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Rutgers Meets Japan: Foreign Teachers, Missionaries, and Overseas Students in the Early Meiji Era
March 5, 2021 @ 7:00 pm - 10:00 pm
A Workshop in Celebration of 150 Years of Friendship Between Rutgers and Fukui
In 1867 Taro Kusakabe (1845-70), a young samurai from Fukui, Japan, began studying at Rutgers College. Several years later, his former tutor and Rutgers alumnus William Elliot Griffis (1843-1928) left for Japan to teach, first in Fukui and later in Tokyo. 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 months before his graduation and his friend Griffis’s departure to Japan. This conference is held to commemorate and celebrate the special friendship between Rutgers and Japan.
Speakers:
Hamish Ion, Emeritus Professor, History Department, Royal Military College of Canada
Specialist on modern Japanese history and a Co-operating Research Fellow at the Center for Christian Studies, Meiji Gakuin University, Tokyo. He has done extensive research on American/European missionaries and oyatoi (Americans/Europeans hired in Japan as teachers and advisors to the government in the late 19th-early 20th c.) and has written on Edward Clark and William Griffis, both Rutgers alumni and two of the earliest oyatoi invited to teach in Japan.
Rui Kohiyama, Professor, Department of International Relations, Division of Global Social Sciences, School of Arts and Sciences, Tokyo Woman’s Christian University
Specialist on the women’s foreign mission movement in North America and female missionaries’ work in Meiji Japan. She is currently working on chapters on early history of Ferris University, which was founded by a female missionary from the Dutch Reformed Church and later headed by Rutgers alumni. Ferris celebrated its 150th anniversary last year.
John Van Sant, Associate Professor, Department of History, University of Alabama at Birmingham
Specialist on late Tokugawa/early Meiji Japan, with an emphasis on the political, ideological and cultural changes in Japan during the nineteenth century. He has written a book on Japanese “pioneers” to America, of which a chapter is dedicated to Japanese students at Rutgers.
Discussants:
Joseph Henning (Associate Professor, Department of History, Rochester Institute of Technology), Nathan Jérémie-Brink, (L. Russell Feakes Assistant Professor of the History of Global Christianity, New Brunswick Theological Seminary), and Satoru Saito (Associate Professor, Department of Asian Languages and Cultures, Rutgers University)