Abstract：The East Asian Higher Preparatory School was an educational institution in Japan which specialized in receiving Chinese students and teaching them Japanese language. It occupied an important position in the history of educational exchanges between China and Japan in modern times and was called “the stronghold of Chinese education in Japan” by the well-known Japanese scholar Sanetou Keishuu. During its more than 30 years of existence, the school solved the Japanese language problem for many Chinese students, and famous figures such as Zhou Enlai, Qiu Jin and Xiao Hong received some schooling here. After the restoration of diplomatic relations between China and Japan, Zhou Enlai’s wife Deng Yingchao visited Japan and expressed the gratitude to Matsumoto Kamejiro’s surviving family for his teachings to Zhou Enlai during her visit to Japan, and this in turn triggered a wave of Japanese research on Matsumoto Kamejiro in Japan. By comparison, research by Chinese scholars on Kamejiro and the school he founded appear to be very limited in number and range. There are a few articles that have briefly discussed Kamejiro and the school in the context of the Sino-Japan Association, and other researches have overlooked it altogether, confusing domestic scholars who study the educational exchanges between China and Japan when they first faced Matsumoto and the East Asian Higher Preparatory School. This paper begins to redress this, starting from the education of students studying in Japan, and exploring the influence of militarism on normal preparatory education of Chinese students at the East Asian Higher Preparatory School as a turn to colonization education. This is intended to clarify the development of an important characteristic of Sino-Japanese relations in modern times and to make up for the lack of domestic research on the institution.The original intention of the East Asian Higher Preparatory School was to cultivate nation-building talents for China. However, with the Japanese invasion of China,and the change of the school from private to public, the Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs took control of the school’s funding,and explicitly changed the school’s constitution to become an instrument of the colonial and wartime enterprise.This mission then gradually infiltrated personnel recruitment, curriculum settings, and other operational aspects. In this way the school became an important base for Japanese political and military authority to cultivate pioneers of colonialism by “using Chinese to subdue Chinese”. For example, Akuma Shinyi and others were assigned to monitor “abnormal behavior” in students, a higher education department was set up to cultivate “outstanding talents of East Asian culture”, and extracurricular activities such as summer groups and hiking clubs were organized to counter students’ anti-Japanese sentiment. These measures propagated ideas of the superiority of Japanese national culture and targeted training activities of colonial education, putting the Chinese students into an atmosphere of all-round “thriving Asian colonial education”, so as to eliminate their patriotic consciousness. After the July 7 Incident, the East Asian Higher Preparatory School could be described as carrying-out various forms of “brainwashing” of students. With some exceptions, it is clear that this schooling had the opposite effect, and that the vast majority of students resisted this colonial schooling at the East Asian Higher Preparatory School. Most returned to China to resistance activities driven by their own national sense, perhaps even paradoxically reinforced by the expectations of the Japanese political authority.
余子侠, 贺云飞. 东亚高等预备学校对华学生预备教育的殖民化转向[J]. 浙江大学学报(人文社会科学版), 2022, 52(4): 117-129.
Yu Zixia, He Yunfei. The Colonization Tendency of Preparatory Education for Chinese Students at the East Asian Higher Preparatory School. JOURNAL OF ZHEJIANG UNIVERSITY, 2022, 52(4): 117-129.
2022, Vol. 52 
