Rutgers Meets Japan

A Trans-Pacific Network of the Late Nineteenth Century

Edited by Haruko Wakabayashi and Fernanda Perrone

DESCRIPTION
In 1867 Kusakabe Taro, a young samurai from Fukui, Japan, began
studying at Rutgers as its first foreign student. Three years later, in
1870, his former tutor, friend, and Rutgers graduate, William Elliot
Griffis, left for Japan to teach English and Science for three and a half
years. The year 2020 marked the 150th anniversary of two landmark
events in the history of the Rutgers-Japan relationship: the untimely
death of Kusakabe only weeks before his graduation, and his friend
Griffis’ departure to Japan.

Griffis and Kusakabe were only a small piece of a vast transnational
network of leading modernizers of Japan in the 1860s and 70s. The
Japanese students in New Brunswick were young and innovative men
of samurai and aristocratic lineage, who were sent by reform-minded
leaders of Japan, which was undergoing a dramatic transformation.
They came to New Brunswick seeking Western knowledge that was
much needed for the modernization of a newly forming nation. New
Brunswick became the hub of a network of Japanese nationals that
extended to the major cities of New York, Philadelphia, and Boston,
and from there to the smaller towns of New England. Once in New
Brunswick, these Japanese students were embraced by Protestant
ministers, educators, and missionaries—both men and women—whose
network encompassed Rutgers College and the neighboring New
Brunswick Theological Seminary, and which stretched to Dutch
Reformed parishes throughout the Eastern seaboard, and westward as
far as the Dutch enclave of Holland, Michigan. Meanwhile, the
American teachers and missionaries who left for Japan became part of
a network of reformist leaders and Japanese returnees that extended
to schools, colleges, and missions in Japan, and formed the
foundations of Japan’s modern educational system. Through
contributions from scholars and archivists in the U.S., Canada, and
Japan, Rutgers Meets Japan aims to reconstruct the early Rutgers-
Japan connections and examine the role and impact of this
transnational network on Japan and the U.S. in the late nineteenth
century.

AUTHOR/EDITOR BIOGRAPHY

HARUKO WAKABAYASHI is an associate teaching professor in the
Department of Asian Languages and Cultures at Rutgers-New
Brunswick. She is the author of The Seven Tengu Scrolls: Evil and the
Rhetoric of Legitimacy in Medieval Japanese Buddhism.

FERNANDA PERRONE is the Archivist and Head of the Exhibitions
Program and Curator of the William Elliot Griffis Collection, Special
Collections/University Archives at Rutgers University. She is the coauthor
of The Douglass Century: The Transformation of the Women’s
College at Rutgers (Rutgers University Press).