mission members were already highly influential politicians, young men
acting on a national mandate (the Charter Oath) “to seek knowledge
throughout the world.” The mission was methodically or ga nized, carried out
on a broad scale, and long—it visited fourteen Western countries in eigh-
teen months. Goals were clearly defined: first, to make the case for treaty
revision and, second, to study best practices in a range of fields— from naval
science to medicine, manufacturing, school administration, law, and methods
of governance— and then return to Japan and adapt the lessons learned to
the Japa nese cultural setting. The men with firsthand experience abroad
were the ones charged with enacting change in Japan. They launched a pro-
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Japa nese Lessons for a Modernizing China, 1895–1937
cess that moved forward experimentally, with multiple outside models
considered and hundreds of foreign advisers hired to work within the Japa-
nese bureaucracy. There were missteps and disagreements. Yet the leaders
were solidly committed to a national wealth and strength strategy that had
at its core building a world- class system of education. Japan’s decision in
1872, at the opening bell of the Meiji era, to fund universal education had a
profound ripple effect, spreading new know- how to the next generation, the
most talented of whom were selected for further training abroad or simply
worked to promote the spirit of innovation at home.
It was this study- tour mentality, an openness to “what works” elsewhere,
that Zhang, Liu, and their Japa nese counter parts saw as key to promoting
modernization in China. Zhang had talked about this with Konoe Atsu-
maro, and it was part of the New Policies thinking. But unlike Japan thirty
years earlier, China lacked a unified central leadership to fully back the idea.
On the contrary, in the post- Boxer years China’s center was increasingly
para lyzed by dueling po liti cal factions, Han- Manchu and conservative-
progressive, with each defining reform differently. There was also the ever-
present prob lem of financing, which was particularly burdensome owing to
the drain from Boxer indemnity payments. As a result, the study tours
China dispatched to Japan tended to be or ga nized locally, mostly by pro-
vincial officials in accordance with their own, not necessarily national, de-
velopment priorities. This scattershot approach, in a country of 400 mil-
lion, twelve times the population of Japan, run by only 40,000 bureaucrats
whose jobs were being undermined by changes in the recruitment system,
is hardly to be wondered at. What is surprising is the sudden change in at-
titude toward Japan, long disparaged as culturally second rate but now ad-
mired for its innovative capacity and regarded as a pos si ble model for
China’s development.
Evidence from a collection of trip reports from 1901 to 1906 suggests that
500 to 1,000 Chinese officials participated in study tours to Japan during
those years alone. The total for the entire 1901–1911 period is likely to be at
least twice that number, especially considering that in many cases no formal
reports were published and distributed. For example, according to news-
paper accounts, in May 1901, the vice president of China’s Board of Revenue
and Population went to Japan to study Japan’s financial institutions and po-
licing system. Six months later, he was the imperial court’s choice to head a
. 149 .
china and japan
del e ga tion to Japan to apologize for the murder of the diplomat Sugiyama
and other Boxer crimes against Japa nese citizens in Beijing. Ad hoc visits
triggered by crises multiplied after Chinese students in Japan became im-
patient with clampdowns by the authorities beginning in 1902. So too
did study tours focusing on specialized subject areas. Particularly note-
worthy were Chinese del e ga tions sent to Japan in 1905 and 1908 for brief-
ings on the Meiji Constitution, the model the Qing court was using as it
slowly transitioned from absolutist rule to a constitutional monarchy.
Study- tour participants typically spent two to three months in Japan.
Some were highly placed educators and businessmen, others ordinary
teachers and agricultural specialists. Their overall goal was to get a firsthand
look at a successfully modernizing society, in par tic u lar, to study the piv-
otal role of universal public education in preparing a workforce capable of
driving rapid economic growth. Programming for the visits was done from
the Japan side. Each official visitor was put in contact with essentially the
same people: government officials, especially those from the Foreign Office,
educators and school principals from the Ministry of Education, China-
Japan friendship groups, and bankers and businessmen. The typical pro-
gram focused on visits to schools at all levels and of all specializations, with
additional time spent on tours of prisons, police stations, factories, banks,
and, in 1903, the Osaka Exhibition, a miniature version of the then popu lar
international events known as world’s fairs. The tours were conducted in
Chinese.
