132937

The Society for Japanese Studies
Social Knowledge, Cultural Capital, and the New Middle Class in Japan, 1895-1912
Author(s): David R. Ambaras
Source: The Journal of Japanese Studies, Vol. 24, No. 1 (Winter, 1998), pp. 1-33
Published by: The Society for Japanese Studies
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DAVID R. AMBARAS
Social Knowledge, Cultural Capital, and the New

Middle Class in Japan, 1895-1912
Abstract: In the late Meiji era, new-middle-class reformers articulated a vision

of society in which they functioned as the principal promoters of national prog-
ress. As experts in fields including social work, education, and psychiatry, and
as critics and activists, members of this knowledge-bearing class sought to de-
fine social problems, influence state policies, and reorganize the everyday lives
of the Japanese people. The activities of the new middle class demonstrate that
the dynamics of power in modern Japan cannot be described in terms of either
a unilinear flow from rulers to ruled or a simple dichotomy between state and
society.
If the decade following the fall of the Tokugawa shogunate witnessed the
dismantling of many aspects of the early modern Japanese status system, the
roughly 15 years following the Sino-Japanese War of 1894-95 saw several
crucial elements of Japan's modern industrial class society come into being.
The Sino-Japanese and Russo-Japanese Wars sparked Japan's industrial
revolution and the rapid urbanization that it entailed. Historians of this pe-
riod have examined in great detail the rise of the urban commercial and
industrial bourgeoisie and the birth of the industrial proletariat. They have
paid less attention, however, to another significant social formation that
arose at this time: the new, urbanized, middle class of white-collar workers
who staffed government agencies, private corporations, and other special-
ized institutions. This new middle class was especially prominent in Tokyo,
the center of bureaucratic and intellectual life in modern Japan. And it was
members of this new middle class who sought increasingly, and with in-
creasing success, to shape the values and policies of the modern Japanese
nation-state.
I wish to thank the following for their helpful comments: Sheldon Garon, David Howell,
Arno Mayer, Elizabeth Frierson, Jordan Sand, Dani Botsman, the members of the New York
Area Modern Japanese History Workshop, and four anonymous readers.
Journal of Japanese Studies, 24: 1

? 1998 Society for Japanese Studies
2 Journal of Japanese Studies 24:1 (1998)
Many historians have tended to dismiss the intellectual and technical
middle classes as, in the words of one writer, an "intermediate ruling stra-
tum" who function merely as instruments of the "state ruling stratum"
(kokka shihai s5).1 Members of the new middle class, however, were by no
means passive instruments of a superordinate ruling class. On the contrary,
the activities of the new middle class demonstrate that the dynamics of
power and patterns of authority in modern Japan cannot be described in
terms of either a unilinear flow from rulers to ruled or a simple dichotomy
between state and society.
Beginning in the last decades of the Meiji era, new-middle-class reform-
ers articulated a vision of society in which they functioned as the principal
promoters of national progress. They not only took the initiative in address-
ing the numerous "social problems" that appeared to plague Japan, but in
fact defined specific issues such as working-class conditions, juvenile de-
pendence and delinquency, and licensed prostitution as "problems" and
worked to shape responses to those problems. As experts in fields including
social work, penology, psychology, and education, and as social critics and
activists, members of the new middle class sought with varying degrees of
success to influence state policies and programs and to reconstitute the daily
practices of the Japanese people. These new-middle-class experts were in
fact responsible for developing many of the techniques for the policing of
society and of families that supported the social structures of the Japanese
nation-state. While by no means a politically unified body, this new middle
class nonetheless formed a critical locus of power in the governing system
of the new Japan.2
The new middle class that emerged at the turn of the century incorpo-
1. Matsunaga Shozo, "Shakai mondai no hassei," Iwanami koza Nihon rekishi, Vol. 16
(Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1976), p. 245.
2. A few historians have recently recognized this development. Mariko Asano Tamanoi,
for example, defines the Meiji state as "the so-called enlightened experts responsible for the
national destiny" and includes among this group not only bureaucrats but also "journalists,
intellectuals, and other public figures." Tamanoi, "Songs as Weapons: The Culture and History
of Komori (Nursemaids) in Modern Japan," Journal of Asian Studies, Vol. 50, No. 4 (Novem-
ber 1991), pp. 795-96. Writing about a somewhat later period, Sheldon Garon has noted the
emergence of a "middle-class state" in Japan. According to Garon, by the 1920s, "higher civil
servants had much in common with members of the new middle class," because "both groups
advanced primarily on the basis of mastering Western knowledge," and because "bureaucrats
and their families adopted the middle-class lifestyles that were associated with Westernization
and urbanization during the early twentieth century." Like Tamanoi's study of policies toward
komori nursemaids, Garon's research reveals cases of "high-ranking officials taking on middle-
class commitments to modernizing the beliefs, daily habits, and gender relations of ordinary
people." Garon, "Rethinking Modernization and Modernity in Modern Japanese History: A
Focus on State-Society Relations," Journal of Asian Studies, Vol. 53, No. 2 (May 1994),
pp. 351-52.
For the term "governing system," see Alan Dawley, Struggles for Justice: Social Respon-
sibility and the Liberal State (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 1991), pp. 3 -4.
Ambaras: New Middle Class 3
rated civil servants, professionals, educators, journalists, managers, and
office workers.3 Their educational backgrounds and occupational careers
distinguished this group from the "old middle class" of small-scale busi-
ness owners and manufacturers, who remained a significant presence in both
urban and rural areas.4 While stratified in terms of income and status, the
new middle class comprised, in Desley Deacon's formulation, "workers
who depend[ed] on the sale of educational, technical, and social skills, or
'cultural capital.'" As intellectual workers, they were "the chief interpret-
ers, creators, and disseminators of knowledge." I The key to the influence of
the new middle class lay not in their numbers, but in their use of this cultural
capital and knowledge.
This knowledge is best understood as "social knowledge," because it
was produced and deployed under specific social and institutional condi-
tions, and because it functioned not simply to support a given social order,
but in fact to constitute that order.6 The circulation of social knowledge was
thus a central element in the formation of power relationships in modern
Japan. As the sociologists Dietrich Rueschemeyer and Tlieda Skocpol have
noted, the rise of industrial capitalism and modern states "worked ... to
promote the increasing use of knowledge for governmental policymaking,
the growth of institutions concerned with producing knowledge, and the
3. For a cursory discussion, see Morioka Kiyomi, "Toshi kas6 to shin chiikans6: ie, ka-
zoku, katei," Shtkan Asahi hyakka Nihon no rekishi, No. 112 (1988), p. 62. According to
Ohashi Ryilken, between 1909 and 1914, the number of persons listed as doctors, technicians,
members of the free professions, teachers, and religious workers grew from 631,000 to
671,000; the number of members of the military and career civil servants (kanri) from 680,000
to 840,000; and the number of noncareer lower-level civil servants (yatoi) from 152,000 to
385,000. Ohashi Ryilken, Nihon no kaikyt kosei (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1979), cited in Saito
Michiko, Hani Motoko: shogai to shis5 (Tokyo, Domesu Shuppan, 1988), pp. 47-48. On the
education of and employment opportunities for young aspirants to new-middle-class status,
see Earl H. Kinmonth, The Self-Made Man in Meiji Japanese Thought: From Samurai to Sala-
ryman (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981).
4. Studies of the old middle class are also rare. The protracted political movements by
small businesses to abolish the business tax have been studied in detail in Eguchi Keiichi, Toshi
shM burujoa undoshi no kenkya (Tokyo: Miraisha, 1976). In English, see Andrew Gordon,
Labor and Imperial Democracy in Prewar Japan (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1991), chapters 1, 2, and 9; and Earl H. Kinmonth, "The Impact of Military Procurements on
the Old Middle Classes in Japan, 1931-1941," Japan Forum, Vol. 4, No. 2 (October 1992),
pp. 247-65.
5. Desley Deacon, The State, the New Middle Class and Women Workers 1830-1930
(Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1989), p. 4. For other overviews of theories of the new
middle class, see Bob Carter, Capitalism, Class Conflict and the New Middle Class (London:
Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1985); and Richard Sobel, The White Collar Working Class: From
Structure to Politics (New York, Praeger, 1989).
6. Robert Dingwall, "Introduction," in Robert Dingwall and Philip Lewis, eds., The So-
ciology of the Professions: Doctors, Lawyers, and Others (New York: St. Martin's Press,
1983), p. 12; Dietrich Rueschemeyer, "Professional Autonomy and the Social Control of Ex-
pertise," in ibid., p. 38.
4 Journal of Japanese Studies 24:1(1998)
enhanced influence of elites deploying secular knowledge claims." Examples
of these developments in Europe and North America include the growing
uses of social surveys and statistics in dealing with poverty and unemploy-
ment, and the activities of policy study groups such as the Fabian Society
and the Verein fur Sozialpolitik.7
In late Meiji Japan as well, the state and private capital increasingly
recognized the importance of various technologies that promised solutions
to the problems of socializing workers and citizens, alleviating the tensions
associated with socioeconomic dislocations, and otherwise managing mar-
ginal elements of the population. Through their production and dissemina-
tion of relevant social knowledge, new-middle-class professionals estab-
lished their authority in a wide range of fields and increasingly defined what
Robert Dingwall has called "the patterns of public demand and response"
to their work. Such professionals, like those in England and the United
States analyzed by Dingwall, not only "presume[d] to tell the rest of society
what [was] good and right for it; they ... also set the very terms of thinking
about problems which [fell] in their domain[s]." 8
In the remainder of this paper, I trace the emergence of a self-con-
sciously middle-class-centered vision of society in the years between the
end of the Sino-Japanese War and the end of the Meiji era and offer ex-
amples of how middle-class reformers positioned themselves as authorities
in the modern Japanese polity.
Early Meiji Discourses on the Middle Class
One of the most revolutionary aspects of the Meiji Restoration was the
abolition of the early modern status system. More specifically, the elimina-
tion of the privileges of the ruling warrior class and of the official ideology
that posited a natural order led by that class opened the field of government,
in theory at least, to men of ability regardless of their birth. At the same
time, the incorporation of Japan into the modern capitalist world system,
together with the introduction of liberal and social Darwinian ideologies,
led to a revaluation of the economy as a sphere of activity that was not only
legitimate but also of primary significance for the rise and fall of individuals
and nations.
This reconfiguration of ideological underpinnings was central to the de-
velopment of the modern Japanese nation-state. At the same time, the polit-
ical, social, and intellectual transformation that it entailed led many Japa-
nese to search for a new class that could serve as the mainstay of the system.
For some 30 years, Meiji writers, critics, and activists sought to define the
7. Dietrich Rueschemeyer and Theda Skocpol, "Conclusion," in Rueschemeyer and

