between the literati and institutions of the press and the schools. Built up in the late nineteenth century as instruments of national integration, newspapers and the educational system created networks that connected urban communities, and they provided a conduit that channeled talent and ambition to the capital. In the process, they became important vehicles for the production and dissemination of Tokyo-centrism. More than any other, these two modernizing institutions gave definition to the literati as a social formation and cultural force. They offered a meeting ground and a stage, shaping the ethos of the literati and propelling them to social prominence and influence. Like the institutions that fostered them, the literati became instruments of Tokyo-centrism.
Though Tokyo’s centrality owed something to the Tokugawa legacy of Edo-centrism, Tokyo’s rise was determined as much by what happened after the overthrow of the feudal regime in 1868 as before. Soon after the establishment of the new state, fierce competition broke out between two centers of the old regime for designation as the new national capital. Osaka, the economic hub of rice and money exchange, emerged as one contender, and Edo, the seat of shogunal political power, as the other. Edo, renamed Tokyo, or “Eastern capital,” won out, but even its new designation called attention to the contingent nature of capitals in Japan, where the physical seat of power had shifted frequently over the centuries.1 Old Edo bequeathed to new Tokyo its academies of samurai erudition, its shogunal palace and aristocratic estates, its vibrant popular culture, and its demographic dominance over other urban centers. Nevertheless, as Henry Smith points out, in the early years of the transition from Edo to Tokyo the new city became a shell of its former self, losing population as the feudal lords and their samurai retainers abandoned the city for their homelands, taking with them much of the wealth that had sustained the city as a center of consumption and cultural production since the 1600s.2 Two decades into the new era, Tokyo recovered the million population mark and regained its centralizing momentum through the establishment of a national railway grid, a constitutional government, and other policies of the Meiji developmental state. Though we have tended to assume the inevitability of Tokyo’s rise, this history highlights the human contrivance that lay behind Tokyo-centrism.
The same forces that made Tokyo central—that concentrated power and prestige in the capital—provincialized other urban centers, turning them into “local cities” (chihō toshi) in relation to Tokyo by marginalizing their cultural and economic production and limiting their political clout. New educational institutions and the publishing market channeled ambitious and talented intellectuals to the capital; the ongoing brain drain held profound implications for local communities. The belief that Japan’s modernist cultural movements originated in Tokyo blinded people to the dynamism and creativity of local cultural movements and their influence on the center. And yet, provincial cities did support thriving communities of artists and writers. Cities such as Kanazawa cultivated towering figures in modern Japanese thought such as writer Izumi Kyōka, Buddhologist Suzuki Daisetsu, and philosopher Nishida Kitarō. As the distinctive regional voices of Sapporo’s proletarian literature, Niigata’s orchestras, and Okayama’s new poetry reveal, innovation and originality was possible in the world beyond the metropolis.
This chapter examines the creation of a new cultural geography that privileged Tokyo and marginalized its outside world—a geography that defined Japan in terms of Tokyo and its Others. In the circulation of people and ideas set in motion by the modernizing project of the Meiji state, Japan’s cities redefined themselves in relation to other urban centers. Just as Tokyo’s metropolitan identity was constructed against a rural imaginary—the chihō, or provinces—Tokyo provided the Other against which local cities forged their own self-conceptions.
EDUCATION AND CULTURAL GEOGRAPHY
The architecture of the national education system was created through a series of late-nineteenth-century laws that shunted children into different streams based on gender and status. The Meiji oligarchy initially intended educational reform to become a vehicle for the introduction of western knowledge into Japan, as well as a vehicle for the creation of a national citizenry capable of service to the state and of work in new economic enterprises. The new leadership also saw education as an instrument of social reform, part of the broader effort to phase out feudal status distinctions between samurai and commoners. To this end they created a compulsory elementary school system available to children of all backgrounds, which by 1907 meant eight years of schooling, tuition free. Entry into secondary school was based on competitive entry examinations, grounding higher education on the principle of meritocracy. These reforms ended the samurai monopoly on learning and made upward mobility theoretically possible through the school system, an ideal captured in the Meiji slogan of “rising in the world” (risshin shusse).3
In practice, however, the elaborate educational tracking system quickly became a vehicle for the reproduction of existing social hierarchies. The first moment of separation, between primary and secondary education, fixed the boundary between an emerging working class on one hand, and middle and upper classes on the other. Because high tuition effectively barred the poor from most secondary schools, the lower tier of primary schools was terminal for children of tenant farmers or of the urban lower class. For children of means, secondary education proceeded along multiple pathways, dividing into a university-bound middle-and-higher-school track, and alternative tracks for normal schools, girls’ higher schools, and commercial, foreign language, and trade schools. Students on the exclusive university track moved from a five-year middle school to a three-year higher school, between which stood a brutal weeding process. School statistics reveal that in 1890 there were spaces for 11,620 students at 55 middle schools spread throughout the country, but only 4,356 spots at the nation’s 7 select higher schools. By 1920 the numbers of state middle schools expanded to 368 (177,201 students) and higher schools to 15 (8,839 students), an asymmetry that significantly sharpened the odds against passing higher-school examinations. These statistics translated into a higher-school admission rate of roughly 1 percent of the male population between sixteen and nineteen. The good news for that successful 1 percent was that higher-school graduation virtually guaranteed entry into a university.4
While numerous private schools emerged to meet the growing demand for education, state schools commanded considerably more prestige and maintained the ranking system that placed Japan’s cities in a hierarchy of educational stature. The first public higher schools were named according to their place in this hierarchy; the nation’s top school in Tokyo, for example, was designated Ichikō, literally “First High.” Tokyo was also the site of the nation’s top (and until 1897 only) public university, Tokyo Imperial University. The cities of Kyoto, distinguished by its long association with the imperial court, and Sendai, seat of one of the most powerful feudal domains and a center of learning during the Tokugawa period, tied for second place in this ranking when the new government located the next higher schools Nikō (Second High) in Sendai and Sankō (Third High) in Kyoto in the 1880s. Establishment of a second imperial university in Kyoto in 1897, and a third in Sendai (Tōhoku University) in 1907 reinforced their positions at the head of the academic hierarchy.5
This educational ranking system privileged Kanazawa and Okayama, where the Fourth and Sixth Higher Schools were located, respectively.6 Sapporo also achieved cultural prominence as an educational center when the Meiji government in 1876 created Sapporo Agricultural College, making it a center for research in agricultural modernization. Its status was greatly elevated when it became the agricultural campus of Tōhoku Imperial University (main campus in Sendai) in 1907, and was made into Hokkaido Imperial University in 1918 (with the addition of faculties of science, engineering, and medicine). In anointing certain cities as centers of modern knowledge, state educational policy created a cultural geography that concentrated human and material resources for knowledge production, in the process helping to constitute a system of centers and peripheries.
Moreover, the tiers in the state’s educational tracking system were distributed according to a particular spatial logic that distinguished villages (with elementary schools only) from cities (with a range of secondary school choices), and both of these from the metropolis (where universities were concentrated). This geographic dispersal of educational institutions linked social mobility to geographic mobility, and it laid the channels through which such demographic movements would flow.