In the late nineteenth-century Japan, authors and publishers discovered and eagerly developed a new literary genre: children’s literature. This literature was and is written for children, but generally not by children. What is in it for the makers? In this dissertation I ask how publications for children contributed to Japan’s nation-building process in nineteenth and early twentieth-century Japan. Contrary to studies that focus on children’s books of ‘literary quality’, I have investigated the adaptation of warrior legends in early youth magazines and book series, as well as contemporary author’s writings on what they themselves defined as children’s literature. This approach throws new light on the dissemination of Western literary genres (children’s literature) and concepts (the Western middle-class concept of childhood), and how the actors (authors, publishers) interpreted and put these into use to carve out a modern identity and to position individuals and groups within a national and international context.

Modern adaptations of warrior legends for children were on the one hand in conversation with Edo period or early modern (1600-1868) illustrated books and primers published for children and adults, as well as existing concepts of childhood (chapter 1), and on the other hand with the increasingly monopolistic modern school curriculum (chapter 2). My case studies focus on legends surrounding (the boyhood of) two historical Japanese generals, Minamoto Yoshitsune (1159-1189) and Toyotomi Hideyoshi (1537-1598) who have an extensive representation history within and outside publications for children. A third case study of the author and lady-in-waiting Murasaki Shikibu (973-?) addresses ideals for girls and the lack of creative input that led to the marginalization of women within the historical canon.

In the late nineteenth century, the heritage of Edo period popular literature was shunned from the sphere of the educated adult (male). However, I show that numerous authors and publishers who represented this group gave warrior legends legitimacy within a new modern literary genre for, in practice mostly male, ‘young citizens’ (chapter 3). As they were thus ‘saving’ such legends from oblivion by reconceptualizing them within the sphere of home education and the not-yet-adult, this at the same time presented an opportunity to challenge the Ministry of Education, using its own methods. Based on imperial edicts, education laws and Herbartian pedagogy, late nineteenth-century textbooks and teacher manuals stressed the value of national icons that both represented exemplary dispositions and national history. Like the textbooks, commercial publications for children contributed to the historical canon formation, but if they were simply repeating the same message, why bother writing children’s books? As the Ministry increasingly stressed a loyal, passive disposition, in the public realm, authors took up the same figures to represent variant ideals.

My focus is on the work of the prolific pioneering author Iwaya Sazanami (1870-1933). He advocated for a more active, or ‘spirited’ citizen and gradually developed his model citizen through rewriting the boyhood of national heroes for primary school students. Positioning himself as an enlightened educator, on his agenda was also Japan’s position as a ‘child’ on the world stage. The timidity caused by strict fathers and the ‘inward-looking nationalism’ advocated by the government would put Japan in a dangerous position vis-à-vis the Western powers. The medicine? Bring to the nation’s young people exemplars with an adventurous and bold disposition and stimulate their imagination through children’s literature.

In the early twentieth century, following the development of children’s literature as an arena within which non-governmental agents could disseminate their ideas for the nation’s future (through its childhood – the past – and children), publishers started to produce numerous magazines that catered to middle-class children of various ages. In the last part of my thesis (chapter 4), I show how in the early twentieth century Iwaya turned his by then well-established ideas into visual narratives for young children that hark back to premodern iconographies. In the late 1910s, in opposition to Iwaya’s generation of authors, a progressive, yet upon scrutiny not pacifistic movement appeared that stressed literary quality and sensitivity to the ‘child’s needs’. These publications also included adapted warrior legends, that idealize the ‘innocent, loyal and sacrificial’ mind of the child or adolescent (in the face of death) as a sublimation of the warrior spirit, serving the ‘adult’s need’ to criticize modern society and barring the child from becoming an adult and defiling its pristine state.

Children’s literature was a mode of expression used not only to impart ideal dispositions into children, but also to retain a coherence of culture during the modernization process, to give premodern legends an irrevocable place within the collective memory, and to disseminate competing ideals of citizenship and society.