In 1867, 5 Japanese college students took a protracted sea voyage to Massachusetts for some superior education. The group included a 13-year-old named Eiichirō Honma, who was from one of many samurai households that dominated Japan. Honma anticipated to change into a samurai warrior himself, and enrolled in a army academy in Worcester.
After which some surprising issues occurred.
Japan’s ruling dynasty, the shogunate that had run the nation for the reason that seventeenth century, misplaced energy. Not obligated to change into a warrior, Honma discovered himself free to attempt different issues in life. In 1870, he enrolled within the not too long ago opened Massachusetts Institute of Know-how, the place he studied civil engineering. By 1874, Honma had change into MIT’s first graduate from Japan.
“Honma might have thought he was going to be a army officer, however by the point he obtained to MIT he needed to do one thing else,” says Hiromu Nagahara, an affiliate professor of historical past at MIT. “And that one thing else was the most popular expertise of its time: railroads.” Certainly, Honma returned to Japan and have become a celebrated engineer of rail strains, together with one by means of the mountainous Usai Go in central Japan.
Now, 150 years after he graduated, Honma is a central a part of an exhibit about MIT’s earliest Japanese college students, “From Samurai into Engineers,” which runs by means of Dec. 19 at Hayden Library.
The exhibit options two different early MIT graduates from Japan. Takuma Dan, Class of 1878, was additionally from a samurai family, studied mining engineering at MIT, and ultimately grew to become distinguished in Japan as head of the Mitsui company. Kiyoko Makino was the primary Japanese lady and the primary feminine worldwide scholar to enroll at MIT, the place she studied biology from 1903 to 1905, later changing into a instructor and textbook writer in Japan.
Tracing their lives sheds mild on fascinating careers — and illuminates a historic interval by which MIT was reaching prominence, Japan was opening itself to the world, and trendy life was rolling ahead.
“After we take a look at Eiichirō Honma, Takuma Dan, and Kiyoko Makino, their lives match the bigger context of the connection between America and Japan,” says Nagahara.
The making of “From Samurai into Engineers” was a collective effort, partly generated by means of MIT course 21H.155/21G.555 (Fashionable Japan), taught by Nagahara within the spring of 2024. College students contributed to the analysis and wrote quick historic summaries included into the exhibition. The exhibit attracts on authentic archival supplies, reminiscent of the scholars’ letters, theses, downside units, and different paperwork. Honma’s drawings for an iron girder railroad bridge, as a part of his personal MIT thesis, are on show, as an illustration.
Others on campus considerably collaborated on the undertaking from its inception. Christine Pilcavage, managing director of the MIT-Japan Program, helped encourage the event of the hassle, having held an ongoing curiosity within the topic.
“I’m in awe of this relationship that we’ve had for the reason that first Japanese college students had been at MIT,” Pilcavage says. “We’ve had this lengthy connection. It exhibits that MIT as an Institute is at all times innovating. All sides had a lot to achieve, from Honma coming to MIT, studying expertise, and returning to Japan, whereas additionally mentoring different college students, together with Dan.”
A lot of the analysis was facilitated by MIT Libraries and its Distinctive Collections holdings, which include the archives used for the undertaking. Amanda Hawk, who’s the general public companies supervisor within the library system, labored with Nagahara to facilitate the analysis by the category.
“Distinctive Collections is happy to help school and scholar initiatives associated to MIT historical past, significantly those who illuminate unknown tales or underrepresented communities,” Hawk says. “It was rewarding to collaborate with Hiromu on ‘From Samurai into Engineers’ to put these college students inside the context of Japanese historical past and the event of MIT.”
The truth that MIT had college students from Japan as quickly as 1870 might sound inconceivable on each ends of this historic connection. MIT opened in 1861 however didn’t begin providing lessons till 1865. Nonetheless, it was quickly acknowledged as a big locus of technological data. In the meantime the historic adjustments in Japan created a small pool of scholars prepared to journey to Massachusetts for schooling.
“The beginning of MIT within the 1860s coincides with a interval of big political financial and cultural upheaval in Japan,” Nagahara says. “It was a novel second when there was a each a want to go abroad and a authorities willingness to let folks go abroad.”
General, the expertise of the Japanese college students at MIT appears to have been pretty clean from the beginning, enabling them to have a robust concentrate on scholarship.
“Honma appeared to have been fairly well-received,” Pilcavage says, who wonders if Honma’s social standing — he was sometimes referred to as “prince” — contributed to that. Nonetheless, she notes, “He was invited to different folks’s houses on Thanksgiving. It didn’t look like he confronted excessive prejudice. The neighborhood welcomed him.”
The three Japanese college students featured within the exhibit wound up main distinctive lives. Whereas Honma grew to become a celebrated engineer, Dan was a fair higher-profile determine. At MIT, he studied mining engineering with Robert Hollawell Richards, husband of Ellen Swallow Richards, MIT’s first feminine scholar and teacher. After beginning as a mining engineer at Mitsui in 1888, by 1914 he had change into chair of the board of the Mitsui conglomerate. Dan even got here again to go to MIT twice as a distinguished alumnus, in 1910 and 1921.
Dan was additionally a dedicated internationalist, who believed in cooperation amongst nations, in distinction to the rising nationalism typically current within the Twenties and Thirties. In 1932, he was shockingly assassinated outdoors of Mitsui headquarters in Tokyo, a sufferer of nationalist terrorism. Robert Richards wrote that it was “a type of horrible issues which no man in his senses can perceive.”
Makino, for her half, led a a lot quieter life, and her standing as an early scholar was solely rediscovered in recent times by librarians working in MIT’s Distinctive Collections supplies. After MIT, she returned to Japan and have become a highschool biology instructor in Tokyo. She additionally authored a textbook, “Physiology of Girls.”
MIT archivists and college students are persevering with to analysis Makino’s life, and earlier this yr additionally uncovered information articles written about her in New England newspapers whereas she was within the U.S. Nagahara hopes many individuals will proceed researching MIT’s earliest Japanese college students, together with Sutejirō Fukuzawa, Class of 1888, the son of a widely known Japanese mental.
In so doing, we might acquire extra perception into the methods MIT, universities, and early college students performed concrete roles in ushering their nations into the brand new age. As Nagahara displays about these college students, “They’re witnessing each America and Japan change into trendy nation-states.”
And as Pilcavage notes, Honma’s standing as a railroad builder “is symbolic. We proceed to construct a bridge between our establishment and Japan.”
