Education in Tokugawa Japan

This careful and important study of the development of the varied types of education in the last two and a half centuries of feudalism in Japan under the Tokugawa dictatorship (16001868) is more than a history of premodern education. It is also an intellectual history and a history of the educational philosophy of the writers of that period. Basing his work on extensive Japanese primary sources, the author has selected and organized his material well; thus his study fills an important gap in our knowledge of Japanese history. Hugh Borton, Haverford College, American Historical Review 71, no. 4 (July 1966): 141011. There is no other book like it. . . . Readers already familiar with earlier books by Ronald Dore will rightly have guessed that we have been given yet another tour de force. Utilizing a remarkable amount of primary source material and discussing its implications with his customary grace and clarity, the author deals with the educational institutions for both samurai and commoner and the curricula of the bewildering variety of schools of Japan from the beginning of the 17th century through the Meiji Restoration in 1868. Yet this is in no sense a book of restricted interest, for it has as much to say to the student of sociocultural change as to the Japan specialist. R. J. Smith, Cornell University, American Anthropologist 68, no. 4 (August 1966), 108687.