad details that make the school stand out sharply from its Tokugawa predecessors.
The author also illustrates the westernization of the new schools through his depiction of the teacher’s relationship with the students. The scene is calm and there is clearly a lot of emphasis being placed on order and discipline in the school - the students sit neatly at their desks all perfectly lined up in rows of two. We also notice that the students in the picture are not actually doing anything – they have their hands resting on bare desks, simply watching the teacher’s back intently as he performs his arithmetic. In other words, he is performing and they are spectating and not the other way around. This relationship between student and teacher – from the orientation of the room to the way the teacher seems to be teaching – is strongly reminiscent of the western schooling tradition and is clearly meant to evoke this sense about it.
Another interesting thing to note is how the teacher is clearly doing arithmetic – one of the relative weakest points in the Tokugawa school system that emphasized Confucian Morality as opposed to mathematics. While the other choices the author made evoke a sense of westernization through superficial means, this is the heart of the piece – that the schools will now be teaching more pragmatic skills, such as those necessary to conduct business as well as western science. Finally, the fact that the teacher is illustrated wearing western clothing while the students wear traditional Japanese clothing is symbolic of the cultural shift that will be occurring, as a new wave of children are brought up in a more western fashion.
In the next image, we will see an earlier depiction of a Tokugawa-era school that will allow us to really appreciate the difference in how the schools are depicted and what that means for the previous system of schooling.