Yubikan

Yubikan is a school for samurai class that was completed in 1691. It was located in Osaki, Miyagi prefecture that is one of the heavily stricken areas of the Great East Japan Earthquake on March 11, 2011. Yubikan also was completely destroyed in the earthquake, but it already has been reconstructed and completed. During Edo period, kids and youngsters of samurai class had been learning reading, writing, arithmetic, and material arts. In that era, common people also had been leaning those subjects generally without material arts in the school called 'terakoya'.

Terakoya is a form of private school that had been prevailing during Edo period. Those schools were mainly aimed at non-samurai class because samurai class could attend to their exclusive schools - Yubikan was one of them. Thanks to the terakoya system, some foreign people left impressions on Japanese's high rate of literacy during Edo period. And that is why Japan was able to absorb western civilization in remarkably short period after the end of Edo Period. 

When time passed and Meiji new government took over the authority from Edo bakufu, most of terakoyas were absorbed into its public school system, forming the bases of that system. Some major terakoyas were used as public schools, being kept as it was. In early Meiji period, Tokyo had 762 teachers who previously worked for terakoya, including 86 women. Among those teachers, the number of former non-samurai class teachers was over that of samurai class teachers.