2020 Volume 71 Issue 3 Pages 411-428
This study canvasses a new perspective on the history of deaf education in Japan based on non-modernism. Using the approaches of Actor-Network Theory and Modi Essendi Theory, the study visualizes the continuity and discontinuity of deaf education with the use of deaf-mute and gestural languages in the Tokugawa and Meiji periods. An analysis of a discourse related to deaf-mute and gestural languages discovered the realization process along with the translation of deafmute, starting from Confucianism, construction of an actor-network with different kinds of actors under the effects of Confucianism, to the instructional policy for common people or the apprentice system. The gestural language was defined as an actor-network, which re-visualizes that separable and internal relationships between deaf embodiment and deaf embodiment changed to their inseparable and external relevance. We take into cognizance the construction of the actor-network of diverse actors such as the deaf-mute, gestural language, reading, social systems, and Confucianism in the Tokugawa period, apart from the purification process, in which the deaf-mute and gestural languages were definitively combined, suggesting a new perspective of history of deaf education in Japan. This is to say that the westernization of deaf educational systems during the Meiji period in Japan does not necessarily imply the modernization of deaf education system in Japan.
