There're some classroom details in the rural Taisho book I think I mentioned back on RKD-- Memories of Silk and Straw: A Self-Portrait of Small-Town Japan by Junichi Saga; there's a sequel I keep meaning to hunt down-- but again, I'm not sure how close they'd be to Meiji Tokyo.
The book is a set of small essay-like chapters drawn from individual interviews; in the last one, a woman born in 1903 says that she went to the Girls' Primary School (hence, sex-segregated), where they didn't have any textbooks so they wrote on slates with "slate sticks" (chalk? or were different colors of slate actually used to write on each other?) and occasionally brought in newspapers for calligraphy practice; sometimes there wasn't any paper available, and so they'd dampen the "sandpit" outside (a playground sandbox, or something specifically designated for writing in?) and practice writing their kanji in there. They had music lessons (mostly singing patriotic songs) in a different room of the same traditionally-constructed building, with handmade paper screens and a soggy wooden veranda
And then there's the rather bloodcurdling account by two guys who were born in 1895 and 1896, of all of the boys their age routinely playing around by making gunpowder from saltpeter, sulfur, and charcoal and stuffing it into a bamboo pipe for fireworks or small shotguns (for picking off birds). And hey, that one has a footnote about the "slate sticks"; there was another game for which "[t]he stick was cut in half and the two pieces rubbed against a stone to flatten out the bottom part, making them semi-cylindrical" (so they were cylindrical to start with); one end of each half-stick was then cut into a "downward-pointing wedge" and the bottom was oiled, and then the half-sticks were flicked around on a flat writing slate (which had raised rims) to try to knock the other kid's stick off, kinda almost like air hockey?
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ninetydegrees
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on 2007-08-27 04:00 am (UTC)The book is a set of small essay-like chapters drawn from individual interviews; in the last one, a woman born in 1903 says that she went to the Girls' Primary School (hence, sex-segregated), where they didn't have any textbooks so they wrote on slates with "slate sticks" (chalk? or were different colors of slate actually used to write on each other?) and occasionally brought in newspapers for calligraphy practice; sometimes there wasn't any paper available, and so they'd dampen the "sandpit" outside (a playground sandbox, or something specifically designated for writing in?) and practice writing their kanji in there. They had music lessons (mostly singing patriotic songs) in a different room of the same traditionally-constructed building, with handmade paper screens and a soggy wooden veranda
And then there's the rather bloodcurdling account by two guys who were born in 1895 and 1896, of all of the boys their age routinely playing around by making gunpowder from saltpeter, sulfur, and charcoal and stuffing it into a bamboo pipe for fireworks or small shotguns (for picking off birds). And hey, that one has a footnote about the "slate sticks"; there was another game for which "[t]he stick was cut in half and the two pieces rubbed against a stone to flatten out the bottom part, making them semi-cylindrical" (so they were cylindrical to start with); one end of each half-stick was then cut into a "downward-pointing wedge" and the bottom was oiled, and then the half-sticks were flicked around on a flat writing slate (which had raised rims) to try to knock the other kid's stick off, kinda almost like air hockey?