Yoshibee Nomura (1896-1986) was an educator who was one of the leading practitioners of Taisho-era free education. He worked as a teacher and principal at Tokyo’s private Ikebukuro Jidou-no-Mura Elementary School　(April 1924 - July 1936). His own educational approach of seikatsu tsuzurikata or “life writing” had a significant influence on and contributed to the historical development of educational practice in Japan. At the time, teachers of written composition consolidated all subjects into composition education and tried to develop composition writing within Japanese language education. In contrast, Nomura’s tsuzurikata education gave precedence to the framework of “life education.” In this paper, I recapture the features of Nomura’s tsuzurikata education and focus on “making friends,” which was a characteristic of his approach, to clarify how Nomura put tsuzurikata education into practice based on the foundation of making friends. To my knowledge, the perspective that the approach of making friends was the foundation of Nomura’s tsuzurikata education has not been studied in previous research. However, research on Nomura’s tsuzurikata education reveals it is a most distinctive educational method.

Rather than developing subject education within seikatsu tsuzurikata, Nomura broadly divided education as a whole into “reading subjects” and “life subjects”; if curriculum subjects were reading subjects, then tsuzurikata was included in life subjects. Further, he promoted making friends as a learning method for life subjects. Nomura regarded “appetite for life” and “appetite for writing” as being closely related and argued that “wanting to express one’s feelings” would lead to action for written composition. In order to achieve this, he thought it was important for each individual to have a foothold in “the soil of friends’ lives.” In other words, he believed that in classes where students actually wrote compositions, each individual having this foothold created the appropriate environment for writing. Furthermore, in terms of method, starting with guidance from discussions prior to writing and commenting, presenting, and sharing their compositions with each other after everyone had finished writing, all the students developed in collaboration with their fellow students. Nomura called this task of creating a piece of work in collaboration with fellow students “creating a book,” and for him, it was the most important purpose and method of tsuzurikata education.

Thus, Nomura’s tsuzurikata education created a new approach to subject learning in the school curriculum, whereby children independently and autonomously created a book based on their own collaborative friendship activities toward making friends. In this way, when private journals, field trip reports, and observational essays are treated as “records of making friends,” writing as a way of making friends in the classroom naturally gives rise to common topics and common issues in the classroom, and this culture of fellowship motivates and creates the spirit of discovery and creativity of each individual. I can conclude that developing students to have this type of personality was precisely what Nomura was aiming for in his tsuzurikata education, as a way of making friends.