training obedient and reliable subjects who could serve as technically efficient cogs in the complicated machinery of the modern state.
In the early years of Meiji, private Japanese educators and Protestant missionaries from America took an important part in developing schools for boys and girls above the primary level, but the Ministry of Education more and more asserted its authority over all schools and gradually forced them to conform to a strict pattern. The schools became increasingly a medium for teaching the people what to think rather than how to think. Thus Japan pioneered in the modern totalitarian technique of utilizing the educational system for political indoctrination and was, in fact, decades ahead of countries like Germany in perfecting these techniques.
The educational system coupled with military conscription, which fell primarily on the peasants, permitted a thoroughgoing indoctrination of the young Japanese, especially peasants, who were less likely than their city cousins to be subjected to outside influence. The peasants in late Tokugawa times, ground down by crushing poverty, had at times rioted against tax-collectors and usurers, but the heavy Tokugawa rule had made them on the whole a docile and obedient lot, perhaps even less conscious politically than their forbears of the more turbulent sixteenth century. They were easy subjects for the indoctrination they were given in schools and in the army.
In classrooms and army barracks the young Japanese was taught to glory in Japan’s military traditions. He came to believe that death on the battlefield for the