Domain schools, private academies, temple schools.
Layers of learning that raised a generation.

The Hagi domain school, Meirinkan, was founded in 1718 by the fifth domain lord, Mori Yoshimoto. Of the roughly 300 domain schools established across Japan during the Edo period, Meirinkan was the twelfth oldest, and it boasted facilities and curriculum among the finest in the country. It was originally located in the castle's third bailey, but was relocated and expanded to its present site in Emukai in 1849.

While its curriculum centered on Confucian studies, Meirinkan was a comprehensive institution combining both scholarship and martial arts, equipped with grounds for swordsmanship, spearmanship, gunnery, and even a pool for swimming practice, and it also incorporated Dutch studies (rangaku) and military science. Yoshida Shoin is said to have lectured on the military text Bukyo Zensho before domain lord Mori Takachika at the age of just eleven — Meirinkan was, for Shoin too, his very first place of education. Later figures such as Omura Masujiro (the military scholar who laid the foundations of the modern Japanese army) also taught there as professors, and the school continued to send out talented people well into the Meiji era.

The South Gate, Kandoku Gate, and Yubikan are all surviving structures from the former Hagi domain school, Meirinkan.

First nationwide for domain schools (upper-layer samurai education), second for temple schools (base-layer commoner education), and fourth for private academies (middle-layer private learning). It is rare for a single domain to rank so highly across such a broad range of layers, suggesting that places of learning were densely layered not only at Meirinkan and Shokasonjuku but across the whole of Hagi and Choshu.

These calculations use Choshu Domain's total population of roughly 467,000 during the Tenpo era (1830s), and the shogunate's nationwide population survey of roughly 31.2 million from Tenpo 5 (1834). These figures are not drawn from exactly the same year as the domain school, temple school, and private academy counts reported by the Yamaguchi Prefectural Board of Education, and population surveys of the time also had limitations — for example, in how the samurai population was counted — so these figures should be understood as rough estimates only. Even so, ratios of roughly 12 times for domain schools, 5.6 times for temple schools, and 6.2 times for private academies speak to just how thick Choshu Domain's educational infrastructure was relative to its population, beyond what raw school counts alone can show.

Many studies point out that, in the late Edo period, the wide spread of temple schools across every social rank gave Japan a literacy rate that stood out even by contemporary world standards (with some regional and class-based variation, urban areas in particular are believed to have reached a considerable level). In a castle town like Hagi, the overlapping presence of domain schools, private academies, and temple schools opened up opportunities to learn not only for samurai but for the children of merchants and farmers as well. It was this depth of educational infrastructure that lay behind the stream of talented people who emerged one after another from a small private academy like Shokasonjuku in the final years of the shogunate.