INTRODUCTION

UNTIL RECENTLY, LITTLE was known about the situation in the late 1880s of science education in Japanese schools, especially primary schools. This was not least due to a lack of sources. It was not until the discovery of some students’ notebooks from this period that concrete insights into the content and teaching methods of such lessons became possible. In 2007, the late Kimura Hatsuo (1931–2018), professor emeritus of Nagoya University, Faculty of Engineering, found several notebooks of his grandfather, Endō Shunkichi, in his parents’ house in Murakami, an old castle town at the coast of the Sea of Japan in Niigata prefecture. The cover of a representative example of such a notebook is shown in Fig.The discovery triggered a comprehensive study on this topic by a larger group of scholars, some results of which are presented below.

In 2008, Kimura wrote an article to introduce what the student about 100 years ago learned in physics (butsuri). For Kimura, these notes were interesting mainly because of their age. However, his article unexpectedly caused a great stir among researchers specialized on the history of science education, because at that time, in 1890 (Meiji 23) there should no longer have been a subject of physics (butsuri) in the official curriculum of higher primary schools.

The point is, that the subject of butsuri which had so far represented science education at Japanese schools, was officially replaced in 1886 by a new subject called rika (“science”). This is regarded as a turning point in science education in Japan, because rika, even though also meaning science, had a different connotation. Instead of emphasising “principles” as was the case in butsuri, the subject rika tended more in the direction of a comprehensive natural history. In other words, after 1886 primary school official curricula no longer contained the subject of butsuri, but instead had rika.

According to the Shōgakkō-rei (Ordinance of Primary Schools) from 1886, compulsory education was four years for ordinary primary school, and four years for higher primary school. The author of the notebooks, Endō Shunkichi, was born in 1875 (Meiji 8), so was 15 years old in 1890 and probably a student of a higher primary school.