Skocpol, eds., States, Social Knowledge, and the Origins of Modern Social Policies (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1996); quotation from pp. 296 -97.
8. Dingwall, "Introduction," in The Sociology of the Professions, p. 5.
"backbone" of the new Japan.9 During the 1 870s and early 1 880s, conserv-
atives such as the oligarch Iwakura Tomomi held that the samurai remained
the bearers of all that was good and important among the Japanese people.
Others, including a number of the intellectuals who met in the Meirokusha
and elsewhere, recognized the importance of a society composed of autono-
mous, independent individuals. In concrete terms, "civilization and enlight-
enment" thinkers, as well as early leaders of the movement for popular
rights, saw not only the samurai but also the wealthy, educated stratum of
merchants and peasants as the people most qualified to lead the nation. 10
Still, during this period the samurai remained the primary pool from
which positions of responsibility were filled, and they constituted the over-
whelming majority of students in the new institutions of higher education.
Many of these samurai came from families that had provided what one
scholar has called "the highly literate service personnel of the late Toku-
gawa era." These "service samurai" valued education and the importation
of new knowledge and technologies, were often critical of the prodigality
of the upper class of samurai, and were raised in a culture in which self-
worth was measured in terms of service to the whole community.11 It
was thus natural that this group should see itself as the vanguard of national
progress.
By the mid-1880s, however, it was the wealthy peasants (gon5) who
emerged as a new ideal type of national backbone. In the Tokugawa period,
the golnol had taken initiatives to develop new agricultural techniques, new
commercial networks, and local industries such as silk, weaving, and soy
sauce brewing. As local elites, the gon1 had valued education and personal
cultivation, and they constituted a reading public for works including the
agricultural manuals of Okura Nagatsune and his peers and the nativist texts
of writers such as Hirata Atsutane. In the closing decades of the Tokugawa
regime, these local elites had also promoted economic rehabilitation, moral
reform, and diligence and thrift movements such as those associated with
Ninomiya Sontoku.12 During the turbulent first decades after the Meiji Res-
9. The terms that authors used varied, but included haikotsu (backbone), chfiken (main-
stay), and chashin (center or core).
10. This is stated most explicitly in Itagaki Taisuke, Goto Shojiro, and Soejima Taneomi,
"Kato Hiroyuki ni kotauru sho," Nisshin shin jishi, No. 232 (February 20, 1874), reprinted in
Toriumi Yasushi, Nihon kindaishi kogi: Meiji rikkensei no keisei to sono rinen (Tokyo: Tokyo
Daigaku Shuppankai, 1988), p. 301.
11. Thomas M. Huber, The Revolutionary Origins of Modern Japan (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 1981), pp. 214-17; quotation from p. 215.
12. See, for example, Denda Isao, Golnol (Tokyo: Kyoikusha, 1989); Thomas C. Smith,
"Okura Nagatsune and the Technologists," in Thomas C. Smith, Native Sources of Japanese
Industrialization, 1750-1920 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), pp. 173-98;
Ito Tasaburo, Som5 no kokugaku (Tokyo: Meicho Shuppan, 1982); and David L. Howell,
"Hard Times in the Kanto: Economic Change and Village Life in Late Tokugawa Japan,"
Modern Asian Studies, Vol. 23, No. 2 (May 1989), pp. 359-68.
toration, gini took the lead in promoting local education, developing new
industries, and stabilizing and improving the livelihoods of their community
members, toward whom they often assumed a paternalistic sense of superi-
ority and responsibility.13
The gini's sense of importance to the nation only grew after the Resto-
ration. Through their leadership in the production and processing of silk and
tea, they developed an awareness of themselves as the primary earners of
the foreign exchange with which Japan's "rich nation and strong army"
were to be built. 14 The gin6 continued their traditional role as importers and
practitioners of new knowledge in their communities and saw the new ideas
of "civilization and enlightenment" as a perfect conceptual rationale for
them to pursue education and to assert themselves on the national stage."
By 1880, in fact, wealthy and middling farmers had supplanted the former
samurai as the principal force in the movement for popular rights and were
also leading members of the new prefectural assemblies.16 To Tokutomi
SohM, editor of the journal Kokumin no tomo, and himself a descendant of a
glnli family in Kumamoto, these "country gentlemen" (inaka shinshi) com-
bined a share in local power with knowledge, sufficient wealth, and virtues
rooted in rural society. This combination of assets, he argued, made them
the true middle class. 17
Despite his hope that the country gentlemen would lead Japan into the
next phase of social evolution, by the early 1890s Tokutomi had come to
bemoan the "decadence of the middle class":
Some become village officials, have commerce with county and prefectural
officials, and ... are suddenly officialized. Some become members of the
prefectural assembly, or of a standing committee, live part or half the year
in a small provincial city, and become immediately citified, which means
that they have gone soft. Some become Diet members, join a petition com-
mittee, or become delegates. Recommended by others or on their own ini-
tiative, they leave for Tokyo and are instantly urbanized. Or rather it is the
opposite, because they are urbanized, they move to Tokyo.
13. Denda, Gono; Denda Isao, Kindai Nihon keizai shiso5 no kenkyu: Nihon no kindaika
to chiho5 keizai (Tokyo: Miraisha, 1962); Neil Waters, Japan's Local Pragmatists: The Transi-
tion from Bakumatsu to Meiji in the Kawasaki Region (Cambridge, Mass: Council on East
Asian Studies, Harvard University, 1983).
14. Denda, Gcn5, pp. 103-48.
15. Hirota Masaki, "Bunmei kaika to zairai shiso," Rekishigaku Kenkyuikai and Ni-
honshi Kenkyuikai eds., Koza Nihonshi, Vol. 5 (Tokyo: Tokyo Daigaku Shuppankai, 1975),
pp. 270-71.
16. Nagai Hideo, Jiyu minken, Vol. 25 of Nihon no rekishi (Tokyo: Shogakkan, 1981),
pp. 78-85.
17. Tokutomi Soho, "Inmitsu naru seijijo no hensen," Kokumin no tomo, Nos. 15-19
(February-April 1888); and Tokutomi Soho, "Chuito kaikyu! no daraku," Kokumin no tomo,
No. 172 (November 13, 1892), p. 5.
Extravagance and license then ruined these men, who sought occupations
as "clerks at the gun office, tax collectors, police, usurers, political hangers-
on, pettifoggers, journalists, and soshi." 18
Yet what Tokutomi saw as the corruption of his gentry class can be in-
terpreted as a new stage in the consolidation of an urban-led, bureaucratized,
capitalist society in which clerks, tax collectors, police agents, and journal-
ists (if not usurers, pettifoggers, and political thugs) played an integral role
along with other intellectual workers, and into which they were integrated
as various strata of the new middle class.19 Tokutomi's early vision of na-
tional development may have been blocked by the political and economic
transformations of the 1890s, but his country gentlemen were still produc-
ing, albeit in modified form, the personnel who would drive Japan's modern-
ization. By the turn of the century, commoners, in particular those of gcnc
background, constituted the majority of students in the nation's middle and
higher schools, from which youths progressed to universities and profes-
sional careers.20
Although Tokutomi's vision was focused on the fortunes of a specific
historical social formation, other writers held a less clear view of exactly
who the new mainstay class was to be and restricted their arguments to
generalized prescriptive categories. Fukuzawa Yukichi, whose Kei6 Gijuku
college had come to train more students of commoner origin than of samurai
descent (a point noted with glee by Tokutomi), in 1888 recognized that the
samurai could no longer function as the backbone of the nation and that it
was important to rely upon a new middle class endowed with knowledge,
virtue, public support, and wealth.21 One contributor to the journal Nihonjin
defined the ideal middle class (chitW shuzoku) as follows:
There are those who stand in the center of society, defend themselves, en-
courage the masses, perform the tasks they assign themselves, stop where
they intend, do not look down on others, are not deceived by others, do not
18. Tokutomi, "Chuto kaikyfi no daraku," pp. 3-5, as translated and summarized in
Carol Gluck, Japan's Modern Myths: Ideology in the Late Meiji Period (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1985), p. 71. For Tokutomi's worldview, derived heavily from the writings of
Herbert Spencer, see Tokutomi Soh6, Shlrai no Nihon (1886), in Sumiya Mikio, ed., Tokutomi
Soho,5 Yamaji Aizan, Vol. 40 of Nihon no meicho (Tokyo: ChUi Koronsha, 1971), and the
introduction by Sumiya in the same volume.
19. See for example, Matsunaga, "Shakai mondai no hassei."
20. Kinmonth, The Self-Made Man, pp. 61-62.
21. Fukuzawa Yukichi, "Rikkoku no haikotsu," Jiji shinpi, December 1, 1888, reprinted
in Nakamura Masanori et al., eds., Keizai koso-, Vol. 8 of Nihon kindai shisd taikei (Tokyo:
Iwanami Shoten, 1988), pp. 265-68. Fukuzawa later wrote that established segments of the
wealthy bourgeoisie such as Mitsui and Mitsubishi were the main force in national develop-
ment. Editor's introduction to "Rikkoku no haikotsu," in ibid., p. 265. For Tokutomi's discus-
sion of Kei6 Gijuku, see Tokutomi, "Inmitsu naru seijij6 no hensen," Part 3, Kokumin no tomo,
No. 17 (March 2, 1888).
receive assistance from others, and are not treated with contempt by others;
who have financial means to assure their livelihoods, knowledge and morals
sufficient to understand the order of things and to conduct themselves ac-
cordingly; who, while not having the means to provide support to others,
are not required to rely on others and have not forgotten how shameful such
reliance is: [this group] is called the middle class, and in this middle class
lies the true health of society. Although uneducated persons look admiringly
upon the grandeur and splendor of the upper class and mistake this for the
strength of the state, this is certainly not the case.22
The author argued that Japan's new middle class should combine the
best characteristics of the four pre-Meiji status groups, because none of
these groups by itself possessed all of the requisite qualities. The new
middle class, he concluded, should assemble individuals of moderate finan-
cial means but high education who could together constitute proper public
opinion. They would side with neither the upper classes nor the poor, thus
achieving a balance between conservatism and radicalism, stabilizing soci-
ety, and protecting the national character. This new middle class would in
fact enlighten and teach the rest of society through its virtues.23
Whereas Tokutomi had complained of the decline of a potentially vig-
orous middle class, the author of this article left the formulation of such a
group to future generations. Nonetheless, in their emphasis on knowledge,
moderate means, and the ability of a certain group to enlighten and lead
through its virtues and lifestyle, both writers already incorporated many of
the motifs that would be found after 1895 in the writings of urban intellec-
tuals who had come of age reading journals including Kokumin no tomo
and Nihonjin. These urban intellectuals derived largely from the service
samurai and gon5 strata and, while imbibing new ideas of success and new
career goals, inherited traditions that stressed the importance of intellectual
and moral cultivation geared to public service and improvement of the
people's lives. At the same time, through their growing involvement with
the Tokyo-centered educational system, this group became familiar with
Western knowledge and class-based models of social organization. Caught
up in the massive transformations that Meiji modernization entailed, and
eager to establish themselves as central to the new social order, these urban
professionals self-consciously identified themselves as middle class and ar-
gued that their time to lead had arrived.
Intellectuals and the "Social Problem" after the Sino-Japanese War
The Sino-Japanese War was a crucial turning point in the development

