in pursuit of cultural acclaim. Through their peregrinations along the tracks of higher education, intellectuals such as Shida and Mitani laid down circuits of knowledge production and exchange. They also established personal and institutional networks that knit the new cultural geography into a social web. Not only did these intellectual circuits serve as vectors for the diffusion of metropolitan trends to the provinces, but they also did the reverse. They created an intellectual feeder system that channeled the innovations of provincial cultural production into the metropolis.
After studying literature at Tokyo University, Shida Sokin came to teach at Okayama’s Sixth High, where he remained for almost twenty years. As a beloved professor of Japanese literature, he mentored many accomplished poets, including one of Okayama’s most famous sons, Uchida Hyakken.11 During his time at Tokyo University, Shida had come under the influence of Masaoka Shiki, the great naturalist poet and founder of the modern haiku movement. Through disciples like Shida Sokin, the new haiku movement established strong provincial links and spread throughout Japan. Indeed, Shida’s energetic promotion of haiku poetry clubs made them a cornerstone of Okayama’s literary scene.12 In spite of his established position as a leading figure in Okayama intellectual circles, Shida quit in 1925, after a long and successful career at Okayama’s public higher school, to take a post at a private higher school in Tokyo—Seikei Higher School, forerunner of the prominent private college in Kichijōji. Since public schools were more prestigious than private schools in the prewar context, the only reason this made any sense as a career move was because it took Shida back to Tokyo. Critical as it was to the socialization and acculturation of Japan’s intellectual establishment, the intellectual life of the provincial higher school simply could not compete with the cultural attractions of Tokyo.
Much like Shida, the scholar Mitani Takamasa exerted great influence on local intellectual and religious movements in Okayama and served as a cultural bridge to the metropolis. While a student at Tokyo Imperial University, Mitani joined Uchimura Kanzō’s “nonchurch” movement (mukyōkai). When he came to teach at Sixth High, he brought this school of religious practice to Okayama. Though he became famous only after he returned to Tokyo to teach at First High, during his time in Okayama he introduced Sixth High students to the latest legal debates in Tokyo and Europe and to what later became his hallmark blend of ethics, law, and philosophy.13 The prominent place Tokyo intellectuals such as Shida and Mitani occupy in local histories testifies to their importance both as leaders of local cultural movements and as conduits for the import of metropolitan intellectual trends into the provinces.
As the stories of Shida and Mitani illustrate, the educational tracking system created a strong material basis to Tokyo-centrism through the circulation of knowledge and human capital. Yet these powerful channels of social circulation and their impact on the way people thought of the relationship between Tokyo and the provinces masked a more complex reality about the movement of ideas and the intellectual formation of scholars. While Tokyo was undoubtedly the single greatest source of academic pedigree, the “Tokyo intellectuals” who staffed Japan’s provincial schools had in fact been provincial transplants to the capital. In this sense Tokyo represented only a single phase of an intellectual biography that circulated scholars through various locales; these diverse cultural experiences cumulatively constituted their intellectual formation.
The biographies of professors at Okayama’s Sixth High show the common Tokyo polishing but also the typical path of education and employment that rotated cultural elites back and forth between the provinces and the capital. Both Shida and Mitani grew up outside the capital, Shida in Toyama and Mitani in Kanagawa. The professor of Chinese literature at Sixth High, Mitsuda Shinzō, was raised in Fukushima; the English teachers Sasaki Kuni and Sangū Makoto came from Shizuoka and Yamagata. Sekiyama Toshio and Fujimori Narikichi, both of whom taught German literature, grew up in Toyama and Kanagawa, respectively. Japanese history professor Matsumoto Hikojirō and philosophy professor Takahashi Satomi were from Aomori and Yamagata in the Northeast.14 In other words, virtually none of the academics hired from Tokyo were actually raised in the capital. This suggested a more complex, heterogeneous intellectual formation than their Tokyo branding implied. Though their scholarship and artistic production were associated with the Tokyo pedigree, this was the capstone of a long period of education and socialization, all of which took place outside the metropolis.
This included the critical period of higher school, which for those born outside the metropolis almost invariably took place in a provincial city. As Donald Roden notes in his engaging study of Japanese higher schools in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, these schools were the equivalent of present-day undergraduate institutions. Indeed, after World War Two many converted into four-year colleges. Prestigious and exclusive, they prepared a select group of students for the imperial university. Passing through the gates of the higher school signaled entry into the intellectual elite. The Japanese government designed the higher school to provide—like the French lycée, the German gymnasium, and the British public school on which it was modeled—“the highest level of general education for young men” and “dedicated [them] to the perfection of national morality.”15 As the instrument of molding the higher-school gentleman, these schools developed a set of distinctive customs that included collective life in self-governing dormitories, hazing rituals, school sports, and school magazines. Such practices became the hallmark of the higher school experience and defined the culture of the student elite. They made the higher school a context for intense sociality and socialization, the formation of a school ethos, and the establishment of old school ties between classmates. The cloistered life, the merging of private and scholastic experience, and expectations of mutual assistance based on hierarchical junior-senior relationships meant that higher-school bonds were particularly strong and enduring. Not only did they demarcate social pathways that took the student elite far beyond their school years, but the hothouse atmosphere of the higher schools also incubated the most powerful intellectual tendencies of the time.16
Many scholars whose educational trajectory took them from higher school in a provincial city to university in the capital found themselves retracing these same steps in pursuit of career advances. In both senses, then, cities such as Okayama became way stations for aspirants to national acclaim. The life course of writer Sasaki Kuni (1883–1964), who made a brief sojourn in Okayama, was typical in this regard. Born and raised in Shizuoka, Sasaki moved to Tokyo to study literature at Meiji Gakuin. He left Tokyo for his first job, a teaching post at Okayama’s Sixth High, where he taught English literature. But he found a way to return to Tokyo, landing a position at the prestigious private Keiō University. It was during his time at Keiō that he achieved renown for his translations of Mark Twain’s humorous fiction. The move to the capital was thus a prerequisite for Sasaki’s recognition as a member of the elite fraternity of writers known as the bundan.
The life of doctor and poet Inoue Michiyasu traced out a similar peregrination. Inoue was raised in Hyōgo prefecture and went to Tokyo to study medicine at Tokyo Imperial University. He took a job at Okayama Medical College but returned to Tokyo, where he opened a private practice and achieved some fame as a poet. In the meantime, his time spent in Tokyo nurturing university connections eventually paid off with an appointment as advisor to the imperial family. Others also used their time in Okayama as a stepping-stone to greater things. Both Gumma-born Aragi Torasaburō, who taught at the Medical School, and Fukuoka-born Matsui Moto’oki, professor of chemistry at Sixth High, went on to become presidents of Kyoto University.17
For all these men, career advancement dictated a departure from Okayama. Ambitious students likewise saw provincial cities as way stations on the road to the university. Though Kyoto, too, was a university town—and by 1918, imperial universities in Sendai, Fukuoka, and Sapporo were other options—most set their sights on Tokyo, where the most prestigious and greatest number of universities were concentrated. The allure of the metropolis deprived provincial cities of local talent, creaming off the men and women who would go on to achieve fame and fortune in the capital. Okayama’s most renowned intellectuals and artists trod this path, leaving the prefectural capital after higher school and never moving back.
The roster of Okayama-born members of the Tokyo literati included a founding figure in western philosophical studies, Ōnishi Hajime (1864–1900), as well as the writers Emi Suiin (1865–1934),