The Primary School Songbooks (Shōgaku Shōka Shū) are a series of songbooks compiled for school education by the Japanese Ministry of Education's Music Investigation Committee, which was founded in 1879 by Isawa Shuji. The songbooks were published from 1881 through 1884 in three volumes. The series marks the first time staff notation was used in Japanese music textbooks.[1]
Volume I included 33 songs; Volume II, 16 songs; and Volume III, 42 songs. They were mostly original Japanese texts set to Western melodies taken from such songs as "Hänschen klein" in Volume 1, "Alle Vögel sind schon da" in Volume II, and "The Last Rose of Summer" in Volume III.