of modern Japanese social thought, because in the wake of Japan's victory,
22. H1shu Gakujin (pseud.), "ChitR shuzoku ni nozomu," Nihonjin, No. 9 (August 3,
1888), pp. 21-22.
23. Ibid., pp. 23-25.
public opinion was confronted with numerous detailed reports of urban mis-
ery, of an emergent labor movement and the plight of the working class, and
of the problem of delinquent and dependent children. Prior to the war, as-
sociations such as the Statistical Society (Tokei Kyokai) and the Imperial
University's Association of Political and Social Science (Kokka Gakkai)
and journals such as Kokumin no tomo and Rikugl zasshi had begun to pay
attention to social problems. But concern for these issues intensified in the
face of the massive industrialization and urbanization that the war provoked.
Journalists, social workers, civil servants, and other professionals formed a
variety of study groups and journals devoted to analyzing the social order
and the possibilities for its amelioration. Such enterprises were key elements
in an emerging network for the articulation of a middle-class consciousness
and social vision. By focusing their attention on the lower classes as "an-
other society," members of the new middle class could construct an anti-
thetical body of practices against which to establish their own "normality"
and "superiority." 24
While some of the new groups were primarily academic organizations,
other associations gathered a more diverse group of educators, publicists,
politicians, and civil servants.25 Prominent members of the Sociological So-
ciety (Shakai Gakkai), founded in 1896, included the Christian educators
and publicists Fukawa Magoichi and Iwamoto Zenji; the journalists Taguchi
Ukichi, Shimada Sabur6, and Miyake Setsurei; the social scientists Takagi
Masayoshi, Kure Buns6, and Kat6 Hiroyuki; the social workers and reform-
ers Tomeoka Kisuke and Hara Taneaki; and the labor organizers Takano
Fusatar6 and Katayama Sen. A number of these individuals also participated
in the Social Problem Research Association (Shakai Mondai Kenkytikai,
1897), whose other members included the political activists Tarui Tikichi
and Nakamura Daihachirn, the writers and journalists Miyazaki Koshoshi
and Ishikawa Yasujir6 (Hanzan), and the writer and Ministry of Agriculture
and Commerce consultant Sakai Ytizabur6. Abe Isoo, Katayama Sen, K6-
toku Shtisui, and others also formed the Socialism Study Association (Sha-
kaishugi Kenkyiikai, 1898; later renamed the Socialist Society, or Shakai-
shugi Kyokai), while the journalists Yano Fumio and Tagawa Daikichir6
and the progressive doctor Kat6 Tokijir6 organized the Social Problem
Study Association (Shakai Mondai K6kytikai, 1901).
24. For the term "another society," see Nakamura Ryoji, "Mo hitotsu no shakai no hak-
ken," in Kawai Takao, ed., KindaiNihon shakai chosashi, Vol. 1 (Tokyo: Keio Tsushin, 1989),
pp. 137-57. On middle-class uses of negative examples, see also Tamanoi, "Songs as
Weapons."
25. Information about these groups and their members is taken from Akamatsu Katsu-
maro, Nihon shakai undoshi (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1970), pp. 62-75 and passim; Kawai
Takao, "Kaidai," in Kawai Takao, ed., Meijiki shakaigaku kankei shiryo, Vol. 1 (Tokyo: Ryui-
kei Shosha, 1991), pp. 1-13; and biographical entries in the Kokushi daijiten (Tokyo: Yoshi-
kawa Kobunkan, 1979-96).
Although they were not necessarily long-lived or carefully organized
enterprises, the frequent appearance of these associations in the decade after
1895 points to the heightened perception among middle-class intellectuals
that society required them to act upon the problems they confronted.
This position was clearly enunciated in the guidelines of Shakai zasshi, the
journal of the Sociological Society, in which the editors expressed their "de-
sire to awaken a sense of duty among the upper class Uisi shakai] and to
secure an appropriate livelihood for the lower class [kas& shakai]," and
"to raise the values of humanity and work for the progress of the Japanese
people." 26
A number of factors contributed to this intensified concern with social
problems. As Carol Gluck has noted, the sense among contemporaries that
rapid economic changes had produced a widespread social crisis was a ma-
jor stimulus to attempts to understand new phenomena such as urbaniza-
tion and the emergence of an industrial working class.27 Faced with this
apparent crisis, state agencies and their allies sought to develop new poli-
cies that could minimize social dislocations and effectively mobilize the
national economy to support rising military budgets and the maintenance
of a colonial empire. Kenneth Pyle has noted the emergence at the turn of
the century of a new generation of "bureaucrat-intellectuals" who "were
convinced of the need for legislation to forestall social disintegration."
These civil servants developed close ties with academic groups such as the
Social Policy Association (Shakai Seisaku Gakkai, 1897), which served as
"a forum and a pressure group for the advocates of factory legislation" and
other measures.28
Also central to the increased activities of middle-class intellectuals was
the penetration of Christianity, particularly Protestantism, among the new
middle class during this period. When Fukawa Magoichi, the Christian
educator and reformer who founded the Sociological Society in 1896,
looked back on the widespread concern for social problems after the Sino-
Japanese War, he stressed the overwhelming significance of Japan's Chris-
tian community:
26. Shakai zasshi, Vol. 1, No. 1 (April 1897), pp. 1-2, cited in Kawai, "Kaidai," pp. 15-
16. Of course, not everyone associated with these groups necessarily identified himself as
middle class, and the class position of individuals such as Kat6 Hiroyuki and Imperial Univer-
sity professor Kuwada Kumazo, who was a wealthy landowner and member of the House of
Peers, is open to debate. Nonetheless, one can detect in the writings of numerous participants
in this discourse on social problems an awareness of society as divided into an upper, a lower,
and a middle segment, with the middle serving to lead the whole. See, for example, Motoyoshi
Yujiro, "Seikatsu no hyojun," Shakai, Vol. 1, No. 1 (January 1899), pp. 10-35.
27. Gluck, Japan's Modern Myths, pp. 26-34.
28. Kenneth B. Pyle, "Advantages of Followership: German Economics and Japanese
Bureaucrats, 1890-1925," Journal of Japanese Studies, Vol. 1, No. 1 (Autumn 1974),
pp. 127-64; passages cited on pp. 150-51.
Why did [concern for] social problems, labor problems, and other issues
emerge around 1897? Of course, it is because of the relationship between
the educated classes and the trends of the times.... First, youth who were
studying at Christian schools were more in contact with the new ideas com-
ing from the West than was the wider public. They were drawn to philan-
thropic activities and placed themselves among those who sympathized with
the poor and the workers. The proof [of this tendency] is in the fact that of
the early participants in charitable and welfare activities, the majority were
church members.... Second, of those who were interested in social reform
in the broad sense, and thus in research in social problems and in sociology,
many were products of Doshisha . . . and of missionary-affiliated schools,
while still others such as Katayama Sen, Matsumura Kaiseki, and the poli-
tician Shimada Sabur6 were also Christians.29
In the first decade of the Meiji period, Christianity, especially Protes-

tantism, had attracted many samurai intellectuals such as Tsuda Sen, Naka-
mura Masanao, and Niijima Jo. These men were all involved in educational
enterprises that in the 1 880s brought Protestantism and Western learning to
a broader audience and particularly to the gjn5 who constituted what Denda
Isao has called the "progressive element of rural society." 30 However, rural
support for Christianity waned in the 1 890s, when polemicists such as Inoue
Tetsujiro argued that the religion was incompatible with Japanese national
morality as expressed in the Imperial Rescript on Education and when the
Ministry of Education issued regulations denying middle-school status and
privileges to institutions that provided religious instruction.3'
Yet despite these losses in rural society, Protestantism "struck a vein" at
the end of the century, when it began to attract large numbers of the new
urban middle class.32 While Sumiya Mikio points to 1901 as the crucial
turning point, the groundwork for this expansion was laid in the preceding
years. This period saw the emergence of a new generation of Christian
leaders, born largely in the 1860s and 1870s, who had studied at small
Christian schools and colleges, and who as journalists and social workers
brought Christianity to urban society, especially the intellectual middle
29. Fukawa Magoichi, "Meiji sanjiunen zengo no Shakai Gakkai, shakai und6 ni kansuru
tsuikaidan," Shakaigaku zasshi, No. 53 (September 1928), cited in Kawai, "Kaidai," p. 9.
30. Denda, Kindai Nihon keizai shiso no kenkyu, p. 144; see pp. 143-242 for an analysis
of the impact of Protestantism on agricultural reform movements in the 1870s and 1880s. On
early Meiji Christianity, see Irwin Scheiner, Christian Converts and Social Protest in Meiji
Japan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970).
31. Gluck, Japan's Modern Myths, pp. 132-34; Sumiya Mikio, Dai Nihon Teikoku no
shiren, Vol. 22 of Nihon no rekishi (Tokyo: Chuo Koronsha, 1992), pp. 131-36.
32. Sumiya Mikio, Nihon shihonshugi to Kirisutokyo (Tokyo: Tokyo Daigaku Shuppan-
kai, 1962), pp. 25-41. For the phrase "struck a vein," see Sumiya, Dai Nihon Teikoku no
shiren, pp. 202-5.
class.33 Many of the individuals that Fukawa mentioned in his recollections
of the period were from this group: for example, Ishii Jiji, director of the
Okayama Orphanage; Tomeoka Kosuke, a pioneer in prison reform and ju-
venile reform; Yamamuro Gunpei, a leader of the Japan Salvation Army;
and Abe Isoo, the Waseda professor and social reformer (another leading
Christian social reformer, Hara Taneaki, was born a decade earlier than this
cohort.) 34
Another crucial element in the spread of Christianity among the middle

class was the religion's appeal to students beyond those enrolled in the
smaller Christian schools. During his 1896 trip to Japan, John R. Mott, an
American missionary who envisaged the creation of an international Chris-
tian student movement, proselytized among students in higher schools, col-
leges, and vocational schools and established a number of YMCA branches
to cater to students of those institutions. Mott recognized the strategic im-
portance of reaching out to students in the government-run (kanritsu) insti-
tutions of higher learning, which were the apex of the new national educa-
tion system; he arranged to send a number of American Christians to serve
as English teachers in these schools. By 1900, students from these institu-
tions, the future elite of Japanese society, constituted the main segment of
churchgoing youth.35 Yet another stimulus to the spread of Christianity
among the middle class were the social reform activities of the Japan
branches of the Salvation Army and the Women's Christian Temperance
Union (WCTU; Kirisutokyo Fujin Kyoftikai). The number of Christians in-
creased dramatically at this time, from 35,000 in 1894 to 75,000 in 1909.36
Although not all of the members of the new middle class became Chris-
tians, many inhabited an intellectual environment that was increasingly
shaped by Christian ideas. A case in point is Adachi Kenchil, the director of
the Tokyo Poorhouse and a leading organizer of social work among Japa-
nese Buddhists. Adachi's first wife, who spent the years 1887 to 1890 in
England as one of the first Japan Red Cross exchange nursing students, con-
verted to Christianity, and the couple often discussed their respective be-
liefs. Adachi first became involved with social work the year following his
wife's return to Japan, while he was still an official in the Tokyo municipal
33. Matsuzawa Hiroaki, "Kirisutoky6 to chishikijin," Iwanami koza Nihon rekishi, Vol.
16 (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1976), p. 306.
34. Katayama Tetsu also mentions the importance of Unitarianism and the new critical
theology in the appeal of Christianity to Abe Isoo and other intellectuals in the late 1880s and
1890s. Katayama Tetsu, Abe Isoo den, Vol. 86 of Denki sosho (Tokyo: Ozorasha, 1991 [1958]),
pp. 189-90.
35. Matsuzawa, "Kirisutokyo to chishikijin," p. 310; and Ernest W. Clement, A Hand-
book of Modern Japan (Chicago: A. C. McClurg and Co., 1907), p. 270.
36 Sumiya, Nihon shihonshugi to Kirisutoky5, pp. 27-28. In Dai Nihon Teikoku no shi-
ren, pp. 202-3, Sumiya gives the figure 36,000 for 1894.
government. Several years later, Katayama Sen, who had returned from the
United States advocating a new "Social Christianity" and established a
settlement house in Kanda, often visited Adachi to debate the merits of
Christianity and Buddhism. Adachi also developed a close working rela-
tionship with Christian social workers and students of Western theories of
social welfare like Tomeoka Kosuke and Tanaka Tar6.37 In this context,
Christianity meant not only a religious belief system, but also contact with
the West. Through their overseas contacts, as Fukawa noted, many Chris-
tians generated forms of cultural capital and social knowledge that both es-
tablished their utility and could be transmitted to other members of the new
middle class.
The New Middle Class, Social Knowledge, and the State: The Case of
Tomeoka Kosuke
The career of Tomeoka Kosuke amply illustrates the dynamics of social

