Gather round, kids; it's DGS history lesson time! We all know that Ryuunosuke and Kazuma were English (and law, in Kazuma’s case) majors at Imperial Yuumei University, but what was the life of a university student like at the time? I did some digging and would like to give a small glimpse into the life of a Meiji Period university student.
I've mentioned this in some of my other meta pieces, but university attendance was very low during the Meiji Period. Before this time in history, only those who belonged to the samurai class were considered eligible for higher education. However during the Meiji Period, an envoy of Japanese educators were sent to study Western universities, especially those in the US and France, and they came home full of ideas that a strong nation needed educated individuals from all walks of life. This led to more regular citizens being accepted into higher education institutions, at least compared to before. You still needed to have enough knowledge to pass a pretty rigorous entrance exam, which generally meant that you'd attended school pretty regularly in your youth. We know that Kazuma was raised by the fairly affluent Professor Mikotoba, who greatly valued education, but it seems that whatever Ryuunosuke’s parents did for work, they must have done well enough for themselves that they could afford to let Ryuunosuke go to school rather than helping with the family business.
Universities in Japan at the time were interested in producing a well-educated general population so that they could be considered a first world nation by their peers in the West, but they also wanted to produce citizens who were loyal to emperor and country. Thus universities drilled nationalistic ideals into their students’ heads, and ran their schools in a strict and militaristic way. Students had to live in dorms, wear uniforms, and were subject to roll-call and inspections as if they were in the army. They were also taught to defend themselves physically, often via martial arts like judo. A common attitude among students at the time was that romantic relationships with women made a man weak and unmanly, and that one had to pursue relationships with men to be truly masculine. Men who couldn't defend themselves ran the risk of being forced into the role of “ochigo,” or a submissive homosexual partner. It's likely that Ryuunosuke had some sort of skill in combat to avoid falling prey to a stronger student. Either that, or he and Kazuma came to some sort of arrangement, but personally I like to imagine that Ryuunosuke isn't completely useless in a fight; he's just a pacifist.
Because the Japanese university system was based on the Western model, many professors were foreigners, especially in engineering and other sciences. Most of these foreign professors would give their lectures in English, so the average Japanese university student during the Meiji Period may have actually been better at English than their modern counterparts. In present day Japan, students study English starting in kindergarten but relatively few can actually speak or understand much of it. Most university study programs in the Meiji Period were 3 years long, with medical school being 4 years. At one point, Ryuunosuke says that he's never read a novel in English, so he's unlikely to have been a literature student. More likely is the possibility that he was studying to become a translator and/or interpreter.
As the opening sequence of DGS told us, the Meiji Period was a time of rapid societal change in Japan. This even included things like people's diets. Until Japan opened its borders, they really had no practice of eating meat, aside from fish. Now, however, dishes like “gyuunabe” (basically the old-timey equivalent of beef sukiyaki), curry, and “nikujaga” (beef and potato soup) became popular. As we know, Ryuunosuke and Kazuma were crazy about sukiyaki and often ordered it when they went out to eat. Beer and wine started to grow more popular as well, and beer halls were built, but beer was quite expensive at this time and cost about as much as 2 kg (4.5 lbs) of rice.
Buildings like the dorms Ryuunosuke and Kazuma lived in were still built in the typical Japanese style. This meant that it was constructed out of wood and paper rather than bricks or stone. Many dorms and even private homes didn't have baths in them, so our boys would have had to commute to the local bathhouse to get cleaned up. These bathhouses were also made of wood, with wooden floors and large wooden bathing tubs capable of accommodating a dozen or more people at once. The bathhouse provided soap for their customers, which Ryuunosuke admitted to stealing occasionally. In the past, the bathhouse would have been lit by candlelight and been quite dim, but during the Meiji Period matches and kerosene lamps were introduced to Japan, which provided a lot more light. Houses also didn't have toilets, so instead people relied on group outhouses.
Naturally the cost of living at the time was much lower than it is now. In 1895, the average salary for a university graduate would have been around 20 yen per month. In contrast, the average Japanese university graduate currently makes around 250,000 yen per month (about $1560 USD). Using these figures, we can estimate that 1 yen in the Meiji Period was worth about 12,500 yen today (about $78 USD). 1.5 kg (3.3 lbs) of rice would have cost around 10 zeni, or 1,250 yen in today's money ($7.80), a bowl of soba would have been around 2 zeni, or ¥250 in today's money ($1.56), and the entrance fee for the bathhouse would have been about 1.5 zeni, or ¥188 in today's money ($1.17). They had 3 denominations of money back then: the yen, the zeni and the rin. ¥1 = 100 zeni, and 10 rin = 1 zeni. Bank notes or bills came in denominations of ¥20, ¥10, ¥5, ¥2, and ¥1. In the Japan-only dlc episode, Kazuma scolds Ryuunosuke for saving 2 zeni on his telegram by dropping the “u” at the end of “Naruhodou,” which is kinda stingy, but to be fair to Ryuunosuke, it was enough money to go to the bathhouse and have a little leftover.
Unfortunately I couldn't find any more significant information about the general daily life of a university student during the Meiji Period, so we'll have to leave it here, but hopefully you all learned something useful!
https://cocolog-nifty.hatenablog.com/entry/2022/07/19/162400
https://sites.rutgers.edu/rutgers-meets-japan/our-exhibition/meiji-development-modernization-of-education/
https://note.com/toshihoshi/n/nb9b3d7d5e4d3
https://suumo.jp/journal/2013/07/30/49118/
https://manabow.com/zatsugaku/column06/
https://www.fuku-chan.info/column/kosen/76761/
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