In recent decades the history of literacy has engaged the interests of many Western scholars, particularly those concerned with applying the techniques and approaches of the social sciences to the broad issues of educational history. The simplistic notion that links higher rates of literacy with progress, rationality, modernity, and other benign abstractions, has been challenged by a group of Western historians intent on probing the complex social determinants of literacy in Europe and North America. Eschewing simple quantitative estimates of literacy, they have sought to analyze the quality and meaning of its possession, investigating the revealing problems of who was literate, what was the kind of literacy, when did literacy exist, and for what reasons. Their findings have been provocative, and their research continues to stimulate controversy as well as new insights. Surprisingly, the same cannot be said for scholarship in Japan, a country with impressive educational achievements, but one where questions about the social meanings and roles of literacy have yet to be raised and where serious scholarly study of the quality of literacy and numeracy skills remains undeveloped. That is the case despite Japan's being the first nation outside the West to have achieved self-sustained industrial growth by the end of the nineteenth century, despite the economists' contention that the fostering of human skills and knowledge throughout the population was essential to that process, and despite the recent surge in interest in Japanese education as the engine of economic success. How can we account for this serious gap in scholarship? First, Japan lacks a data base comparable to the vast accumulation of signature data for nineteenth-century France, England, and parts of the United States Richard Rubinger is chairman of the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures and Adjunct Professor in the History Department and the School of Education at Indiana University. The author wishes to acknowledge receipt of financial support for research in Japan during the academic year 1988-89 from a Fulbright grant and from the Social Science Research Council. He also wishes to thank George Elison whose eye for the infelicitous phrase has made this essay more literate than it otherwise might have been.