knowledge during this period.38 A graduate of Dishisha University who en-
tered the Protestant ministry, Tomeoka decided in 1891 to commit himself
to the salvation of prisoners and the reform of penal institutions. During his
three years as a prison chaplain in Hokkaido, Tomeoka came to the under-
standing that the best way to prevent criminality was to keep youths from
embarking on criminal careers. He thus developed an interest in juvenile
reform programs and planned to travel to the United States to study the most
modern developments in the field. Tomeoka first consulted M. L. Gordon,
his former theology professor at Doshisha. Gordon mentioned Tomeoka to
his friend, a certain Mr. Round, the chairman of the New York Prison As-
sociation, who sent Tomeoka a number of publications concerning juvenile
reform, including Enoch C. Wines's widely read textbook, The State of Pris-
ons and Child Saving Institutions in the Civilized World.
After studying these materials, Tomeoka strengthened his determination
37. See, for example, Adachi Daisuke, "Watakushi no mita oji Adachi Kenchii no katei
seikatsu," in Mitsuda Kensuke, Reimeiki ni okeru Tokyo-to shakaijigy5 to Adachi Kenchi J,
Vol. 15 of Denki sosho (Tokyo: Ozorasha, 1987 [1955]), pp. 81, 92-93. On Katayama's Social
Christianity, see Sumiya, Nihon shihonshugi to Kirisutoky5, pp. 67-93. For Tanaka's work,
see Tanaka Tar6, "Jizen no kagakuteki konkyo," Shakai, Vol. 2, No. 13 (April 20, 1900), pp.
11-23, as well as Tanaka's numerous reports in the journal Jizen.
Buddhist involvement in social work was itself to a significant degree a response to a wave
of Christian activism that threatened the position of Buddhist institutions in Meiji Japan. On
this point, see Yoshida Kyiichi, Nihon kindai Bukkyi shakaishi kenkyt (Tokyo: Kawashima
Shoten, 1991), and James Edward Ketelaar, Of Heretics and Martyrs in Meiji Japan: Buddhism
and its Persecution (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), especially pp. 133-35.
38. The following biographical information, unless otherwise noted, is drawn from To-
meoka Kosuke, "Katei Gakk6 sosetsu ni itaru made," in Makino Toraji, ed., Tomeoka KAsuke
kun koki kinenshi, Vol. 21 of Denki sosho (Tokyo: Ozorasha, 1987 [1933]), pp. 29-39.
to visit the United States and received financial support for his trip from an
American missionary in Sapporo as well as from fellow prison chaplains in
Hokkaido, most of whom were Dishisha graduates. In the United States,
Tomeoka observed a number of institutions on the East Coast, especially
the reformatory at Concord, Massachusetts, and the Elmira Reformatory in
New York, where he studied under Zebulon Brockway, one of the foremost
American proponents of reformatories and the new penology.39
Upon his return from the United States via Europe, Tomeoka made con-
tact with leading government officials including Kiyoura Keigo, a top police
administrator, and Miyoshi Taiz6, a Christian who was at the time assistant
minister in the Justice Ministry. These three together planned to establish a
reformatory, but their enterprise never came to fruition, apparently because
Tomeoka and Miyoshi disagreed on the type of religious instruction to be
provided.40 Tomeoka then accepted a position as chaplain at the Sugamo
Prison, from which he developed close contacts with a number of leading
prison administrators, and served concurrently as minister at the Reinanzaka
Church (now Toriizaka Church), the main institution in Tokyo's Congrega-
tional Church.
In 1899, Tomeoka left the prison chaplaincy and his church ministry to
become an instructor at the newly established Police and Prisons School,
run by the Home Ministry. The school, one of whose purposes was to train
a professional police corps in preparation for treaty revision and the in-
creased presence of foreigners outside the treaty ports, was attended by "po-
licemen from the various prefectures, who were selected as possessing qual-
ifications rendering them fit for police sergeants or inspectors in the future."
Until the school closed in 1904, Tomeoka taught courses in the history of
prison systems, the rehabilitation of discharged convicts, and the reform of
juvenile delinquents. His influence can be judged to have been significant,
because "the number of students trained [at the school] had reached over a
thousand, and the graduates had been distributed throughout the empire to
fill various posts of trust." 41 In addition, because graduates were required to
serve as instructors at prefectural police academies, Tomeoka's ideas of so-
cial reform and the new penology reached a broad audience of local offi-
39. On Tomeoka's U.S. itinerary, see "Kaisetsu," in Doshisha Daigaku Jinbun Kagaku
Kenkyujo, ed., Tomeoka Kosuke chosakushu, Vol. 1 (Kyoto: D6h6sha, 1978), p. 660. For
Wines and Brockway, see ibid., pp. 664-65; Fujii Tsunefumi, Fukushi kokka o tsukutta oto-
ko: Tomeoka Kosuke no shogai, 1864-1934 (Tokyo: Hosei Shuppan, 1992); and Anthony M.
Platt, The Child Savers: The Invention of Delinquency (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1977), ch. 3.
40. Okue Seinosuke, "Watakushi to Tomeoka Kosuke shi to no kankei," in Tomeoka
K5suke kun koki kinenshu, p. 796.
41. Baron Kanetake Oura, "The Police of Japan," in Marcus B. Huish, ed., Fifty Years of
New Japan, Vol. 1, comp. Shigenobu Okuma (London: Smith, Elder, and Co., 1909), p. 294.
cials.42 Tomeoka was also a frequent contributor to the journal of the Police
Association (Keisatsu Kyokai zasshi), which sought to promote the moral
and intellectual cultivation of the nation's police officers, and a frequent lec-
turer at study groups attended by leading intellectuals and social reformers.
In 1899, Tomeoka established a private reformatory, the Family School,
in Sugamo, Tokyo. Although the school depended largely on private contri-
butions, Tomeoka secured his own livelihood through the Police and Prisons
School and from the Home Ministry, which employed him as a traveling
consultant (shokutaku) beginning in 1900.43 In the same year, Tomeoka as-
sisted ministry officials, university professors, and other social workers in
establishing a poverty research group and helped draft the nation's first Re-
formatory Law (Kanka h5).44 In 1903 the ministry sent Tomeoka to study
social work operations in the United States and Europe. After the Russo-
Japanese War, Tomeoka combined his social work activities with active par-
ticipation in the Local Improvement Movement and Hotoku Movement,
which were designed to secure the economic and moral bases for Japanese
industrial and imperial expansion.45
During this time, Tomeoka was also a prolific writer for both the Chris-
tian press and a broader public. His two major works from the period be-
tween the Sino-Japanese and Russo-Japanese Wars, Kanka jigy5 no hat-
tatsu and Jizen mondai,46 illustrate his desire to draw the public's attention
42. On graduates' teaching at prefectural police academies, see Baron Suyematsu (Ken-
ch6), "Police," in Alfred Stead, ed., Japan by the Japanese (New York: Dodd, Mead and Co.,
1904), p. 509. Suyematsu writes that in 1901 the nation's police force consisted of "2,116
police officers and 31,833 men" under them. Ibid, p. 506. One may thus infer that Tomeoka's
ideas reached virtually the entire corps of middle- and upper-level police officers.
43. As an instructor at the school, Tomeoka initially received an annual salary of Y1,500,
but this was later raised to V1,800. This salary put Tomeoka on an income parity with ranking
civil servants in the sinin category. As a consultant to the Home Ministry, Tomeoka received
an annual allowance of Y600. End6 Koichi, " 'Shokutaku' toshite no Tomeoka Kosuke," Meiji
Gakuin ronsJ, Nos. 352-53: Shakaigaku, shakai fukushigaku kenkya, Nos. 65-66 (March
1984), pp. 289-92.
44. Tomeoka Kosuke kun koki kinenshi, p. 2; Fujii, Tomeoka Kisuke no shigai, pp. 201-
3. Another noteworthy state-sponsored venue for the interaction between experts and reform-
ers from the civil service was the temporary Factory Survey Office established in 1900 in the
Ministry of Agriculture and Commerce. Sheldon Garon, The State and Labor in Modern Japan
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), p. 27.
45. On these movements, see Kenneth B. Pyle, "The Technology of Japanese Nationalism:
The Local Improvement Movement, 1900-1918," Journal ofAsian Studies, Vol. 33, No. 1 (No-
vember 1973), pp.51-66; Gluck, Japan's Modern Myths; and Miyachi Masato, "Nichiro zengo
no shakai to minshii," in Rekishigaku Kenkyukai and Nihonshi Kenkyukai, eds., Koza Nihonshi,
Vol.6 (Tokyo: Tokyo Daigaku Shuppankai, 1975), pp. 131-70. Tomeoka's activities as a Home
Ministry consultant during these years can be followed in Tomeoka Kosuke Nikki Henshf lin-
kai, ed., Tomeoka Kuisuke nikki, Vols. 2-3 (Tokyo: Kyosei Kyokai, 1979).
46. Tomeoka Kosuke, Kanka jigyo no hattatsu (Tokyo: Keiseisha Shoten, 1897), and
Jizen mondai (Tokyo: Keiseisha Shoten, 1898).
to social problems and to the need for both private individuals and the state
to endeavor actively to remedy them. They also evince Tomeoka's desire to
establish and consolidate within the social imaginary a prominent position
for new middle-class reformers armed with proper virtues and knowledge.
In Jizen mondai, for example, Tomeoka argued that the progress of civi-
lization had produced a split not only between the wealthy and the poor, but
also between the intelligent and the ignorant, and that these tensions resulted
in the disruption of the social order through strikes, conflicts, and crime.
The emergence of a new group of philanthropists (jizenka), he contended,
would resolve these tensions. These philanthropists should be not only self-
less, persevering, courageous, and compassionate, but also endowed with
proper knowledge of the principles, organization, and methods of charity,
and with administrative talents.47 While the spirit of Christianity underlay
the philanthropist's mission, charity could no longer consist of mere alms-
giving, because this encouraged pauperism. Instead, charity was a scientific
practice that required careful research and categorization of the poor. In-
deed, to Tomeoka the line between charity workers and sociologists was
very thin, and the data produced by the former's surveys could be of im-
mense benefit to the work of the latter.48
The philanthropist was a "gentleman" who served as a medium between
the wealthy from whom he received funds and the poor whom he assisted.
But he was more than a simple agent of the wealthy, for "although contribu-
tors have goods and money, they do not know how to use them profitably."
The philanthropist thus performed acts of charity not only toward the re-
cipients of charity, but also toward the affluent, since he helped them use
their assets wisely and saved them from the moral corruption that accumu-
lated wealth might bring.49 Although the aristocracy (kizoku), based on their
social position, income, and natural calling (seirai no tenshoku), should of-
fer compassion to the lower classes, in Japan the nobility (kazoku) displayed
virtually no concern for the poor or for charity. Tomeoka cited approvingly
a letter from a "gentleman" involved in charity work, who wrote:
Although the nobles expend much energy on unproductive public ceremo-

nies and monuments, they seem to have made no efforts with respect to
charity. Under the circumstances, far from appearing as models for the gen-
eral public to emulate, they lead one to question whether they have not be-
come models of conservatism, indolent weakness, and incompetence.
This letter, Tomeoka added, represented the opinion of "Japanese gen-

tlemen of common sense who have paid attention to the social problem."
47. Tomeoka, Jizen mondai, pp. 4-5, 13-16.

48. Ibid., pp. 46-47. See also Tomeoka, Kanka jigyd no hattatsu, pp. 4-5, on the rela-
tionship between religion and scientific methods.
49. Tomeoka, Jizen mondai, pp. 17-20.
Tomeoka added that he expected that the nobles would eventually live up to
their responsibility, but his message was clear: they required middle-class
"gentlemen" to tell them how to do so.50
These "gentlemen" and (gentlewomen) were to be the vanguard of a
movement that would revitalize Japanese morality and rescue the nation
from its current woes. In the conclusion to Kanka jigy5 no hattatsu, To-
meoka noted that although Japan was the most advanced society in the East,
its morals were disturbed and society tended toward frivolity, hypocrisy, and
lust for power and profit, while men of religion remained complacent and
men of knowledge became "crafty slaves of the vulgar world." Arguing that
material civilization was not the way to guarantee the nation's eternal pres-
ervation, Tomeoka issued this call:
Move back, small scholars . . ., away, small men of religion . . . , retreat,

petty schemers.... In their place come forth, philanthropists of great feel-
ing; emerge, people of religion with passionate blood and tears! If you do
not come forth to take up your calling to help [society's unfortunate chil-
dren], what will become of Japan?5'
Tomeoka actively cultivated this new middle class of reformers. He vig-

orously attacked the detached intellectualism of old-guard Christian leaders
and appealed to church members to develop a new "Social Christianity." 52
He used his cultural capital both to introduce aspiring middle-class reform-
ers to American experts 53 and to ensure the social and political acceptability
of other Christian reformers in Japan. For example, Yamamuro Gunpei, a
leader of the Japan Salvation Army and Tomeoka's junior at Doshisha, re-
called the following:
A long while ago, at a luncheon meeting of top Police Prefecture officials,

one person asked, "What is the Salvation Army?" and another responded,
"I hear they're a bunch of socialists." Tomeoka was present at the time, and
he properly explained our organization to them. In the first few years after
the founding of the [Japan] Salvation Army [in 1895], whenever we needed
an outside speaker for one of our special meetings, we'd always call on
either Tomeoka Kosuke or Hara Taneaki.54
Tomeoka also sought to build a national organization of charities and was

instrumental in the foundation in 1908 of the Central Charity Association
50. Ibid., pp. 98-106.

