The purpose of this research is to determine which samurai classes among the graduates of Kanazawa I Middle School in the old Kaga domain successfully entered new careers as elites in school education. The data for the research was gathered from a list of Kanazawa I Middle School graduates for the middle and final part of the Meiji Era.
In recent years, research on the samurai classes that dealt with reorganizations of the old social standing into new class systems did not observe the classes as a single group, but examined them according to their property, social awareness and cultural ethos, which were divided unequally under the old social class system. In this thesis, I choose to focus my analysis on social awareness and cultural ethos in the middle and final part of the Meiji Era, a time in which models of people who moved ahead in society were spreading among ordinary people. Below are the outcomes of my research:
1. There was one specific condition that significantly improved the prospects of a family producing an elite. The families that succeeded in producing elites were ranked yoriki and kyunin or higher. My calculations on the number of elites produced show that there were significant differences between families in these ranks or higher and those that were not. It was found that the families in the higher ranks produced elites four to five times as often than the lower families, which makes it clear that higher ranked families produced more elites in school education. Of the families lower than the two above-mentioned ranks, there were some whose ranks had risen due to promotion within the clan. Although such promoted families were a minority under the strict class system, it seems that they were regarded favorably in the society after the Meiji Restoration, which set a greater value on academic background. By contrast, Ifound that the ratio of production of elites from kachi and ashigaru ranks was very low.
2. Why is the percentage of elites produced in school education high in the yoriki and kyunin ranks? It seems that the reason is that the members of these ranks internalized the original attitudes of the samurai toward “duty” and studying. After the Meiji Restoration, they did not find value in studying due to its merits, but naturally entered into schools of higher grade under the modern system under their attitude that samurai should have “a homeless mind.” They tried hard to make themselves into a functional group by educating their children and by marriage strategies.
