This article explores the evolution of Seikei Gakuen, an educational complex established by Nakamura Haruji, an educator from the Faculty of Letters at Tokyo Imperial University. The first school at this institution was the Seikei Jitsumu School established in 1912 to serve students from modest backgrounds, but the institution underwent a dramatic transformation since then. As Nakamura went on to establish the Seikei Middle School (1914), the Seikei Elementary School (1915), and the Seikei High School (1925), while abolishing the original Jitsumu School in 1925, the Seikei Gakuen emerged as a bastion of elite education for wealthy families. Why and how did Nakamura, who sought to stop cram schooling, shift the focus of his educational enterprise from serving modest aspirants to catering to the affluent? And in doing so, how did he reconcile the demands of wealthy parents with his own educational philosophy?
While historians have lauded Seikei Gakuen as a center of the Liberal Education Movement, which emphasized individuality and creativity, they have largely overlooked Nakamura’s compromises with elite families, and how those compromises helped reshape Japan’s school system. I argue that although Seikei Gakuen did not dismantle Japan’s entrenched credential competition, it conferred significant advantages on its affluent students: exceptional facilities, small class sizes, and access to high school diplomas without academic competition. As access to high school diplomas without competitive entrance examinations was a privilege of students of noble birth at Gakushuin, it can be said that commoner students from wealthy families at Seikei gained the privilege of aristocracy. This case reveals that individual efforts to overcome credential competition without structural reform can result in the inequality of educational opportunity.