Soon after overthrowing the Tokugawa government in 1868, the new Meiji leaders devised ambitious plans to build a modern nation-state. Among the earliest and most radical of the Meiji reforms was a plan for a centralised, compulsory educational system modelled after those in Europe and America. Meiji leaders hoped that schools would curb mounting social disorder and mobilise the Japanese people against the threat of Western imperialism. The sweeping tone of this revolutionary plan obscured the fact that the Japanese were already quite literate and had clear ideas about what a school should...