This study focuses on the activities of educational reformers in Taishō Japan who sought to refocus the aim of education from the state to individuals. Educational reform in the Taishō and early Showa eras has often been overlooked in the literature in English. However, this period was the crucible for the formation of both the agenda for many of the postwar educational reforms and the entire teachers’ labor movement in Japan. Because of this lacuna, many accounts of the postwar educational reforms that took place during the Allied Occupation of Japan portray those reforms as a “foreign import” that did not fit with the “traditional” prewar educational system of Japan, and this adds credence to claims that those postwar reforms should be repealed. Understanding that the postwar reforms had a precedent in the reform movements that occurred in Japan prior to the war helps to shed light on this misconception.

There are four groups at the core of this study: the Keimeikai, the first teachers union in Japan; the Kyoiku no Seikisha, which sought to institute educational reform through a network of private schools and interested educators within the state system; Hani Motoko and her private school the Jiyu Gakuen; and the Kizaki Musan Nōmin Shōgakkō, or Kizaki Proletarian Farmers’ Elementary School. These groups sought to achieve social reform by re-centering the educational system away from its role as a tool of nation-state development, which had at its core the function of character building and moral regulation, to a means for individual-centered intellectual development. These four groups worked to form alternative educational spaces for various segments of the populace who had been politically, socially and economically marginalized in the process of nation-building in Japan in the Meiji and Taishō eras.