Author:
Title: Les premiers pas de l'enfance. Orthgraphe Francaise, a l'usage de l'ecole quai-sei-zio. Premier edition. Yedo ... (1867). [sic].
Description: Yedo (Tokyo), 1867 (Keio 3). 18x13cm publisher's wrappers with printed label (marked, stitching broken); 32pp including 10 pages of alphabets. Pretty good. The red stamp on the title is the school's. ¶ The Kaiseijo (quai-sei-zio or Kaisezio or Kaiseizyo or Kaiseidzio or Kaiceizio depending on who wrote it) was the Bakumatsu school for barbarian studies, founded in 1857 and re-named in 1863. In 1865 the military joined in with this maybe unwelcome but necessary education and, I've read, quadrupled the number of students with 300 learning English and 100 learning French. It seems they began printing their own texts in 1866. Come Meiji it became the Kaisei gakko and eventually part of the conglomerate that became Tokyo University.It's easy for blinkered anglophones like me to forget that the Japanese were busily digesting the whole planet, not just learning fractured English from absurd phrase books. They learnt many fractured languages from absurd texts and still somehow leapt into the modern world.

Keywords: language education school text books social sciences c19th Japan reform progress linguistics French