Unequal Twins: On the Double Presence of “Aesthetic Education” in Japan
Dr. Anna ZSCHAUER, Hildesheim University

Microsoft Teams meeting
Join the meeting
Meeting ID: 328 293 500 854 184 0
Passcode: me6TL24v

Seen from the outside, Japanese education appears to hold two learning cultures side by side: one descending from the notion of “aesthetic education” imported in the late nineteenth century, realised above all in school art and music instruction; and a second in the form of geidō, the arts of the way. Reductive as this opposition may seem, it finds an echo even in contemporary voices from Japan, which set an educational ideal marked as “traditional” apart from a Western one and explain the former throughout by reference to aesthetic practices — the tea ceremony, poetry, nō theatre. Strikingly, the sources invoked are often Japanese writings of the early twentieth century that were themselves already responding to an international discourse. Yet for all the relevance claimed for aesthetic values in shaping educational ideals, the term “aesthetic education” never appears in the “traditional” model.

The aesthetic is thus anchored in both learning cultures, but possibly in fundamentally different ways. The paper pursues this observation through three questions. First: Do the two serve the same function, or are different ends being pursued by the same aesthetic means? A historical account that takes in both the shifts since the Meiji period and the present-day overlap of the two models within schooling speaks for the latter reading. Second: On what terms can the two learning cultures be compared as “aesthetic education” at all? Here the lasting effects of the “hermeneutic colonisation” diagnosed by Michael Marra — in the course of which Japan reinterpreted its premodern traditions within imported categories — should not be underestimated. Third: Where exactly do the differences lie with respect to the role of the aesthetic and to such notions as creativity, self and freedom — ideals central to debates in Japanese art education since the Taishō period, yet holding no comparable place in the classical arts of the way?

The aim is not to add another building block to the rhetoric of an East-West dichotomy, but to show under what conditions such a comparison yields insight, and what it can tell us about the many things an aesthetic perspective on education has to offer.

Anna Zschauer (Dr. phil.) studied German studies and History at Heidelberg University to become a secondary school teacher but then turned to philosophy first. After research stays at Kyoto and Tokyo University in Japan, she obtained her doctorate from Hildesheim University, researching the reception of philosophical aesthetics in Japan. The thesis “Ästhetik und japanische Moderne. Interkulturelle Fallstudien“ (Karl Alber Verlag 2025) was awarded the Karl Alber Price 2024. After four years of working at a German high school (2021-2025), philosophical perspectives on teaching and learning became another great field of interest. A. Zschauer is currently part of the Philosophical Institute at Hildesheim University, where different ways of global philosophizing are explored.

For further information, or to be placed on PESF mailing list please contact: qasir.shah.14@ucl.ac.uk