Literacy Revisited: Some Reflections on Richard Rubinger's Findings

Abstract

No one has done more than Richard Rubinger in recent years to explore the parameters of literacy in Japan, and his recent article in MN 55:2 (Summer 2000) should raise awareness of an issue that is often taken somewhat for granted but which impinges significantly on our understanding of Meiji society.1 Literacy is an uncommonly slippery issue, but it is not one that can properly be evaded, and Rubinger is to be thanked for having brought it to our attention. At the same time, however, precisely because it is such a slippery issue, there is ample scope for rumination and further debate, and it is in that constructive spirit that I offer here my own thoughts on the matter. In the pages that follow I wish not only to consider the basis of the unexpected conclusion Rubinger came to in his recent article-namely that illiteracy may have been more widespread in Japan at the end of the nineteenth century than has generally been thought-but also to weigh other evidence that is available to us, to consider its implications, and to suggest some lines for further research. As Rubinger has made clear, Japan lacks the range of statistical evidence that has been identified in European societies and exhaustively mined for the light it is thought to cast on premodern literacy. This lack we have to live with, but there is another kind of evidence that is at least worth considering, and that is the writings of Western visitors to Japan. Constantine Vaporis has used these writings in a different context, to consider roads and travel in Tokugawa Japan, for, as he remarks, Native travelers were not as likely to comment unless road conditions were extraordinary, so for evidence about the normal state of roads we have no recourse but to turn to foreign accounts.2 Here I will examine some of the things such accounts have to say in regard to Japanese literacy in the nineteenth century.

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