研究成果の確認─日本と韓国の識字史を中心に
研究成果の確認─日本と韓国の識字史を中心に
獨協大学 川村 肇
本発表では、日本の識字史研究の成果と韓国との比較を中心に論じる。発表者を含む日本教育史研究グループは、Rubinger 氏らとともに、古代から近代に至る日本の識字の実態を地方文書や手習い塾資料などから明らかにしてきた。
日本では10 世紀に平仮名?片仮名が成立し、貴族社会では漢文を正格としたが、宮廷の女性中心に文字使用が広がり、中世には片仮名を中心として民衆の一部に識字が浸透した。江戸期には武士支配の下、村落文書運用の必要から農村に識字が拡大し、18～19 世紀には手習い塾の普及とともに都市?農村で識字が深化した。しかし明治初期の調査では、地域差が極めて大きく、全国的な識字率は必ずしも高くなかったことが示される。
発表者は日本の識字史を国際的文脈で捉えるため、韓国の研究成果を翻訳?紹介してきた。韓国では、15 世紀の訓民正音創製後、女性?両班層に広まり、16 世紀以降は仏典や儒教書の諺解を通じて普及したが、日本の仮名とは異なる展開を示した。また、書堂は植民地期以降も存続し、儒教的教養維持の場として機能した点が日本や台湾と異なる。
近代日本語は西洋概念の翻訳に際し、膨大な漢語を音読みで導入したため、漢字依存が強まり、同音異義語が増加して識字のハードルが上昇した。2000 字規模の漢字習得が必要となり、識字の段階は連続的なグラデーションを成す。他方、韓国では漢字が日常的に使われなくなり、日本との違いが鮮明である。
最後に、識字は「学習権」と深く関わる基本的人権であり、読み書きのみならず「世界を読み解く力」と結びけられてきた。他方で指摘される文字の持つ権力性を踏まえつつ、今後の研究発展を探りたい。
Review of Research Findings: Focusing on the Literacy Histories of Japan and Korea
Hajime Kawamura, Dokkyo University
In this presentation, I will discuss the achievements of Japanese literacy-history research, with particular attention to comparisons with Korea. Together with R.Rubinger and other colleagues in the Japanese educational history research group, we have clarified the realities of literacy in Japan from antiquity to the modern era through local documents, temple-school materials, and other sources.
In Japan, hiragana and katakana emerged in the tenth century. While classical Chinese remained the official written language among the aristocracy, the use of script spread among court women, and by the medieval period literacy had begun to permeate segments of the common people, especially through katakana. In the Edo period, under warrior rule, the necessity of managing village documents expanded literacy into rural areas. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, literacy deepened in both cities and villages through the spread of tenarai-juku (informal writing schools). However,early Meiji-era surveys reveal enormous regional disparities, indicating that nationwide literacy rates were not uniformly high.
To situate Japanese literacy history within a broader international context, the presenter has translated and introduced recent Korean research. In Korea, after the creation of Hunminjeongeum in the fifteenth century, the script spread among women and the yangban elite. From the sixteenth century onward, it became widely used through vernacular translations of Buddhist and Confucian texts, though its development diverged significantly from that of Japanese kana. Moreover, sodang (traditional village schools) survived even into the post-colonial period, functioning as institutions that preserved Confucian cultural learning?an aspect that distinguishes Korea from both Japan and Taiwan.
In modern Japan, the translation of Western concepts led to the large-scale introduction of Sino-Japanese vocabulary through on-yomi (Sino-Japanese readings), which greatly increased dependence on kanji. This accelerated the proliferation of homophones and raised the threshold for literacy, requiring mastery of roughly two thousand characters and creating a continuous gradation of literacy levels. In contrast,because Chinese characters are no longer used in everyday life in Korea, the divergence between the two societies has become even more pronounced.
Finally, literacy is a fundamental human right closely connected to the "right to learn," encompassing not only basic reading and writing but also the capacity to interpret and understand the world. At the same time, given the often-noted power inherent in written language, further research must continue to explore both its liberating and constraining dimensions.