3 h 39 minAudiobook11 minSummaryRead it, hear it, the 15-minute summary, and print and large print at costPaperback · 6 × 9 in · printing soonHardcover · 6 × 9 in · printing soonAbout this book
What does a changing nation look like from a child's place at home, at school, and at play?
In A Japanese Boy, Shigemi Shiukichi opens a window on childhood in Meiji-era Japan. Home, family, school, games, and seasons bring a changing society close. The focus is everyday life: how a boy learns what others expect of him, and how the world beyond his household begins to take shape.
Japan opens to the wider world, taking up new technology and new schooling while families keep older beliefs and manners. Through one boy's early years, the memoir explores the meeting of old habits and new ideas. Loyalties to family, community, and country grow together, making childhood a way to understand a nation in change.
What you’ll discover
- The household as teacher Explore the family world where a child first learns manners, respect, and responsibility.
- School beside older learning See how changing education stands alongside familiar ways of passing knowledge to children.
- A world of play Look beyond lessons to the games that form part of a boy's everyday world.
- Old habits, new ideas Discover a society embracing outside contact while families hold to older beliefs and manners.
- A nation through childhood Follow the growing ties of family, community, and country through one boy's early years.
Who will love it
For readers who love everyday life in another time and place, food and festivals, family warmth, and a narrator who talks to you like a friend across the table.
What’s inside
The key ideas, in the 15-minute summary
- A seaport town shapes a boy's world
- School teaches penmanship, numbers and respect
- Home life is warm, busy and ruled by custom
- Theaters, wrestlers and a castle with a dark past
- A father's calm, a mother's care, a neighbor's kindness
- A year of festivals fills the boy's memory
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- Hardcover
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- Large print paperback
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- Large print hardcover
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Read and hear Un ragazzo giapponese in 25 languages and switch at any time. Or read two side by side, paragraph by paragraph: the way to learn a language with a book you love.
Un ragazzo giapponese
by Shigemi Shiukichi · 1889
A boy in the seaport of Imabari grows up among rice junks, kotatsu fires, kites and New Year mochi.
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From the 15-minute summary · Key idea 1
A seaport town shapes a boy's world
Shigemi starts with the place. Imabari lies on Shikoku, and its harbor is a shallow ditch where people wade across at low tide and dig for clams. Junks bring rice, and grain merchants push a sharpened bamboo tube into the sacks, chew a few grains, and name the province they came from. Laborers with iron hooks carry the sacks to the warehouses.
Nearby stands a bathing resort inside a man-made stone cave, heated by wood fires. Patients sit on the scorching floor and then run to the sea, supposedly to cook illness out of the body. The boy went with his mother and liked it very little. Mount Myozin is not a remarkable peak, but he feels at home whenever he sees it on his return. The town has no steeple and no pagoda, because it is too poor to build one.
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What is A Japanese Boy about?
It is a memoir of boyhood in Imabari, a seaport on Shikoku. The author describes school, home, food, baths, theaters, festivals, games and family, showing how an ordinary Japanese boy lived as old customs gave way to new ones.
Who wrote A Japanese Boy and why?
Shiukichi Shigemi wrote it in New Haven, Connecticut, in 1889. He wanted American readers to hear a Japanese boy's life told by a Japanese boy, and he hoped the book would help pay for his continuing studies.
Is A Japanese Boy a true story?
Yes, it is an autobiographical account of the author's own childhood, though it focuses on customs common to many boys. Names such as Mr. Gladness and Miss Chrysanthemum are English renderings of Japanese names.
The author
Shigemi Shiukichi
1865–1928 · Japanese physician and writer
Shigemi Shiukichi was a Japanese physician, educator and writer. He was born in 1865 and died in 1928. He wrote A Japanese Boy, which was published in 1889. His work included medicine and education as well as writing.
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