A TYPICAL STREET CONVEYANCE IN JAPAN BEFORE THE INTRODUCTION OF JINRIKISHAS
Some unseen power must have presided over the choice of the four American pioneer missionaries—Channing Moore Williams, Samuel Robbins Brown, James Curtis Hepburn, and Guido Fridolin Verbeck—who arrived on the soil in 1859, each one to live through forty years of altruistic toil. They seeded Japan with new thoughts and raised a regiment of trained men, with faces set toward the Occident. These serve, or have served, as van-leaders of reform and progress, not a few being in the high councils of the nation. Of the four pioneers, three, having been in China, soon got a grip on the native script and literature, which, like most things Japanese, is based on the Chinese. Dr. Guido Fridolin Verbeck, master of seven languages, became later chief government translator, adviser of the emperor, and the star preacher in Japanese. This “Americanized Dutchman,” educated in technical science at Delft, had at once the mind of an engineer and of a statesman. At Nagasaki he took hold of the boys, taught them the New Testament and the Constitution of the United States, and, to feudal and divided Japan, Christopher Martin Wieland’s poem, “Where is the German Fatherland?” Verbeck dictated what should be the languages for medicine (German), law (French), and education (English). He hewed out the channels of progress by urging that while students should be sent abroad in large numbers, foreign experts in all departments should be brought to Japan; by proposing an imperial embassy to go around the world, and by elaborating a scheme of national elementary education. Dr. Samuel Robbins Brown, the schoolmaster, intellectual father of the first American woman’s college chartered as such, at Elmira, New York, who had in 1847 brought the first Chinese students to America, introduced photography and raised a body of intellectuals. To-day a hundred Japanese lawyers, doctors, editors, ministers, and public men revere his name.
In December, 1867, the older native statesmen, with long preparation, and the younger ones, with the new mind “brought from over the sea,” got possession of the imperial palace and person in Kioto, and began, in the boy mikado’s name, that series of far-reaching reforms that have made a new nation. In the new Government possibly half were pupils of Verbeck. His heart beat faster when in one of the five articles of the charter oath of the emperor in Kioto, the basis of the Constitution of 1889, it was sworn that “intellect and learning should be sought for throughout the world in order to restore the foundations of the empire.” Leaving Nagasaki and going at once to headquarters, Verbeck secured the turning of the stream of students to America, where soon hundreds, mostly at New Brunswick, New Jersey, were, from 1866 onward, pounding at the gates of knowledge. Verbeck was then called to Tokio to be president of the Imperial University of Tokio and incidentally to be factotum of a government then in novelty and isolation. When the embassy set out to go around the world in 1872, Verbeck, who had suggested the idea, found that more than one half of its personnel had been his pupils.
WILLIAM ALEXANDER GRAHAM, SECRETARY OF THE NAVY IN 1831
From 1868 to 1900, in response to the Mikado’s invitation, about five thousand experts or assistants in every line of human achievement went to Japan, from master or ordinary mechanics, boatswains, and corporals to superintendents and professors. Their salaries ranged from day’s wages to a salary then exceeding that of the President of the United States. Of these, about twelve hundred were American teachers. Of all these foreign helpers (yatoi), called out under the charter oath, I had the honor to be the first appointed and on the ground.
It was my good fortune to arrive in Fukui, Echizen, in 1871. I enjoyed the unique advantage of living in the far interior, in a daimio’s castle, of seeing feudalism in operation, and of being present. October 1871, at the solemn and impressive ceremonies at its fall and the transference of sovereignty to the emperor.
There was as yet no national department of education. Perhaps it is no accident that, out of the province of Echizen, where public schools were first organized, was raised the Ninth Division of the army that took Port Arthur. The chemical laboratory, training-class of teachers, lecture-and recitation-rooms, equipped with blackboards and modern furniture, were in the actual “palace” occupied for two centuries by the Baron of Echizen, one of the seventeen great feudatories of the empire. As I had been a soldier in the Civil War, I was asked my opinions as to the value of forts in miniature then being built with trowel and clay. Almost the first call to apply my knowledge of chemistry and physics was to show the Japanese how, by the use of electric wires and fulminates, to blow up ships by submarine wires and torpedoes. The introduction at that time of chairs in the schools, and changes in method and habits of sitting, have during a generation elongated the legs of a nation, adding half an inch to the Japanese stature.
Seeing the danger in a scheme of education of exclusive devotion to book-learning, and knowing the value of manual and technical training, I elaborated the plan of a technological school. The letter reached Tokio almost on the day that the first minister of education, Oki Takato, was appointed and the department was organized. Summoned by return messenger to the capital, I was about to begin with four professional chairs, but happily, with enlarged ideas, the Government organized a few months later on a larger scale the superb College of Engineering, in which such men as Dyer, Milne, Divers, and Ayrton taught, and such pupils as Takaminé, Shimosé, and Oda were graduated. Transferred to the Imperial University, I had the honor to serve during three years. I taught science by contract; but also ethics, philosophy, and literature voluntarily, in order to know the Japanese mind. Of my pupils, some entered the cabinet; others to-day occupy places among the highest in education, diplomacy, or the enterprises of the Government. One of these was the Marquis Komura, who, after winning laurels in London, Washington, and Peking, sat opposite Serjius De Witte, the Russian, at the Portsmouth Conference in 1905. Remembering his daily work in the classroom, I was not unprepared for his brilliant success. Against the Russian, he scored all points on the Manchurian question, which to-day is the pivot of politics in the Far East. Komura and Takahira, both ambassadors, the latter to Washington in 1905, had been my pupils, Komura during nearly three years.