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Japanese school uniform: Historical trends -- 20th century 1930s
Japanese School Uniform Chronology: The 1930s
Figure 1.--This Japanese cabinet card school boys at school. We no longer see cabinet cards in the United States and Europe. The dealer thought it was taken about 1930. We would say it could have been taken anytime during the kate-1920s to the early-30s. We do not know where it was taken, but suspect it was a town school. There is some writing on the card, but as it is in Japanese, we do not know what it says. Put your cursor on the image to see some of the writing. The portrait appears to be a class photograph. The children are all boys. They look to be about 8-9 years old. Notice that their teachers are men. Put your cursor on the image to see some of the printing on the front. Thhere is also some text on the back.
We see childten wearing both traditional clothes and the military styled uniforms in the 1930s. We see more images of the boys than the girls in the 30s, but we do see images of girls at school as it was becoming increasingly common to send girls to school. We note schools at the beginning of the decade with boys wearing Prussian cadet caps with boy traditional and cadet uniforms. We believe that these are city schools. In the countryside we see schools with all the children wearing traditional clothes. We do begin to see the military uniforms becoming much more common during the 1930s. There was in the 1930s a very significant militarization of Japanese society. We believe that this was reflected in the schools. We do not yet have, however, the information or images needed to substantiate this, although we are beginning to build a basic archive. Military uniforms were by the end of the decade standard in city schools, but still relatively rate in the country side, except for the Prussian cadet caps. And we begin to see more girls wearing the sailor suit uniforms by the end of the decade. We do not see children wearing Western clothing to school, except the uniform styles.
