"L'insegnamento della 'lingua nazionale' e il sistema educativo nel Giappone Meiji (1868-1912). Ideologia e formazione dell'identità nazionale"

After the collapse of the shōgun’s régime, Japan from the beginning of the Meiji Restoration (1868) had to cope with many tasks in order to carry out a process of modernization of the Country. One of the most demanding reform was the implementation of a new, and centralized, education system, within which the teaching of a standardized “national” language was one of the pillars of the new school organization. The need to pave the way to the development of a common medium of communication, shared on a national basis, inspired dialectological research, the production of new textbooks, a national language planning that meant, in some cases, discrimination against minority languages and dialects. Through a “trials and errors” process, between the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century, Japan succeeded in the creation of a “national language” ideology, and in developing a new school system that gained one the highest school attendance ratio in the world.