Orchestrating it all was Kano Jigoro, president of Tokyo Teachers Col-
lege, host of the first Chinese students to arrive in Japan in 1896. Educating
Chinese students was high on his personal agenda. By 1901 when the New
Policies were announced, he had already guided the first batch of Chinese
students to graduation, had enrolled another group in a special Teachers
College course, and was finalizing plans to open the Kobun Institute, a new
school exclusively for Chinese students and designed specifically to get them
up to speed in math and science. In the summer of 1902, Kano received a
four- month grant from the Foreign Ministry to visit China, where he lec-
tured dozens of officials, including Zhang Zhidong, on the basics of peda-
gogy and how to motivate students. Study- tour participants traveling to
Tokyo were given the same set of Kano briefings, with the additional fea-
ture of actual site visits to schools. What Kano sought to impress on them
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Japa nese Lessons for a Modernizing China, 1895–1937
was the urgency of making elementary education universal in China, the
need to expand teacher training, and the importance of developing a cur-
riculum emphasizing practical knowledge, not simply the humanities.
Another prominent educator on every one’s study- tour list was Kano’s
colleague Shimoda Utako, head of the Peeresses School, proponent of a
modern Asian / Japa nese style of women’s education centered on “good
wives, wise mothers,” a concept that had grown out of the home economics
training Shimoda had received in England during the two years she was
there before the 1894–1895 Sino- Japanese War. Shimoda was a high- profile
figure, much talked about in the press. She was the founder, chief fundraiser,
and spokesperson for the Imperial Women’s Association, a lobbying group
calling for not only a new, Asian, modern curriculum but also job training
for low- income women entering new twentie
th- century jobs. Her books
were being translated into Chinese. In the summer of 1900 she had a meeting
with Sun Yat- sen, who reportedly used the occasion to make an appeal for
funds for his revolutionary campaign.
The typical study tour started with a briefing at the Education Ministry,
where one can imagine Kano Jigoro giving a summary of Japan’s thirty years
of experience with educational development, starting with the government’s
bold decision in 1872 to build from the ground up a nationwide system of
schools for both boys and girls. By 1893, 75 percent of school- age boys and
40 percent of school- age girls were enrolled in four years of compulsory
schooling, figures that were comparable to those in Eu rope and the United
States at the time. Data of this sort did not generally make it into the study-
tour reports, nor did the report writers elaborate on Japan’s debates over
educational policy, its sequence of experiments with diff er ent Western
models, the pro cess of building a new university, the use of foreign advisers,
and the like that had worked together to produce the school system as it
looked in the early 1900s. Emphasis was more on the results than on the
difficult road to reaching them. Appended to most reports were detailed
orga nizational charts of the pre sent school system, sample curricula, and
descriptions of the planning and management functions of the Ministry of
Education.
But the study- tour reports were by no means all about charts and dia-
grams. They also conveyed the sense of excitement participants felt on first
seeing a modern school system in operation. “Primary education is national,
. 151 .
china and japan
universal education without distinction between rich and poor, clever and
simple,” one official wrote. “Every one is required to attend school; no one
lacks this daily necessity of life.”6 They were impressed that “universal” meant
extending schooling even to the disabled. Virtually all visitors were given a
tour of the Tokyo School for the Blind and Deaf, where they saw children
reading using a system of modified Braille. “The nation wastes no talent,”
one visitor remarked. “With this approach how can education not but ‘raise
the country.’ ”7
“Raising the country,” or, in Meiji terms, creating wealth and power, was
an explicit goal of education, visitors were told. And integral to this was the
fostering of patriotism, love of country, and loyalty to the emperor from the
earliest grades in school. Japan began promoting patriotism in the 1880s,
and the loyalty doctrine was finalized in the Imperial Rescript of Educa-
tion issued in 1890. For the Chinese, whose terms of reference centered on
understanding ways to preserve the imperial regime, witnessing pupils be-
having in a disciplined, orderly way, cheerfully bowing to the portrait of
Emperor Meiji displayed on classroom walls, gladdened their hearts. They
were quick to point out to readers that this nationalism, nurtured through
the school system, was meant to preserve Japa nese values, not to supplant
them with Eu ro pean alternatives, as some Chinese educators were inclined
to do. Other than their admiring comments on Japa nese nationalism, Chi-
nese visitors had little to say about Meiji politics, the role of po liti cal par-
ties, debates in the Diet, or the function of an active press.
Study-tour reports devoted as much space to describing educational
practices as educational purposes— such things as curriculum choice,
teaching methods, and school equipment. Whereas schools in China were
set up solely for instruction in classical subjects, in Japan “what is taught
has been extended to military subjects and trade to the arts, agriculture,
music, sewing, teaching the blind to read, the deaf to speak, dance, and phys-
ical education,” one official wrote.8 Visitors were impressed with the em-
phasis placed on educating the young for the future world of work, and how
this played into methods of content delivery through applied rather than
rote learning. They described spacious, well- lit classrooms and the use of
modern equipment. Science labs caught the attention of groups touring
Tokyo University, as did the size of the library, with its 170,000 volumes in
Chinese and Japa nese plus 140,000 volumes in En glish and other Eu ro pean
. 152 .
