Japan has one of the highest literacy rates in the world. Starting from the Edo period, Japan was no longer a state of conflict, but rather a state of harmony. Warriors’ priorities were to perform tasks as bureaucrats instead of being fighters on the battlefield. The origin of common education originated around this time, but it was not around later in the Edo period where education became more available to women. It is certain that women did not have the same opportunities as their male counterparts.
However, compared to modern perceptions on women’s literacy during this period, women had many opportunities and a lot of them received the same amount of education, as did men. It is hard to conclude the education system in Japan in general, both for men or women. Before the Meiji Restoration, Japan was not a modern nation state, but full of domains subordinate to the military government run by the Tokugawa family.
Although the daimyos (domain heads) has to established residency in Edo, and report to the Bakufu, many domains have local laws and are self-governed in many aspects. Thus, there is no meaning in generalizing Japanese education in the Edo period as a whole. Education varied among women from different areas of Japan. The form of education, and what was considered a full curriculum were widely divided. Women’s education in the Edo period distinguishes from status, class, locality, and language.
All of these factors contribute to the differences in women’s literacy. Women’s education varied among status and class. As samurai and aristocrat women received education dating from earlier periods than commoners. Samurai women can also be divided into those form upper or middle-level samurai household and those from lower level samurai households. In the early Edo period, no formal education was established. The domain itself regulated who needed to attend the domain school.
Only one domain school had ever admitted female students. In Kornicki, Patessio and Rowley’s “Introduction” for the book Female as Subject, it mentions that “only in one domain did the daimyo’s government take any interest in the education of women: in 1841 Tsuyama domain (Okayama Prefecture) set aside a room for commoner women with female teacher to provide instruction both in needlework and in morality by means of such text as Onna daigaku (Greater Learning for Women) and Onna imagawa (Imagawa Letter for Women)” (9).
During this time of the Edo period, school targeted towards the commoners were already common and samurai women were assumed to receive education in their household, thus this domain school was aimed at commoner women. The commoner women of course were separated from the other students. Samurai women compared to commoners had much heavier regulations in their daily lives. As Yamakawa Kikue writes in her book Women of the Mito Domain, samurai women rarely left their household.
Samurai women received most of their education from their fathers or female tutors. The text they had to study differed among their family situation. One of the fundamental reasons that people believed women should be educated was because they wanted to enhance women morality than to enhance women becoming thinkers. Evidence of this is the readings that women had to read as part of their education. Certain books were considered appropriate for female readers. Chinese texts for women were also favored in women’s education.
Those such as Analects, the Classical of Filial Piety, Biographies of Women and Commandments for Women were mentioned by influential sinologist Yamaga Soko citing from Zhu Xi (Kornicki, Patessio and Rowley 9). Most women did not start their education by reading text such as these. While male and female curriculum varied, girls started off learning with the same basics. Dating from 1616, education was common among female aristocrats. This is no a surprise since female aristocrats from earlier periods had already been reading and writing for hundreds of years.
These women would learn “Chinese characters from the Thousand Character Essay and by doing sodoku (a form of rote learning that involved reciting the received Japanese reading of the text aloud in unison) of canonical Chinese text, and their education was not considered complete until they had studies waka composition, Japanese and Chinese texts, and Japanese history” (Kornicki, Patessio and Rowley 9). This is an example only for the very privileged and not common for everyone. Being able to read and write Chinese displayed a high level of literacy.
Many of those texts supposedly enhancing female moral improvement were written in Chinese. In order for these women to learn from these texts, women learned Chinese. This was a trait of women form upper and middle level samurai families. Compared to samurai women, commoners received education for different reasons. Female commoners were educated because they needed some of the skills, especially merchant women in urban areas. Merchant women learned from text that help them succeed in the business world.
Text such as Onna shobai (Commercial Primer for Women) was published targeting explicitly for commerce purposes. “It seems undeniable that this represents the visible side of the provision of commercial education for women in the Edo period. The activities if female entrepreneurs in Osaka such as Tatsuuma Kiyo (1809-1900) were dependent on some form of commercial education, as was the wife of the owner of rapeseed oil business just outside of Kyoto in the early nineteenth century, who as the diary of a clerk reveals, was involved in scrutinizing the accounts of the business” (Kornicki, Patessio and Rowley 13).
These merchant women received education in commerce, and this gave them a considerate amount of power compared to other women. Samurai women, given the higher status, were mostly segregated from the society in general. Although upper and middle level samurai women had both status and wealth, they were dependents of the family head, and education does not helped them have more freedom. Lower level samurai women were likely to receive education in reading and writing for one or two years, and then move on to study at needle school.
Since the lower level samurai did poorly in the later half of the Edo period, women needed to learn more skills that was considered practically and essential to run a household. Compared to merchant women, peasant women’s education was mostly based on the opportunity given. While most merchant women did great financially, like the samurai families, some peasants were wealthy while others were poor. Wealthier peasants were able to afford education, and poor peasants were not able to because they needed to spend their time farming.
Women from poor peasant families were considered an important member of the labor force, and for these families, education was unnecessary, or even a negative influence. “Circumstances were decidedly not favorable for a woman in what is now rural Niigata Prefecture who in 1800 was forced to write an abject letter of apology to her husband and parents-in-law for her selfishness in having used her spare time to learn to write” (Kornicki, Patessio and Rowley 12). Education among rural peasant women was debatable. Courtesans from the pleasure quarters were highly educated in Edo Japan.
Many courtesans excelled in reading and writing because it was necessary for them to entertain their clients. As Kornicki, Patessio and Rowley mentions “ Numerous paintings and prints by Hishikawa Moronobu and other artists in the seventeenth and eighteenth centutries depict courtesans in the act of reading, as shown in Itasaka’s contribution to this volume, and the biographies of leading courtesans suggest than an education in waka composition was a sine qua non” (13). These art pieces that depict educated courtesans could be an idealization of real courtesans of the era.
However, the frequent depiction suggests the great possibility that these courtesans were educated to a certain level. By late Edo period women education had increased rapidly. On the other hand, the gap between male and female school enrollment was still extremely wide. From a record of the current Yamaguchi Prefecture, “the record of entrants runs from 1855 to 1973, and 145 names are listed, 22 of them girls (15 percent of the total); however, all but 5 of the girls were enrolled between 1869 and 1873, so out of a total enrollment of 81 up to 1868, girls represented merely 6 percent” (Kornicki, Patessio and Rowley 13).
The sudden decline in female enrollment was a result of the women’s obligation to domestic chores and farming duties. Some villages have much higher rate of female enrollment when their economy is more diverse. For example, villages that produced silk or cotton had enrollments up to 30 percent. One of the most important factors that varied women’s education was geography. Urban women were likely to be more educated than rural women. Women in Edo and Osaka had opportunity to attend schools, while southern Kyushu and northern Honshu had much lower rates of female school enrollment.
By the late Edo period, records showed that “ a minimum of 176 women were running terakoya in the first half of the nineteenth century and a further six were running shijuku. Of these terakoya run by women, 53 were in Edo, consisting one-tenth of all teachers there; 16 of the proprietors were samurai status while the remainder were not” (Kornicki, Patessio and Rowley 21). The high percentage of these schools located in Edo proves that cities provided more opportunity for women.