itself where the second and third (noninheriting) sons of rural landlords moved from their villages to the cities to be schooled with children of the urban elite, members of old merchant and artisan families as well as former samurai. For these families, education represented one way to transform feudal wealth into human capital and secure the family’s fortunes at a time of rapid economic transition. Elite urban in-migration implied upward mobility, social advance secured through access to new knowledge. The rural poor, in contrast, lacked the property requisite to finance secondary education for their children. For them, the labor market, rather than the school system, created the channels of geo-social mobility. In their case, movement to the cities was less upward mobility than outward mobility, since geographic movement, for the most part, changed the social form of their labor but not their position in the social hierarchy. Like the labor market, modern educational institutions became a vessel for the transmutation of feudal social categories into modern social categories, for dissolving status positions and reshaping them into class formations. Moreover, complementing the effects of urban rankings of public schools, the geographically dispersed tiers of school tracks constituted a new cultural geography that was hierarchical and created a system of centers and peripheries.
Beyond the class distinctions it helped to generate, the educational system created cultural disparities between communities. As they were situated on the educational grid, localities assumed places in a new cultural hierarchy that privileged the learning and knowledge production of the metropolitan center. The nexus of knowledge and power concentrated in secondary education was one reason why localities were willing to commit scarce budgetary resources to establish a network of postelementary schools. As communities recognized, schools provided a cultural resource that could become an engine of local development. Secondary schools were magnets for intellectuals who injected into their adopted homes new forms of knowledge that helped cities modernize; they contributed their expertise to city planning, architectural innovation, public health initiatives, and the creation of local libraries, museums, and exhibitions. This could spell the difference between standing at the forefront of urban innovation and growth or being left behind in the competition for private investment and further government financing.
In the case of Niigata, the prefectural government worked hard to build up educational institutions within its jurisdiction. A middle school was built in Niigata city in 1892, followed by schools in Nagaoka, Shibata, Sado, and Takada. By 1910 the prefecture boasted twelve middle schools, with an enrollment of 5,500 students. Of the 500 graduates that year, 85 had submitted applications to higher school. And though 152 Niigata students were currently attending higher schools, all of these were outside the prefecture.7 Establishing a higher school was considerably more difficult than building a middle school, however. Both required approval of the Ministry of Education, but higher schools had the distinction of being fully funded by the national treasury. Localities could sweeten the pot for the national government by financing the school building or donating an existing facility. Indeed, Kanazawa and Okayama, early victors in the interurban competition for a higher school, were selected in part because they could draw on their legacy as castle towns to provide this type of assistance. In Kanazawa’s case, a generous donation from the former daimyo family, plus the large pool of literate young men ready to matriculate at a higher school, tipped the scales in the city’s favor.8
Though political leaders in Niigata had been active since the late 1880s with a campaign to raise money for local facilities and efforts to lobby the central government, they lost out to places such as Okayama in the early round of competitions. Further campaigns in 1905 and 1911 likewise met with failure, but another drive was undertaken in 1916. Facing fierce competition from other prefectures, Niigata began a new fund-raising campaign and sent an entourage of local dignitaries to Tokyo to appeal for support. This time the efforts bore fruit: flush with cash generated by tax receipts from the war boom, the state approved the establishment of higher schools in Niigata and three other cities.9 Departing from previous practice, higher schools of the new generation were designated with the names of the cities in which they were based: Niigata Higher, Yamagata Higher, and so on. Though the round of higher-school expansion during World War One brought great prestige to the communities that gained the new institutions, status distinctions persisted between the first generation of “number” schools and the expanded cadre of “name schools,” a distinction exacerbated by the overproduction of middle- and higher-school graduates and so-called employment difficulties (shūshokunan) of the 1920s.
Undoubtedly a boon to local development, the enormous investment in secondary schools also fixed the position of localities in the educational grid. A city’s status as a center of learning ensured cultural dominance in its respective region and, at the same time, cemented its position of cultural subordination to Tokyo. In other words, the educational system created multiple centers and arranged them hierarchically. The metropolis, with its concentration of universities, was one center, but local cities such as Okayama, with its concentration of secondary schools, constituted another, secondary center. Okayama’s ability to develop educational resources drew on its rich inheritance as a center of learning during the Tokugawa period; in the late nineteenth century the city moved quickly to build on this legacy. Okayama’s first public middle school opened in 1874; a second was built in 1921. The city’s two middle schools, together with the private middle school that had opened in 1894, enrolled about 2,600 students. By 1886 Okayama boasted two women’s colleges, and additional schools were established in 1900, 1908, and 1925. In terms of commercial and technical schools, the city offered a range of options by 1926: a four-year public technical school, a four-year public commercial school, a private professional women’s college, a women’s arts school, and city-run industrial arts and commercial schools. In addition, Okayama was home to a prestigious medical school and a normal school.10
This impressive array of schools established Okayama’s reputation as a center of higher learning for the region, attracting a flow of students from the surrounding counties as well as neighboring prefectures of the Chūgoku and Shikoku districts. Moreover, because employment at Okayama’s secondary schools typically required a university degree, the school network generated an in-migration from university centers in Tokyo and, to a lesser extent, Kyoto. In their capacity as teachers, metropolitan intellectuals made enormous impacts on local cultural movements, often acting as conduits for the introduction of Tokyo trends into the provinces, where they encountered thriving local cultures and became part of a cultural melting pot. Whether it was in-migration of Tokyo intellectuals or the influx of students from surrounding towns and villages, the new educational system provided a channel for the circulation of people and local knowledge. It created extended social networks and provided the context for productive engagements and mutual influences, a synergy between artists and writers from different local communities who came together in places like Okayama.
At the same time, their subordinate position on the grid turned cities such as Okayama into way stations on the path to the metropolis, both for students continuing on to university and for the scholars who used employment in Okayama as a stepping-stone to a more prestigious post at a metropolitan university. Modern educational institutions operated to reinforce Tokyo-centrism in other ways as well. Indeed, the status hierarchy between faculty and students became a powerful mechanism for the production of the ideology of the metropolis. Facing their provincial students, Tokyo intellectuals represented the source of knowledge; in the act of teaching and learning, and the relationship of mentor to student, the lived experience of higher education in the provinces naturalized the idea that modern knowledge issued forth from a single source in Tokyo. Performing, metaphorically, the interplay between Tokyo and the provinces, the teacher-student relationship helped to breed condescension for provincial culture, on the one hand, and deference toward the center on the other.
INTELLECTUAL CIRCUITS
Biographies of Japanese intellectuals who lived during these years reveal the power this tracking system had in structuring individual lives. It influenced career choices and shaped decisions about where to live and when to move. The stories of Shida Sokin (1876–1946), a minor figure in the modernist poetry movement, and Mitani Takamasa (1889–1944), an eminent legal philosopher and Christian leader, offer telling examples of the operations of the new cultural geography. As they traveled along career paths prescribed for upward mobility, Shida and Mitani made the trip between provincial