Talk:Okinawa Shogaku High School

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Name[edit]

It would be interesting to have something more about the school's name - what it means, where it came from, why it was chosen. "Shôgaku" (尚学) isn't really a word with a straightforward meaning, as far as I am aware, but, rather, it uses Shô 尚, the name of the Ryukyu royal dynasty, along with a somewhat historical-sounding use of the "gaku." I have never heard of anything similar in mainland Japan. There is no Tokyo Tokugawa-gaku School, or Kyoto Matsudaira-gaku School.

In normal modern Japanese, school names are typically just the neighborhood name followed by chûgakkô (Middle School), or kôtô gakkô (High School), and where they are private schools, as Shôgaku is, it's just whatever the name is, followed by those terms. Other schools, academies, and the like end in daigaku, gakuin, gakuen, or a handful of other standard terms for such things.

To give just a few examples, right in Naha, you have Kyônan High School 興南高等学校 and Seisa International High School 星槎国際高等学校, neither of which have "gaku" in their names - and a quick skim of the list of high schools in Japan on Japanese Wikipedia reveals too that the vast majority follow this pattern. Searching the word "gakuen" in Google, we get plenty of results for Shiramine Gakuen, Hokusei Gakuen, Tôhô Gakuen and the like - just a name (Shiramine, Hokusei) and a word for "school" (gakuen).

There may well be other examples of gaku being used within the name of a school like this, but I haven't seen them. And while the only example that comes to mind at the moment is the 国学 (kokugaku), the "National Academy" or "National University" of the Ryukyu Kingdom, the idea of a school name ending in just gaku (as 沖縄尚学 does) rings to me like the way institutions might be named in the Edo period, or earlier, before the modern educational system & system of municipalities and such was put into place.

So, apologies for the lengthy comment - I had meant to just write something quick - but, getting back to the point, "Okinawa Shô [Family/Dynasty] School High School" is a very interesting and distinctive name, and I'd be very curious to see more in the article here about where that name comes from - especially since it seems to have taken on that name in 1983, and is not as far as I can tell a successor to any institution established by or otherwise directly associated with the dynasty. Cheers. LordAmeth (talk) 13:29, 17 August 2014 (UTC)[reply]