by Donald T. Roden (Author)

Schooldays in Imperial Japan: A Study in the Culture of a Student Elite by Donald Roden offers the first sustained exploration of the daily life, values, and rituals of Japan's prewar higher schools--elite, all-male academies that prepared a fraction of one percent of the nation's youth for the Imperial Universities. Rather than focusing on institutional structures, Roden probes the **inner culture of students and teachers**: the songs, games, and slogans that marked dormitory life; the shifting balance of power between faculty discipline and student self-rule; and the ideals of cultivation, loyalty, and honor that linked these schools to both the samurai tradition and to Western models such as the British public school or German Gymnasium. Drawing on diaries, memoirs, novels, and interviews with alumni, the book reconstructs a world in which late adolescents were socialized into an ethos that simultaneously promised meritocratic achievement and reproduced hierarchical ascription, embedding conservative values at the very center of Japan's rapid modernization.

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