A Study on Osada Arata’s 1942 Lectures in China

Abstract

Osada Arata (1887–1961), a renowned Japanese educationalist, visited Japanese-occupied Beijing in 1942 and delivered five lectures to high school teachers there. He claimed that Eastern countries should absorb Western culture and create a more unified civilization. In these lectures, Osada showed his rich knowledge of Chinese Classics and his ambition to establish a new pedagogy that would surpass Pestalozzi's. This was one of the factors that drove his educational studies in the first half of the 1940s. However, his theory faced the dilemma of Chinese nationalism, so its influence was very limited.