51. Tomeoka, Kankajigyo5 no hattatsu, pp. 144-46.
52. "Kaisetsu," Tomeoka Kosuke chosakushi, Vol. 1, p. 666; Matsuzawa, "Kirisutoky6
to chishikijin," pp. 308-9. Tomeoka was close to Katayama Sen, another proponent of Social
Christianity, and spoke at the labor meetings organized by Katayama.
53. Namae Takayuki, "Tomeoka Kosuke-shi yori uketaru kogi to yuj6," Tomeoka KJ-
suke kun koki kinensha, p. 812.
54. Yamamuro Gunpei, "Kans6 oyobi kansha," Tomeoka Kosuke kun koki kinenshi,
p. 757.
(Chiio Jizen Kyokai). In 1901, Tomeoka established a training departmentfor
charity workers (jizenjigy5 shihanbu) as an adjunct to the Family School. By
offering instruction in the Bible, charity techniques, psychology, history,
criminology, penology, sociology, pedagogy, and ethics, Tomeoka sought to
cultivate a core of professional social workers with wide-ranging expertise.55
Tomeoka's pioneering activities are particularly significant because they
demonstrate the ways in which members of the new middle class helped
construct the ideological and practical foundations upon which social poli-
cies were grounded. Many of the major events in the history of late Meiji
Japan, such as the repression of socialism and the labor movement and the
rise of a patriarchal ideology focusing on the emperor, have bred a general-
ized conception of power as flowing unilaterally from the state to society, or
from "the ruling class" to "the people." The case of Tomeoka Kosuke, in
which factors such as social knowledge and cultural capital play a primary
role, suggests a more complex power dynamic at work in the early twentieth
century, one in which the new middle class served to bridge and blur the
boundaries between society and the state as traditionally defined.
Tomeoka's activities also suggest that, despite the growth of a nation-
and emperor-centered "civil morality," Christian social reformers actually
stood close to the center of the new governing system.5 After the Russo-
Japanese War, the Home Ministry, faced with new challenges to the political
and economic order, moved to promote and coordinate social work and phil-
anthropic enterprises. Tomeoka, who was a Home Ministry consultant, and
other Christian social workers and policy experts including Tanaka Tar6 and
Hara Taneaki helped lead this organizational effort and significantly influ-
enced the content of welfare programs. In practice, a number of programs
involved the delegation of funds and responsibility to Christian organiza-
tions such as the Salvation Army and the WCTU. The relationship between
Christian social reformers and the late Meiji state, then, should not be seen
as one in which the former either succumbed to or were merely coopted by
the latter. In their role as experts and consultants on social policy, Christian
reformers helped to orient state action, asserted themselves in programs at
the local level, and thus contributed to shaping the modern power structure.
Circuits of Knowledge, Networks of Power: Educators and

Psychiatrists
In other fields as well, communities of specialists worked to secure the

authority to develop and apply their expertise to resolve a broad range of
55. Hara Masao, "Fury6 shonen to sono kanka kyoiku," in Tomeoka Kosuke, ed., Katei
Gakk& dai ni hen (Tokyo: Keiseisha Shoten, 1902), pp. 143-50, 159-61.
56. On this "civii morality," see Gluck, Japan's Modern Myths, ch. 5.
social problems as they defined them and thus to insert themselves within
the new networks of power that characterized the modern nation-state.
These experts were actively constructing the institutional framework for
their activities, both within and on the perimeter of state structures. The last
decade of the nineteenth century and the first decade of the twentieth wit-
nessed significant advances in the organization of the professional middle
class in Japan. Bernard Silberman has described the "complete rationaliza-
tion of a structure for recruitment, tenure, advancement, and retirement in
the civil bureaucracy in the period from 1884 to 1899" based on a competi-
tively organized, hierarchical educational system.57 Similarly, Hazama Hi-
roshi has noted the systematization of qualifications and advancement pro-
cedures for white-collar employees in large industrial firms.58 Developments
in other fields indicate a widespread movement to structure social knowl-
edge in the interests of the employers of expertise, the broader polity, and
the experts themselves.59
The education profession was increasingly ordered according to rules
defined by the Ministry of Education, but a number of voluntarily formed
organizations helped members of this field articulate common intellectual
frameworks, verify expertise, and otherwise effectively deploy their cultural
capital and define their social position. Beginning in 1890, Motoyoshi Yii-
jiro, Takashima Heizaburo, and other educators and psychologists estab-
lished associations and journals that linked fields such as educational theory,
special education, and social work. Of particular significance was the foun-
dation in 1898 of the journal Jidi kenkyi, which, together with the Child
Study Association (Jid6 Kenkyiikai, later Jid6 Gakkai) that it spawned in
1902, became a center for the exchange of expertise on youth in imperial
Japan. Takashima, who was largely self-taught, gained wide respect as an
authority in the field. Another noted figure was Ototake Iwazo, an instructor
at the Tokyo Higher Normal School who spent the first years of the twenti-
eth century in Germany absorbing the latest notions of continuing education
and the education of delinquent and "feeble-minded" youth. Both men were
frequently invited to speak at meetings of social workers and government-
57. Bernard S. Silberman, "The Bureaucratic State in Japan: The Problem of Authority
and Legitimacy," in Tetsuo Najita and J. Victor Koschmann, eds., Conflict in Modem Japanese
History: The Neglected Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982), pp. 236-39.
58. Hazama Hiroshi, Nihon romu kanrishi kenkyi (Tokyo: Daiamondo Sha, 1969).
59. The process of professionalization in the legal and medical fields at this time was
marked by proliferation of organizations and governmental regulations such as the 1893 Rules
Governing Lawyers (Bengoshi kisoku) and the 1906 Law Governing Doctors (Ishi ho). In these
fields, professionalization was marked by a conflict between practitioners' groups and the state
over issues such as professional autonomy, status, and government policies. See, for example,
Odanaka S6ju, "Bengoshi," in Kokushi daijiten, Vol. 12, p. 516; Hosokawa Izumi, "Nihon
Igakkai" and "Nihon Ishikai," both in Kokushi daijiten, Vol. 11, pp. 109-10.
organized seminars on social work and social problems, and they were in-
volved in training prison chaplains and prison officers.60
Educators also constructed "home education" (katei kyoiku) as a field of
knowledge that posited new domestic roles and social relationships. Geared
to helping mothers prepare their children to become self-disciplining sub-
jects and citizens capable of absorbing and applying new knowledge ac-
quired in the national school system, this new discipline was developed first
by normal school educators and spread among school teachers, school ad-
ministrators, and other intellectuals in the period around the Sino-Japanese
War. Based on a modern, Western conception of the family, the discipline
first gained acceptance among affluent urban middle-class households and
eventually spread throughout the urban middle class. Promoters of the new
discipline held that education could be divided into cognitive, physical, and
moral aspects and that the home was to be the site for the early cultivation
of these faculties. With regard to the cognitive and the physical faculties,
the home should serve an auxiliary function under the supervision of school
educators; but with regard to the child's moral training, the home, and par-
ticularly the mother, was to play an especially significant role, for which
knowledge of proper techniques was indispensable.
Home education as a discipline engendered a new type of interaction
between educational authorities and households. It offers striking evidence
for Jacques Donzelot's claim that the family is not a fixed entity but is
shaped by "the system of relations it maintains with the sociopolitical
level." 62 Within this system of relations, the position of professional edu-
cators and medical experts was greatly enhanced. The development of home
education also allowed many women educators, equipped with knowledge
of home economics and pedagogy, to achieve status as professionals.
Psychiatric expertise developed significantly during the first decade of
the twentieth century. A key figure in this process was Kure Shfiz6, who,
after spending the years 1897 to 1901 in Europe studying the latest theories
in the field, returned to hold a chair in psychiatry at Tokyo Imperial Univer-
sity and to serve concurrently as director of the Tokyo municipal mental
60. Takashima was a frequent contributor to Jido kenkyu, and also published works such
as Jido shinri kowa (Tokyo: Kobundo Shoten, 1909). Ototake's publications in this period
include Jikken kyoikugaku (Tokyo: Meguro Shoten, 1908), Teinoji kyoikuho (Tokyo: Meguro
Shoten, 1908), and Furyoji kyoikuhd (Tokyo: Meguro Shoten, 1910).
61. Yamamoto Toshiko, "'Katei ky6iku' soshutsu no shinario," in Terasaki Masao et al.,
eds., Kindai Nihon ni okeru chi no haibun to kokumin togo (Tokyo: Daiichi Hoki, 1993),
pp. 179-98. For an example of child experts' efforts to market their expertise among new-
middle-class mothers, see Matsumoto Kojiro, "Katei ni okeru jido kenkyu," Jido kenkyu-,
Vol. 6, No. 10 (October 1903), pp. 17-24.
62. Jacques Donzelot, The Policing of Families, trans. R. Hurley (New York: Pantheon,
1979), p. xxv.
asylum, the Sugamo Hospital, where he proceeded to implement a number
of bold reforms in treatment. In 1902, Kure took the initiative in founding
the Japan Neurology Association (Nihon Shinkei Gakkai) and its journal,
the Shinkeigaku zasshi. Kure assumed the role in the field of psychiatric
social work that Tomeoka Kisuke had prescribed for the new philanthrop-
ists in his book Jizen mondai. His lectures to the Greater Japan Women's
Hygiene Association (Dai Nihon Fujin Eiseikai), a group sponsored by the
Home Ministry, led to increased awareness among upper-class women of
the problems of the mentally ill and their families and spurred the creation
of a charity association for this category of needy persons. In 1910, Kure
began producing scientific survey reports that demonstrated the unsatisfac-
tory conditions of mentally ill persons confined to their homes under the
provisions of the 1900 Law for the Care and Custody of the Mentally Ill
(Seishin bydsha kango ho). By distributing these reports to both houses of
the Diet, Kure and his associates helped pave the way for the passage of the
Mental Hospitals Law (Seishin byiin ho) several years later.63
In addition, psychiatrists actively participated in the Child Study As-
sociation and shaped the types of knowledge that group produced. In 1900,
Fujikawa Yii, at the time an exchange student in lena, published an article
on sexuality among school-age youth in Jid6 kenkyt and introduced to
Japanese readers the latest writings in German on the new field of peda-
gogical pathology and therapy. Before the end of the decade, Fujikawa,
Kure ShUz6, and Kure's associate Miyake Koichi had organized a sympo-
sium on pedagogical pathology (kyciku byorigaku) and published the re-
sults.64 In 1908, Miyake, who had recently returned from studies in Ger-
many and Austria, conducted and published a study of juvenile inmates in
two reformatories in Saitama Prefecture. This survey was noted by Justice
Ministry officials, who began sending prison medical officers to train un-
der Kure and Miyake at Tokyo Imperial University.65 Miyake also devel-
oped a close working relationship with the Home Ministry, which em-
ployed him as a traveling consultant and would later (in 1923) commission
him and his colleagues to conduct a national survey of juvenile reforma-
tory inmates using intelligence-testing methods that Miyake had intro-
duced to and adapted for use in Japan. Miyake used the survey results to
63. Takemura Kenji et al., "Seishin shogaisha," in Shakai Fukushi Kenkyujo, ed., Sen-
zen, senchuiki ni okeru shogaisha fukushi taisaku (Tokyo: Shakai Fukushi Kenkyuijo, 1990),
pp. 123-28; and Kaneko Junji, Miyake Koichi Hakase jiseki, Vol. 29 of Denki sosho (Tokyo:
Ozorasha, 1988 [1963]), pp. 23-24.
64. Fujikawa Hideo, Fujikawa Yui (Tokyo: Ozawa Shoten, 1990), pp. 145-47.
65. Kaneko, Miyake Koichi Hakasejiseki, pp. 30 -31. For one version of the 1908 survey
report, see Miyake K6ichi and Ikeda Ryutoku, "Fury6 sh6nen ch6sa hokoku," Jid5 kenkyfi,
Vol. 12, No. 9 (March 1909), pp. 313-18.
press the Home Ministry to develop more specialized juvenile reform fa-
cilities staffed by trained mental health experts.66
These examples, together with that of Tomeoka Kisuke, demonstrate
the delineation of new circuits of knowledge and networks of power in late
Meiji Japan. In the cases noted above, social knowledge flowed from the
individuals and institutions that produced it toward state ministries and re-
lated groups; it was then processed and retransmitted for consumption by a
broader audience of officials and citizens. Not only state institutions such as
Tokyo Imperial University and the higher normal schools but also associ-
ations on the perimeters of the state, such as the Child Study Association
and the Japan Neurology Association, were crucial sites for the development
of new social knowledge. This knowledge, it should be emphasized, did not
simply respond to the needs of the state and key segments of society as those
groups perceived them. Rather, new social knowledge actually restructured
the perceptions and needs of public and private actors.
At the same time, an elaborate circuitry had developed to transmit this
knowledge and the practices it prescribed. The term circuit holds a double
relevance because specialists like those discussed above often undertook
lecture tours and through their lecturing reinforced their professional status
and insinuated their authority into schools, homes, police agencies, religious
groups, and even the military. To ensure widespread reception of their ex-
pertise, many of these professionals published popularized (tsazoku) ver-
sions of their more technically specialized research and contributed articles
to general-interest magazines and middle-class women's journals.67 By the
end of the Meiji era, these professionals had taken major steps to reorganize
the everyday lives of other members of the middle class as well as those
with whom they came into contact.
Social Criticism, Sociability, and the Middle-Class Home
Middle-class writers and activists also engaged in wide-ranging social

