Associate Professor SUNAGA, Satoshi

Associate Professor SUNAGA, Satoshi

History of Education in Modern and Contemporary Japan

Education is inevitably subject to various regulations in the context of politics, economics, history, and other social relations.  However, education also includes independence and originality that are not merely subordinate to such regulations.  The purpose of this study is to clarify, based on historical materials, the history of how education has been conducted in the interrelated tension between regulation and independence.  In particular, it is an urgent task to collect, preserve, and publicate of historical materials from the 1950's onward, and to conduct interviews with aging relations.  I would also like to work on the development of the archives.

First, I will focus on the editing process of supplementary textbooks for social studies called Children of the World (15 volumes, Heibonsha, 1955–1957).  These books were edited and published to promote the study of world geography through children's descriptions of their daily lives, consisting of essays and drawings by children from around the world, and explanatory text, photographs, and charts added by the editors.  The content of the essays and the explanatory texts are imprinted with various aspects of the international situation against the backdrop of the Cold War system.  On the other hand, a careful examination of the primary documents left behind by the editor at the time (unpublished essays, correspondence with local collaborators, records of editorial meetings, etc.) reveals that the content of the essays included specific individual experiences that did not necessarily conform to the wishes of the teachers and editors.  From these materials and analytical perspectives, I will attempt to clarify some aspects of the “children's world history” of the 1950's.