Education in Tokugawa Japan

Education in Tokugawa Japan by R. P. Dore offers the first comprehensive English-language account of how a society often remembered for its rigid hierarchy laid the foundations of modern Japan’s remarkably high levels of literacy and learning. Drawing on fief records, school regulations, curricula, and popular texts, Dore reconstructs the educational institutions of the Tokugawa period—from the elite fief schools training samurai to the terakoya that brought reading, writing, and arithmetic to commoners. He shows how Confucian moral training, vocational imperatives of governance, and the spread of print culture combined to transform education from a priestly preserve into a broadly shared pursuit.Far from being static, Tokugawa education adapted to political reform, Western learning, and the growth of commerce. Dore details both the ideals that guided samurai education—moral rectitude, loyalty, and service—and the practicalities of school life: ceremonies, examinations, discipline, and finance. He also probes the limits of the system, from the uneven education of women to tensions between moral cultivation and administrative utility. With clarity and breadth, the book illuminates how early modern Japan’s scholastic traditions nurtured a society capable of rapid modernization after 1868, while offering a rich portrait of the interplay between social order, merit, and the pursuit of knowledge.This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1965.