criticism during this period. The activities of reformist intellectuals like To-
meoka Kosuke and Kure Shtiz6, who were closely linked to state agencies
and other elite groups, demonstrate attempts by members of the new middle
class to enlighten the upper classes with regard to their social responsibility.
66. Miyake's national survey of reformatory inmates was conducted in 1923 and pub-
lished as Kankain shuyo jido kanbetsu chosa hokoku, do fuhyo (Tokyo: Naimusho Shakai-
kyoku, 1925), reprinted in Shakai Fukushi Chosa Kenkyukai, ed., Senzen Nihon shakaijigyo-
shosa shiryo5 shusei, Vol. 5 (Tokyo: Keiso Shobo, 1990), pp. 97-136. For Miyake's introduc-
tion of intelligence testing to Japan, see Kaneko, Miyake Ko5ichi Hakase jiseki, pp. 33-34.
67. See, for example, Takashima, Jido shinri kowa; Miyake Koichi, Tsuizoku byo-tekijido-
shinri (Tokyo: Keibunkan, 1910); and Tsukahara Masatsugu, Seinen shinri (Tokyo: Kinkodo,
1910).
Tomeoka's writings incorporated pointed critiques of contemporary mo-
rality and the nobility. Other writers, however, expressed outright hostility
toward the "old classes" and used their positions as experts and opinion
leaders to, in Alvin Gouldner's terms, "harass the old, sabotage it, critique
it, expose it and muckrake it, express moral, technical, and cultural superi-
ority to it, and hold it up to contempt and ridicule." 68
After 1895, the press exploded with denunciations of the corrupt and
venal politics (kinken seiji) of the oligarchs, nobles, military elites, party
leaders, and their allies in the business world. New-middle-class journalists,
publicists, lawyers, and academics, building on precedents from the move-
ment for freedom and popular rights, stood at the forefront of efforts to
reform society and develop the democratic potential of the Meiji constitu-
tional system.69 Inspired by Nakae Chimin's 1898 call for reinvigorated so-
cial sanctions against the corrupt elites, the Yorozu chdhd ran a series ex-
posing concubinage among the upper class, while in 1900 the Niroku shinpd
ran an 80-day attack on the Mitsui zaibatsu that resulted in the latter's agree-
ment to contribute Y100,000 to public causes.70
In 1903, lawyers, journalists, WCTU members, and student groups in
Yokohama led a movement to support Diet member Shimada Saburi's re-
election, which was challenged by a coalition of upper bourgeoisie (Shibu-
sawa, Iwasaki) and SeiyUkai party leaders. Shimada, the Christian publisher
of the Mainichi shinbun, was a leader in the movements to abolish prosti-
tution and to seek redress for farmers affected by industrial pollution from
the Ashio mines. The victorious Shimada faction, backed by the city's small
merchants, labeled their opponents the "venal faction" (kinkenha) and them-
selves the "party of justice" (seigiha).71 At the same time, intellectuals such
as the Christian journalist and lawyer Kinoshita Naoe campaigned for uni-
versal suffrage, while Abe Isoo, Katayama Sen, Kitoku ShUsui, and others
(including Kinoshita) moved toward overt denunciation of capitalism in
their stillborn Social Democratic Party.72 Another significant part of this
trend was the formation of the "Band of Idealists" (Risidan) by Kuroiwa
Ruiki, the muckraking publisher of the Yorozu chdh5, and the mobilization
68. Alvin W. Gouldner, The Future of Intellectuals and the Rise of the New Class: A
Frame of Reference, Theses, Conjectures, Arguments, and an Historical Perspective on the
Role of Intellectuals and Intelligentsia in the International Class Contest of the Modern Era
(New York: The Seabury Press, 1979), p. 17.
69. See, for example, Gordon, Labor and Imperial Democracy; Miyachi, "Nichiro zengo
no shakai to minshU."
70. Matsunaga, "Shakai mondai no hassei," pp. 267-74; Asukai Masamichi, "Kokumin
bunka no keisei (1)," Iwanami kdza Nihon rekishi, Vol. 18 (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1963),
pp. 295-98.
71. Miyachi, "Nichiro zengo no shakai to minshii," pp. 136-37.
72. Of the party's founders, only Kotoku was not a Christian.
of intellectuals and students to protest the government's slow response to
the Ashio copper mine pollution incident.73
To what extent the new middle class was actually able to extend its sway
over the "old class" at this time is unclear. The leaders of this new social
formation, it should be emphasized, were by no means politically unified.
They did not all support the progressive campaigns of Shimada or Kino-
shita; they were divided on issues such as how to respond to the nascent
labor and socialist movements; and they could be found both criticizing and
supporting the government's military ventures and imperialist ambitions.
Nonetheless, these new professionals were conscious of their mission and
had taken major steps to assert their authority within what Gouldner has
called a culture of critical discourse. As one editorialist in Shakai zasshi
stated: "The middle class [chatd shakai] ... [is] a formation of intellectuals
[shikisha no dantai] whose influence weighs greatly within the nation." 75
This emergent class also sought to develop a new type of sociability that
would set it apart from older modes of social intercourse. The Yorozu chdh5,
staffed by writers such as Kitoku, Sakai Toshihiko, and Kawakami Kiyoshi,
ran a series of articles calling for the simplification of extravagant banquet-
ing practices and the modernization of daily life.76 Sakai in particular took
up the cause of reform, calling for the elimination of such vain but useless
practices as tipping at inns, the bringing of extravagant presents when call-
ing upon acquaintances, and the writing of letters that were full of florid
conventions but left little room for any genuine expression of sentiment or
purpose.77 Kuroiwa's Band of Idealists also pushed for the new sociability.
Although the group's meetings featured lectures on religion, society, and
Diet politics by individuals including Uchimura Kanzi, Abe Isoo, and the
lawyer and parliamentarian Hanai Takuzi, Sakai wrote that what distin-
guished the gatherings was an emphasis on frank presentation of one's per-
sonal life. He described one meeting, attended by "lawyers, journalists, edu-
cators, students, merchants, and others," as follows:
The T-shaped dinner table was set without any formal seating order or
ranking; everyone just took a place. Everyone was silent while bread and
soup were served and beer was poured. Then anyone was free at any time
to engage in conversation about the subjects at hand. This conversation was
73. Matsunaga, "Shakai mondai no hassei," pp. 267-74; Asukai, "Kokumin bunka no
keisei (1)," pp. 295-98.
74. Gouldner, The Future of Intellectuals, pp. 28-30.
75. "Chuto shakai oyobi ryomin," Shakai zasshi, Vol. 1, No. 5 (August 1897), p. 3.
76. Asukai, "Kokumin bunka no keisei (1)," p. 297.
77. Sakai Toshihiko, "Fizoku kairyo an," Yorozu choho, August 21, 1900-October 29,
1900, reprinted in Yamakawa Hitoshi et al., eds., Sakai Toshihiko zenshu-, Vol. 1 (Tokyo: Chuo
Koronsha, 1933), pp. 115-41. Sakai's writings provide another prime example of the impact
of Protestant reformist discourses on non-Christian members of the new middle class.
not a private chat with the people seated near oneself, but a public talk ad-
dressed to everyone at the table. The subjects at hand were generally: one's
name, age, occupation, and place of birth; whether or not one was married,
and if not, why; and the things that one did that day. When all agreed, the
first speaker spoke about himself; then everyone else followed, each taking
[a few] minutes, until by the end of the meal everyone had spoken.... In
this way, members learned each others' names, faces, occupations, experi-
ences, and character, and eventually came to harmonize and sympathize
with each other. Let it not be said that this was merely ordinary conversa-
tion. For in the midst of that ordinariness, of that artlessness, of that candor,
appeared an earnestness that was enough to elevate people's hearts.78
This new sociability was to be complemented and supported by a new

