Jamyung Choi

Historians have extensively explored conflicts and reconciliation between labor and management, but have hardly considered how class hierarchy took shape and persisted. This article explores the birth of class hierarchy through the lens of the Tokyo Worker School. While education bureaucrats created this school as a training ground for skilled workers, the school’s educators helped their students join white-collar positions and avoid the stigma against manual labor. By tracing this process, I explain how the aspirations of educators and students alike consolidated class hierarchy and explore why the collar line persisted despite the ascent of hitherto under-valued professions,
such as engineering.

This article explores how Tokyo Imperial University, the oldest Japanese state university, came to be perceived as the top school in meritocratic Japan. Educational sociologists have investigated the institutionally defined hierarchy among universities in modern Japan but have rarely debated why the hierarchy persisted after the abolishment of privileges given exclusively to students of Tokyo Imperial University. This article historicizes the university's superiority as an idea reshaped through the expansion of higher education and competition among institutions. It reveals a paradox of meritocracy: the idea of merit was discursively eclipsed as more aspirants competed for educational credentials in modern Japan.

This paper examines the Red Gate Student Consumption Cooperative (akamon gakusei shohi kumiai, hereafter RSCC, 1928-1940) at Tokyo Imperial University (hereafter Todai)—a branch of the Tokyo University Student Consumption Cooperative (Tokyo gakusei shohi kumiai) led by Kagawa Toyohiko—in the context of middle-class politics in Japan. As middle-class life became a common aspiration, consumption cooperatives, which lowered prices through collective purchase directly from producers, surfaced as a tool to promote a middle-class standard of living. Exploring the RSCC, I will highlight how student life at Todai, a critical springboard to middle-class status, became an object of social contestation during the interwar and wartime years. I will place the history of the RSCC within the context of an important shift in the nature of middle-class identity—from moneyed models of modern living to struggling yet aspirational “western-clothes paupers.” In so doing, I will illuminate how student radicalism reflected students’ blurred identity as individuals caught between the tentative proletariat and the prospective middle class. This paper will also reconceptualize the war era as less a “dark valley” than a boon to middle-class production and formation. The RSCC prospered throughout the 1930s, with its activities and value markedly increasing during this decade. For example, the RSCC inspired university authorities to further develop the student welfare system, such as tuition exemption and lowered prices in on-campus dining halls. The number of dropouts plummeted during the war, and Todai’s function in the human production of the middle class strengthened.

This paper examines the Sports Purification Movement (supōtsu jōka undō) initiated in 1930 by the alumni of the Tokyo Imperial University (hereafter, Tōdai) Athletic Association (TAA) in the context of changing middle-class identity in wartime Japan. As intercollegiate sports activities prospered at higher educational facilities, star athletes stood out for their privileged status on campus and the job market. They quickly became the target of criticism, not only from leftists who denigrated star athletes as “running dogs of capitalism,” but also from school authorities and sports administrators themselves. Sports Purification activists problematized the "professionalization of student sports," which, they claimed, adversely affected academic performance, lowered admission standards, and encouraged athletes' monopolization of sports facilities. To solve these problems, they proposed a restoration of an “amateur identity” in sports. Viewing Tōdai as a privileged sports community with its sports facilities and influential alumni, I explore how university students created a sports culture that helped refashion middle-class identities of leisure in early-twentieth-century Japan. By focusing on the pervasive influence of TAA alumni including managers of school sports, business communities, and bureaucrats, this paper also highlights the effects of "sports purification" in three contexts: state engagement, the reform of intercollegiate leagues, and the popularization of sports. I examine how TAA leaders used the idea of amateurism to move from an elitist to mass identity and created opportunities for non-athletes across the campus and beyond. In this way, the TAA fashioned a middle-class identity of leisure that became increasingly notable for its classlessness.

As the Japanese state bureaucracy and industrial corporations began to employ university graduates, Japanese universities assumed an increasingly critical role in mediating between social aspirants and potential employers. This educational-employment pipeline was, however, contested terrain, where economic distress and an oversupply of university graduates posed significant challenges. From the late Meiji period, university professors, administrators, business leaders, and bureaucrats tried to facilitate this pipeline by standardizing job searches and employment. Together with the economic prosperity of the war years, this paved the way for a mass middle-class society in postwar Japan.
This paper examines the evolution of the educational-employment pipeline through the lens of Tokyo Imperial University (Todai). Todai, the first Japanese university created to produce bureaucrats, was a principal locus of white-collar employment. By exploring this pipeline, this paper notes that Todai became a factory producing middle-class citizens with a distinct set of cultural values. Through its privileged student welfare system, Todai allowed students easy access to expensive education and to white-collar professions and bona fide middle-class lifestyles. It also facilitated the diffusion of middle-class living. The competition to enter Todai and white-collar professions spurred energetic efforts by the state, corporations, and university authorities to establish more universities and to systematize white-collar employment in the Japanese Empire. The expansion of higher education lured an increasing number of citizens into an economically modest but culturally elite middle class, without excluding anyone.