Dōmō hitsudoku, Shinchōyō ōrai 童蒙必讀新聽用徃来 (全)

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The Dōmō hitsudoku, Shinchōyō ōrai 童蒙必讀新聽用徃来 (全) was printed in the first decade of the Meiji Era. A full-color image of a Western-style courtroom opens the text of this ethics textbook. The figures in the image appear in Western clothing and the courtroom setting employs distinctly Western furniture. In fact, this courtroom differs greatly from the typical Japanese court, where plaintiffs and defendants crouched on the floor before a local or provincial official.1 Traditional Japanese court cases took place privately, which means the audience included in the illustration would not have been present.2 In 1873, the Ministry of Education offered a selection of five ethics textbooks for the education of elementary school children.3 Following the trend toward Westernization in this period, all of these texts, whether entirely or in part, were translations of Western texts.4 As the Ministry of Education based the new educational system heavily on the French school system of the period, the ethical texts used in translation came from France.5 Researcher: Colleen Bache 1 Carl Steenstrup, A History of Law in Japan Until 1868, (Leiden, The Netherlands: E.J. Brill, 1991), 154-155. 2 Ibid. 3 E. PatriciaTsurumi, “Meiji Primary School Language and Ethics Textbooks: Old Values for a New Society?” Modern Asian Studies 8 (1974), 249. 4 Ibid. 5 Donald H. Shively, ed., Traditiona and Modernization in Japanese Culture, (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1971), 37-38; Tsurumi, “Meiji Primary School Language and Ethics Textbooks,” 249. Other information: Full text pdf at Hiroshima University: http://ir.lib.hiroshima-u.ac.jp/metadb/up/text/10440.pdf, opens in a new window Gakugei University: ir.u-gakugei.ac.jp/handle/2309/106277, opens in a new window