domesticity. Western-inspired ideas of a "home" centered on the conjugal
unit as opposed to the lineal extended family of the ie had been promoted
by enlightenment thinkers since the 1870s and in the late 1880s gained
particular prominence in the writings of the Protestant-influenced reform-
ers Tokutomi Sohi and Iwamoto Zenji.79 Urbanization and the movement
of salaried workers away from their extended families spurred a broad in-
terest in new models of domestic organization. From the time of the Sino-
Japanese War, commercial publishers, who were expanding their enterprises
to reach a growing readership, introduced "home" (katei) columns into
their newspapers and magazines, while some 30 journals with the word ka-
tei in their titles were founded in the 1890s and early 1900s.80
Middle-class reformers such as Hani Motoko and the contributors to the
WCTU's Fujin shinpd focused increasing attention on improving home eco-
nomics, home life, and home education. Hani, who had studied under Iwa-
moto Zenji and who was active in associations founded by foreign women
in Tokyo, sought in her journals Katei no tomo and Fujin no tomo to estab-
lish standards for middle-class expenditures and domestic practices. Her
promotion of household account ledgers was designed to help a class of
78. Sakai Toshihiko, "Risodan bansankai no ki," Yorozu ch6ho, April 3, 1902, in Sakai
Toshihiko zenshti, Vol. 1, pp. 212-14. Sakai's first address to the group, "The Awakening of
Middle-Class Men" ("Chiito jinshi no kakusei"), was praised by Kotoku Shilsui as a "great
success." Hayashi Takao, Hyoden Sakai Toshihiko: sono hito to shiso (Tokyo: Orijin Shuppan
Sentaa, 1987), p. 55.
79. Muta Kazue, "Images of the Family in Meiji Journals: The Paradox Underlying the
Emergence of the 'Home,' " US.-Japan Women's Journal, English Supplement, No. 7 (1994),
pp. 56-58; Nishikawa Yfiko, "The Changing Form of Dwellings and the Establishment of the
Katei (Home) in Modern Japan," U.S.-Japan Women's Journal, English Supplement, No. 8
(1995), p. 21; Saito Michiko, Hani Motoko: shogai to shiso5, pp. 19-21.
80. Yamamoto, "'Katei ky6iku' s6shutsu no shinario," p. 182. One observer of this trend,
noting that use of the word katei helped boost sales of magazines, pictures, and novels, com-
mented sardonically that "soon even onna gidayti and rakugo will be crowned by the word
katei." "Katei mono ryuko," Chuo koron, No. 193 (April 1905), p. 69.
people who were not yet accustomed to living on salaries. At the same time,
Hani made Western clothing and Western recipes an integral part of her
model.81 Although some readers criticized Hani's discussions of chairs, fry-
pans, and gas and electricity as too "upper class" and too Westernized to
meet their needs, Hani argued that the middle class should strive to improve
its conditions and that her ideas could be applied when readers' situations
permitted. Her proposals did in fact provide a powerfully attractive model
to the many readers who, despite their low salaries, aspired to middle-class
lifestyles.82
Sakai Toshihiko, who had converted to socialism, also took up the cause
with zeal and in 1903 founded the Katei zasshi, dedicated to the progressive
reform of the conjugal relationship and the home. In the first issue, Sakai
described the evolution of the social conditions governing family life from
the premodern patriarchal family system (kazoku seido) through the indi-
vidualist stage to the impending stage of socialism, but noted that both pa-
triarchal ideas and individualist, private-property-centered values were still
widespread. In response, Sakai argued that "the ideal of the family [ie] is
one in which husband and wife are equals, and love and assist each other to
achieve a truly mutual life" and that "the home [katei] is the place where
this ideal is made manifest." 83
Sakai's example of the model family and home was that of Sasa Kuma-
taro, the director of the Sumidagawa branch office of the Tokyo Tobacco
Bureau. A mid-level civil servant (chato no kanri), Sasa was infused with
the spirit of reform. At work, he ordered staff members to wear Western
clothes and to use Western pens, ink, and paper, and he developed a calcu-
lation method that made the abacus unnecessary. Sasa and his wife were
also enthusiasts of household rationalization, organizing their family's life
according to the principles of economy and efficiency. (Mrs. Sasa reportedly
told Sakai that one might obtain some useful ideas about household order-
liness from observing a warship, where convenience was achieved with
minimal space!). Unlike upper-class families, the Sasas did not employ do-
mestic servants, except a babysitter to help care for their six children. The
Sasa home was a Western-style structure, and the center of the Sasas' life
was their dining room, where they not only took their meals but also enter-
tained guests and played with their children, one of whom performed a mili-
tary march on the organ for the benefit of visitors.
Mr. Sasa has in this way made his home an enjoyable place. In return, he
rarely goes out except on business matters; his children have never taken
81. Sait6, Hani Motoko: shogai to shis3, pp. 52, 55-57, 62-77, and 82, note 11.
82. Ibid., pp. 64, 76. While not comprising her Westernized ideals, Hani nonetheless de-
veloped ideas for the amelioration of Japanese-style kitchens.
83. Sakai Toshihiko, "Wagahai no konpon shis6," Katei zasshi, Vol. 1, No. 1 (April
1903), in Sakai Toshihiko zenshfi, Vol. 2, pp. 269-75; passage cited is on pp. 274-75.
meals anywhere other than at home; and [the family] never goes out for
entertainment or to seek pleasure. On Sundays, [the family] finds its greatest
pleasure in getting together and playing at home.84
To Sakai, the most wholesome (kenzen) homes were those of the middle
class, while it was only in this class that one could find women of true re-
finement (shin no hinkaku). In contrast, men of the upper class kept numerous
concubines and often married former geisha, while their homes were always
infused with lies, frivolity, and licentiousness. Middle-class women, he con-
tinued, should not seek to emulate their upper-class counterparts, but should
preserve their own frugal, dignified ways and thus enjoy true love and do-
mestic bliss.85 Sakai's reasoning perfectly matched that of the Fujin shinpc
editorialist who decried "aristocratic falsehood, aristocratic corruption, and
aristocratic ignorance" and claimed that "only among the middle class,
where the beautiful custom of monogamy is naturally practiced, thrift and
perseverance [undertaken], and husband and wife both work, can there be
room for the idea of reform [of women's conditions and manners (jofa)]."86
These attacks on upper-class licentiousness and corruption mirrored the
writings of some critics and reformers on the loose sexual practices of the
lower classes. Matsubara Iwagor6, for example, noted in an 1897 report on
slum life that members of the lower class thoughtlessly (mukanben) pro-
duced children, who in turn thoughtlessly reproduced, and that this agglom-
eration of thoughtlessness seriously impeded social progress.87 Adachi Ken-
chiu, director of the Tokyo Poorhouse and a pioneer in the urban child-saving
movement, noted that a major cause of juvenile delinquency was the ease
with which members of the lower class married and separated; they neither
registered their marriages nor the offspring of those unions, and this in turn
facilitated the abandonment of children when marital partners changed.88
Middle-class reformers thus asserted the superiority of their notions of mo-
nogamy and careful sexuality over those of other groups in society.89
84. Sakai Toshihiko, "Sumidagawa no ko katei," Katei zasshi, Vol. 1, No. 3 (June 1903),
in Sakai Toshihiko zenshu, Vol. 2, pp. 297-313; passage cited is on p. 313. Hani Motoko also
employed the model of a warship when discussing efficient use of household space. Saito, Hani
Motoko: shogai to shiso, p. 69.
85. Sakai Toshihiko, "Gilkan," Katei zasshi, Vol. 1, No. 3 (June 1903), in Sakai Toshi-
hiko zenshui, Vol. 2, pp. 313-15.
86. "Kaikaku wa chuto shakai ni konkyo o suyu beshi," Fujin shinp5, No. 24 (April 20,
1899), p. 2. For another example of middle-class criticism of upper-class sexual corruption,
see the editorial "Joryui shakai no zokuron," Fujin shinpo5, No. 42 (October 25, 1900), p. 1.
87. Matsubara Iwagoro, Shakai hyappomen (1897), reprinted in Ofuji Tokihiko, ed.,
Meiji bunka shiryo sosho, Vol. 12 (Tokyo: Kazama Shobo, 1960), p. 284.
88. Adachi Kenchiu, "Koji akka no jokyo" (manuscript, 1895), in Jido Mondaishi Ken-
kyukai, ed., Nihon jido5 mondai bunken senshui, Vol. 2 (Tokyo: Nihon Tosho Sentaa, 1983),
p. 10.
89. For discussion of middle-class-inspired attempts to reform the purportedly lascivious

behavior of nursemaids, see Tamanoi, "Songs as Weapons."
With this new vision of the family came a new perspective on the role
of mothers within both the household and the nation. Hara Taneaki, a promi-
nent Christian who had worked as a prison chaplain and who was the first
to undertake the rehabilitation of discharged convicts in Japan, summed up
the requisite norms in a discussion of the relationship between home educa-
tion and criminality delivered to the members of the Greater Japan Women's
Education Association (Dai Nihon Fujin Kyoikukai) in 1897. Mothers, he
wrote, must control themselves, rid themselves of indolence and selfishness,
be humble, polite, and virtuous, and eschew lying, deceit, and evil customs.
They should be competent managers of the household economy, always me-
ticulous in keeping accounts, and should strive for diligence and thrift in
household operations. Hara's example for the model not to follow was that
of the upper-class woman, the second wife of an affluent, high-ranking civil
servant. Through lack of oversight, she allowed visitors and servants to spoil
her stepson; she resorted to deceit to avoid the anger of her husband, a heavy
drinker; and through her carelessness with household accounts provided her
stepson with opportunities to pilfer small sums and thus develop a taste for
criminal behavior.90
Other experts stressed the contrast between the middle and lower classes
with respect to household education. For example, Tomeoka Kisuke pep-
pered a talk delivered to WCTU members with phrases such as "in homes
of less than middle standing" (chi ika no katei nado) or "in the slums
around Samegahashi." 91 Tomeoka's own reformatory, the Family School,
was designed to provide delinquent children with the love and discipline of
a Christian middle-class family. But whichever counterexample they chose,
as in the case of conjugal relationships and sexuality, it was to women of
the middle class that these experts assigned the norm for domestic and ma-
ternal practices.
These new norms, promoted by both state officials and middle-class re-
formers, were stimulated in part by "social hygiene" movements in Western
nations and posited for women the role of "good wife and wise mother," or
of an "agent of morality" well versed in concepts of public health and the
scientific knowledge of child rearing.92 Even Sakai's egalitarian ideal in-
cluded a conjugal division of authority: the husband was to function as
90. Hara Taneaki, "Katei kyiiku to hanzai to no kankei," Shakai zasshi, Vol. 1, No. 8
(December 1897), pp. 7-10.
91. Tomeoka Kosuke, "Katei kyoiku no ketten," Fujin shinpoi, No. 44 (December 25,
1900), pp. 17-22.
92. Sheldon Garon, "Women's Groups and the State: Contending Approaches to Political
Integration, 1890-1945," Journal of Japanese Studies, Vol. 19, No. 1 (Winter 1993), pp. 11-
12; Tamanoi, "Songs as Weapons"; Narita Ryilichi, "Women and Views of Women Within
the Changing Hygiene Conditions of Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth-Century Japan,"
U.S.-Japan Women's Journal, English Supplement, No. 8 (1995), pp. 64-86.
"prime minister and foreign minister," while the wife was to serve as "fi-
nance minister and home minister," responsible for the household budget,
education, and hygiene.93
The Home Ministry sympathized with this identification of women as
"home minister" and provided channels for the transmission of this new
image to an audience beyond the urban middle class. For example, a 1909
issue of Shimin, the journal of the Home Ministry-sponsored HWtoku move-
ment that Tomeoka had helped to build, featured several articles promoting
the new-middle-class values. Prominent educators such as Miwada Masako,
Yamawaki Fusako, Tsukamoto Hama, and Ototake Iwaz6 stressed the im-
portance of a wife's sincerity, mastery of the principles of home economics
and scientific homemaking, and responsibility for educating children.94 In
her contribution, Yajima Kajiko, leader of the WCTU, played upon the im-
age of the empress as a model public woman to reject retrograde views of
women's proper roles.95 Home Ministry officials may not have accepted the
arguments against licensed prostitution put forth by Yajima and her allies,
but they certainly shared with this group a concern for modernizing the
domestic sphere. This common objective facilitated continued cooperation
between women's groups and state agencies in the following decades.96
Conclusion
If one were to define class in purely economic terms, the "new middle
class" would not qualify as a distinct social formation, because white-collar
workers by and large do not own the means of production and thus must be
situated within the working class.97 Class, however, cannot be defined
simply by economic criteria, but needs to be analyzed in terms of relation-
ships within specific historical contexts. E. P. Thompson, while by no means
neglecting economic factors, has stressed that class is "a social and cultural
formation," while Arno Mayer has argued that
although the relations of production are a necessary determinant of class,

they do not constitute a sufficient one.... The place and movement of class
93. Sakai Toshihiko, Katei no shin fu-mi (1901), in Sakai Toshihiko zenshu, Vol. 2,
pp. 30-31 and passim.
94. Miwada Masako, "Katei no kofuku to fujin no kokorogake"; Miwada Motomichi,
"Fujin no kenshiki o tateshimeyo"; Yamawaki Fusako, "Shijo kyoiku ni tsuite"; Tsukamoto
Hama, "Fujin no jomu ni okeru keizai shiso"; and Ototake Iwazo, "Haha no chikara," all in
Shimin, Vol. 4, No. 4 (May 28, 1909).
95. Yajima Kajiko, "Chikyuisetsu no yurai," Shimin, Vol. 4, No. 4 (May 28, 1909),
pp. 16-18.
96. Garon, "Women's Groups and the State."
97 For a recent exposition of this argument, see Sobel, The White Collar Working Class.
in economy, society, and polity are a function not exclusively of shared eco-
nomic interest but also of ideological configurations and political relations.98
In turn-of-the-century Japan, the new middle class developed an aware-

