Literacy

Tokugawa Japan is said to have enjoyed a higher level of literacy than most other parts of the world, though the precise percentage of people who were literate has been difficult to estimate. According to some scholars, the literacy rate among urban dwellers may have been as high as 80% for men and 50% for women, and even including people throughout the rest of the archipelago (i.e. rural villagers), as many as 40-50% of men, and 15-20% of women are believed to have been literate.

Ronald Dore has estimated that as many as 43% of boys and 10% of girls, across social status categories, received some form of schooling in the late Tokugawa period, whether at a terakoya ("temple school"), or in private tenarai (lit. "hand learning", i.e. reading and writing) tutoring from relatives or neighbors.

Tokugawa Japan was a highly bureaucratized society, with much reports and other forms of official paperwork circulating throughout the archipelago. Thus, while official posts and elite status meant the samurai surely had higher rates of literacy than the commoners, it can be inferred that many rural people - especially village headmen, who had bureaucratic paperwork responsibilities, and merchants, who had to balance books and record sales - also possessed at least some degree of literacy. This inference is supported not only by the mounds of surviving political and economic records, but also by diaries and journals which tell of villagers' lives. While it would have been quite standard not only in the villages but also in the big cities for edicts and other sorts of public documents to be read aloud to gathered crowds, for the benefit of those who could not read, we also see in these diaries accounts of villagers maintaining records of various sorts, writing and receiving letters, and buying, borrowing, and lending books. Booklenders traveled throughout the countryside, bringing books from the major cities, and often got to know their customers well enough to bring books specifically catered to their interests; rural customers could also place special orders. But, beyond this, books are also known to have circulated within villages, and between villages, in informal networks of friendly borrowing. One such diary, which might be taken as indicative if not entirely typical, reveals that Mori Chôemon, a relatively well-to-do farmer in Kusaka village some distance outside Osaka, had a book-lender visit his village once a month; in 1727, Mori bought books on letter writing and on old calendars, a guide to Edo, books of ghost tales and war stories, and a copy of the 80-volume Wakan sansai zue encyclopedia. His diary reveals that he lent books quite widely to residents of his and neighboring villages, who engaged not only in book-borrowing, but also engaged with one another in playing go, flower arrangement, jôruri singing, Chinese poetry contests, and other cultural activities.

Literacy among commoners is believed to have spread particularly widely in the late 17th century. Scholar Eiko Ikegami cites a 1725 story in which the speaker relates that in his youth (i.e. sometime, roughly, before 1700), only the wealthier members of townsmen society could afford tutors for their children, and as such there were only three or five people in a given ward of the city who could read and write well. But, he continues, today (i.e. around 1725), "even the daughter of a humble household like ours can have lessons in writing and reading."

The institution of a modern-style national education system in the Meiji period led, of course, to dramatic increases in literacy rates.

References

• Eiko Ikegami, Bonds of Civility, Cambridge University Press (2005), 300-302.