Japa nese Lessons for a Modernizing China, 1895–1937
languages. Apart from classroom equipment, other new technology on view
in “modern” Tokyo— trolleys, streetlights, and telephones— received little
mention in the trip reports. More space was given to enthusiastic descrip-
tions of the Ueno Zoo; there was nothing like it in China.
The development of new schools was not the exclusive focus of the
Chinese study trips, though some ele ment of education and training was al-
ways included on the tour agendas. At their request, some Chinese officials
were taken to farming areas to talk with specialists about purchases of farm
implements, to compare notes on scientific sericulture, and to get a firsthand
look at Japan’s agricultural extension system and how rural schools handled
funding shortages. Chinese businessmen were given another variant of the
standard tour. Well- known industrialist Zhou Xuexi received his entrepre-
neurial start on a Yuan Shikai– sponsored 1903 mission to Japan, where he
was given a fast- paced tour of financial agencies, the Mitsui Bussan com-
pany, printing presses, schools, a copper- smelting factory, and a glassmaking
plant. “Schools and factories, managed by the people themselves, have sud-
denly multiplied more than tenfold within the last ten- odd years,” he
wrote. “The speed of pro gress surpasses anything yet seen in the world. . . .
Nearly every foreign product in daily use is now also manufactured in Japan.
What’s more, Japan is now shipping these manufactured commodities to
Eu rope and Amer i ca as part of its strug gle for economic rights.”9 Cultural
borrowing was the secret to success, Zhou was told by his Japa nese hosts.
If China could get its financial house in order, they said, it would be the
strongest nation in the world.
Chinese visitors were optimists when it came to the potential benefits
of “opening up” to the outside world through Japan. For most of them, a
rung or two below Zhang Zhidong in rank, the development challenges
they faced— institutional reform, economic growth, social betterment—
were not only of academic interest but were urgent local issues demanding
attention. What they found in Japan were workable models in diverse fields,
but especially in education and training— the cornerstone of all programs
of change, anywhere, anytime. They were wholeheartedly positive about
what they saw, notwithstanding a tinge of “anything you can do, we can do
better.” Their reporting on Japan’s best practices was precise and detailed,
undoubtedly providing a boost to fellow officials already engaged in pro-
moting the development of new schools at home.
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china and japan
Japa ne
se in China as Advisers and Teachers
As study tours to Japan multiplied, a counterpart program of hiring
Japa nese advisers and teachers to work in China got under way. This, too,
was jointly agreed to by the Japa nese government and Chinese provincial
leaders. Starting with about 20 teachers and advisers in 1901, the number
jumped to 150 the following year. By 1909, according to a Japa nese Foreign
Ministry survey, some 550 Japa nese advisers and teachers were working
in China, more than from any other nation. The group also included women;
the rec ords for 1902–1912 show there were about 50 Japa nese women in
teaching posts in China during the de cade. Though few in number, these
Japa nese hires, male and female, had the potential to make a significant
contribution. For one thing, they were operating in a receptive policy envi-
ronment that, for reasons of cost, communication, and pushback against
the West, favored Japan as a source of technical assistance. For another,
advisers serving in se nior posts were hired precisely to lend their prestige,
knowledge, and management skills to effect broad change. Even ordinary
teachers in local areas often had influence beyond their numbers, and
their new teaching methodologies, which were regarded as superior, were
quickly copied.
Both sides participated in decisions to hire Japa nese experts. Tokyo
vetted the candidates and proposed their names to Chinese officials, cen-
tral and local, who then made the decisions and issued the invitations. The
two sides negotiated contract terms, including travel costs, housing allow-
ances, and salaries, which were paid by the Chinese. While a mea sure of
idealism and even excitement played into decisions to work in China, it was
in plain terms a job that a candidate was applying for, a source of income,
so salary was a key consideration. Just as the Japa nese paid high wages to
the foreign advisers they hired to work in Japan, so, too, did the Chinese
pay Japa nese teachers and advisers well, although less than their Eu ro pean
and American counter parts. The standard contract was short term, with
renewal subject to a per for mance review, a clause that enabled Chinese em-
ployers to maintain control over the people they hired. In a word, the Chi-
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