ness of itself as much through a matrix of ideological constructions and po-
litical negotiations as through a sense of shared economic interests. As this
paper has demonstrated, various experts, reformers, and critics constructed a
vision of society as divided into an upper, a lower, and a middle segment,
and assigned to themselves and their peers-the middle segment-the pre-
eminent position with regard to ensuring the well-being and progress of the
nation. As part of their ideological engagement, members of this group im-
plicitly and explicitly posited their difference from and superiority to other
classes in terms of values, everyday practices, and technical expertise. And
to implement the reforms and techniques they deemed essential to achieving
the twin objectives of national progress and self-empowerment, new groups
of experts worked to capture key sections of public opinion and to cement
alliances with state agencies. This process, furthermore, characterized not
only the late Meiji era, but also the entire history of imperial Japan.99
New-middle-class reformers, in other words, sought to establish hegem-
ony over social discourse and practice. This does not mean that middle-class
advocates necessarily denied the validity of the interests of other classes.
But it does mean that activist members of the new middle class worked to
define those interests as they saw fit and encouraged members of other
classes to identify with such definitions. Thomas Smith has noted, for ex-
ample, that during the first decades of the twentieth century workers "were
tirelessly reminded by middle-class sympathizers that, until they curbed a
notorious propensity for drinking, gambling, whoring, and domestic quar-
reling, they would never achieve higher regard, and many workers agreed."
Smith writes that workers "filled the correspondence columns of labor
newspapers" with letters calling for "frugality, sobriety, regularity, and
night study." He also notes the importance of the Christian concept of jin-
98. E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (New York: Vintage,
1966), p. 11; Arno J. Mayer, "The Lower Middle Class as Historical Problem," Journal of
Modem History, No. 47 (September 1975), p. 425. Mayer continues in this passage to note that
these class positions are particularly notable "in conjunctures of dynamic conflict."
99. I do not mean to suggest that members of the new middle class were not linked by
common economic interests. For discussions of this issue, see Awazu Seiry6, "Gakushi shakai
ni taisuru hokenteki kyfisai no hitsuy6 to sono hoh6," Kokka Gakkai zasshi, Vol. 23, No. 7
(July 1, 1909), pp. 1-16; and Nanba Seishir6, "Chfto shakai no shakai mondai," Kokka Gak-
kai zasshi, Vol. 23, No. 8 (August 1, 1909), pp. 70-78. On the income and insecurity of lower-
level white-collar workers, see for example, "ChUto kaikyd konpai no ichi rei," Jindj, No. 87
(July 15, 1912), p. 6; and Much6 Anshu (pseud.), "Seishin rodosha mondai: seikatsu yori
mitaru gakko kyoin to bunshi," Chao- kiron, No. 193 (April 1905), pp. 82-90. For a discussion
of diminishing employment opportunities and consequent anxieties among students, see Kin-
month, The Self-Made Man, ch. 6.
kaku, a universal human potential for moral development, in the language
of workers' demands until well into the 1920s.100
The projection of middle-class messages toward the working class also
points to a central feature of Japanese socialism during the twentieth cen-
tury. It may seem somewhat peculiar that in 1901 Sakai Toshihiko, a social-
ist, should have claimed for wives the role of "home minister" within the
household: the Home Ministry had in 1900 developed the Peace Police Law,
which restricted political assemblies and effectively repressed labor unions
and strikes and, at the time Sakai was writing, had banned the nascent Social
Democratic Party. But to many Meiji socialists, personal morality, thrift,
and proper homemaking were as important as class struggle and the social-
ization of the means of production.
Such values allowed social democrats such as Abe Isoo to remain
closely linked to other middle-class reformers in the private sector and in
state agencies, even as government officials took an increasingly harsh ap-
proach in dealing with overt challenges to the state by Kitoku Shiisui and
his associates, with whom Sakai maintained close links.101 Furthermore, this
strain of middle-class reformism did not disappear with the advent of so-
phisticated Marxist theories and the emergence of a more vigorous labor
movement in the Taisho period. On the contrary, labor organizers and pro-
letarian party leaders such as Abe, Katayama Tetsu, Suzuki Bunji, and Ka-
gawa Toyohiko ensured that Christian-inspired middle-class values re-
mained central to labor culture and social democratic politics during the
twentieth century. And these leaders also maintained close contacts with
other moral reformers and social bureaucrats at the local level and within
the Home Ministry.
One can also detect a certain congruence of social values and postures,
as well as a linkage in social policy mechanisms, between the new middle
class and the old middle class of small-scale businessowners and manufac-
turers. Although some contemporary writers viewed the old middle class as
the "incarnation of conservatism," these small business owners saw them-
selves and came to be seen by government agencies as the mainstays of
100. Thomas C. Smith, "The Right to Benevolence: Dignity and Japanese Workers,
1890-1920," in Smith, Native Sources of Japanese Industrialization, pp. 245 (italics mine),
242, and 261-63.
101. Sakai had intended to join the Social Democratic Party. When the Home Ministry
banned the SDP, Sakai remonstrated with Home Minister Suematsu Kench6, with whom he
was personally acquainted and who occasionally acted as Sakai's informal patron. In his diary,
Sakai criticized Suematsu for displaying an anachronistic attitude toward socialism. Sakai To-
shihiko, "Sanjussaiki" (diary) entries for May 20, May 22, and August 22, 1901, in Sakai
Toshihiko zenshi, Vol. 1, pp. 398, 400, 410. Although Sakai was a close associate of Kotoku,
he did not share the latter's anarchist view but after 1905 hewed closer to the line propounded
by the orthodox wing of the German Social Democratic Party. See Hayashi Takao, Hyiden
Sakai Toshihiko, pp. 175-80.
urban neighborhoods, especially those with shifting populations.102 The old
middle classes took the initiative in organizing neighborhood associations,
or chonaikai, in the decades after the Sino-Japanese War, and in the 1920s
and 1930s they provided the majority of local welfare commissioners (ho-
men iin).'03 In their capacity as welfare commissioners, members of the old
middle class promoted hygiene, frugality, and the reform of social prac-
tices among the working-class and lower-class residents of their neighbor-
hoods. At the same time, they demonstrated an awareness of themselves as
intermediaries who could harmonize the interests of the capitalist and work-
ing classes and who could criticize members of the upper class for mistaken
or suspect approaches to the poor.104 Because one of their principal tasks
was to compile card files on the poor within their precincts, the welfare
commissioners implemented new techniques of surveying and surveillance
at the local level and thus served as conduits for new social work policies
developed by specialists in municipal government social bureaus and related
agencies. 105
It is not clear to what extent new-middle-class practices and influence

took hold among the rural population in the decades after the Meiji era. As
the fieldwork of John Embree and Ella Wiswell in Suye Mura in 1935-36
suggests, middle-class constructions of gender and marriage held little sway
in the daily life of rural Kyushu, while actual members of the new middle
class were largely alienated from the community in which they resided. On
the other hand, Margaret Sanger was a well-known figure among the women
of Suye Mura; some younger women in the village aspired to become office
workers; and Ie no hikari, the most widely read magazine in the village (and
one of the most popular throughout rural Japan), provided frequent discus-
sions of urban middle-class lifestyles and homemaking.106 Urban middle-
class messages were gradually making their way into the countryside, but
102. Omori Makoto, "Toshi shakai jigyo seiritsu ki ni okeru chuikanso to minponshugi:
Osaka-fu homen iin seido no seiritsu o megutte," Hisutoria, No. 97 (December 1982), pp. 58-
77. For "incarnation of conservatism" (hoshushugi no gonge): Toda Kaiichi, Nihon no shakai
(1911), cited in ibid., p. 70, note 4.
103. Omori, "Toshi shakai jigyo"; on the leadership of the chonaikai, see also Yazaki
Takeo, Social Change and the City in Japan: From the Earliest Times Through the Industrial
Revolution, trans. David L. Swain (Tokyo: Japan Publications, 1968), p. 456.
104. Omori, "Toshi shakai jigy6," pp. 70-72.
105. See for example Ikeda Yoshimasa, Nihon shakaifukushi shi (Tokyo: HMritsu Bunka-
sha, 1985), p. 516. The welfare commissioners also engaged in functions such as mediating
disputes and providing money to the poor through loans or donations.
106. John Embree, Suye Mura: A Japanese Village (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1939); Robert J. Smith, "Japanese Village Women: Suye-mura, 1935-1936," Journal
of Japanese Studies, Vol.7, No. 2 (Summer 1981), pp. 259-84; Itagaki Kuniko, Showa senzen,
senchilki no noson seikatsu: zasshi "Ie no hikari" ni miru (Tokyo: Mitsumine Shobo, 1992),
pp. 32-33; Garon, "Women's Groups and the Japanese State," pp. 22-23.
the translation of many of these messages into widespread daily practice
would have to wait until the high-growth phase of the postwar era.
Even within urban society, however, it is not clear that the new middle
class reformers and experts successfully developed an identity and social
vision that could incorporate the interests of all of the potential members of
this social formation. While the WCTU, the Salvation Army, Tomeoka K6-
suke, Abe Isoo, and other reformers criticized loose sexuality, wasteful con-
sumption, and other forms of questionable morality, many urban white-
collar workers and students continued to flock to the licensed quarters, to
musume gidayu performances or, in the 1920s and 1930s, to more "mod-
ern" cafes and bars, and consumed their share of alcohol.'07
The new middle class, then, was far from a united body with a common
political agenda and single identity. Rather, as responses to issues such as
the emergence of socialism, the demands for labor legislation and universal
suffrage, and the movement to abolish licensed prostitution reveal, members
of this class displayed a diversity of political opinions which led them to
seek support in different state agencies and among different segments of
public opinion. While the influence of members of the new middle class
grew during this period, it is important to remember that other groups such
as the industrial bourgeoisie or higher government officials were often able
to limit the scope of middle-class activists' demands or to impose their own
social, economic, and political agendas. The new middle class thus has to
be understood in the context of the various negotiations and alliances its
members undertook, as well as in the broader context of shifts in Japan's
political economy and social conditions.
Despite these apparent limitations, new-middle-class experts and re-
formers successfully integrated themselves into a wide range of power re-
lationships and established themselves as authorities on issues of relevance
to the nation-state and the daily lives of its people. By deploying new, often
imported, social knowledge and models of social relationships, the new
middle class helped to construct the categories according to which national
and social problems were understood and addressed. An analysis of the po-
sition of this social formation is thus critical to understanding the governing
system of modern Japan.
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY
107. For Meiji-period examples, see Yamagata Tokon (Fukawa Magoichi), "Seinen ga-
kusei daraku no riyu," Shakai zasshi, Vol. 1, No. 9 (January 1898), pp. 16-20, and Vol. 1,
No. 10 (February 1898), pp. 19-26; Tomeoka Kosuke, "Gakusei ffiki mondai," Shakai, Vol. 2,
No. 15 (June 1900), pp. 64-67; and Soeda Tomomichi, Enka no Meiji Taish5 shi (Tokyo:
Iwanami Shoten, 1970), pp. 86-88. For a fictionalized account of new-middle-class consum-
erism and "decadence" in the 1920s, inspired loosely by the author's experiences, see Tanizaki
Junichiro, Naomi (Chijin no ai), trans. Anthony H. Chambers (New York: Alfred A. Knopf,
1985).

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The Society for Japanese Studies

Social Knowledge, Cultural Capital, and the New

Abstract: In the late Meiji era, new-middle-class reformers articulated a vision

Journal of Japanese Studies, 24: 1

Early Meiji Discourses on the Middle Class

7. Dietrich Rueschemeyer and Theda Skocpol, "Conclusion," in Rueschemeyer and

Intellectuals and the "Social Problem" after the Sino-Japanese War

The Sino-Japanese War was a crucial turning point in the development

In the first decade of the Meiji period, Christianity, especially Protes-

Another crucial element in the spread of Christianity among the middle

The career of Tomeoka Kosuke amply illustrates the dynamics of social

Although the nobles expend much energy on unproductive public ceremo-

This letter, Tomeoka added, represented the opinion of "Japanese gen-

47. Tomeoka, Jizen mondai, pp. 4-5, 13-16.

Move back, small scholars . . ., away, small men of religion . . . , retreat,

Tomeoka actively cultivated this new middle class of reformers. He vig-

A long while ago, at a luncheon meeting of top Police Prefecture officials,

Tomeoka also sought to build a national organization of charities and was

50. Ibid., pp. 98-106.

Circuits of Knowledge, Networks of Power: Educators and

In other fields as well, communities of specialists worked to secure the

Social Criticism, Sociability, and the Middle-Class Home

Middle-class writers and activists also engaged in wide-ranging social

This new sociability was to be complemented and supported by a new

89. For discussion of middle-class-inspired attempts to reform the purportedly lascivious

although the relations of production are a necessary determinant of class,

In turn-of-the-century Japan, the new middle class developed an aware-

It is not clear to what extent new-middle-class practices and influence

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