This article concluded that in Imperial Japan, during the Asia Pacific War, 1931-1945, the young non-elite had to exert ourselves strongly “originality and ingenuity” that it is similar to the “intelligence” pragmatism theorists said.
To prove the above, this article firstly analyzed the movement of the policy that aimed at the exaltation of the “originality and ingenuity” by the masses in the 1930s and the early 1940s in particular, after World War I that the preparations for a coming total war were pushed forward in Japan. Secondly, this article focused on the national textbook Seinen-Shushin-Kouminsyo for the shushin and civic education of the youth school and analyzed a main curriculum system aiming at the “originality and ingenuity” training in the youth school.
The main elucidation points of this article are as follows.
The exertion of the “originality and ingenuity” was to wrestle for project activities for the young non-elite each one to solve close public problems spontaneously. By the project activities of the young, general-purpose technology development was made much of in particular. In other words, the exaltation of the “originality and ingenuity” was that the young drew up creative project activities mainly on the general-purpose technology development proactively to overcome serious difficulty of national life and really carried it out. At this time, the person considered to be their model was Thomas A. Edison, Sakichi Toyoda, Sakutaro Kobayashi who had a little formal schooling, and technology developers of other non-elite.
In this way, the Japanese total war system in the times of the Asia Pacific War built a new component of national education system to train the young who engaged in labor to be impellers of various project activities to share close public problems and to solve them. It was considered that this new component was pragmatic.
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