The Graduate School of Education, University of Tokyo
Abstract
In this paper I try to clarify the function of school education in national integration through music education. As a part of this effort, I traced back memories of people on "singing" who went to elementary schools from the middle of the Taisho Period to the first part of the Showa Period. The purpose of this paper is to observe how people accepted and consumed the contents and method of "singing" to form their national consciousness. From the standpoint of acceptance of "singing". I examined the structure of "singing", explanation on lyrics, and relations between songs called "shoka" and ritual songs. As a result, it was made clear that as for the structure of "singing", singing in unison by the whole class was repeated in almost the same fashion as the educational plans written in teaching manuals. Many of the people, however, do not remember if there was any explanation on the contents of lyrics and only few people remembered explanation related to any ideology. Regarding consumption of "singing", I examined people\u27s memories and reasons for liking for particular songs. It was concluded that there were some patterns for those points and that family background, individual experience and inclination gave influence. Judging from those observations, it is hardly possible to establish the conventional explanation that the state tried to integrate the people and internalized within them the ideology of Emperor system and the militaristic nationalism through explanation on lyrics. Supposing sense of unity as the people were established and monolithic nationalism were formed by sharing melodies and lyrics of songs through experience of singing in unison, in actuality, it could be said that the people based on totally different reasons and memories, share songs, which should be the source of the sense of unity. In conclusion, it can be said that songs, which is consumed very differently by individual levels, hardly managed to maintain national integration through their melodies and lyrics themselves
