Edward Warren Clark was born in 1849 in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. He was one of the oyatoi gaikokujin, foreign experts who were sent to Japan by the Japanese government to help modernize Japan. Clark worked to teach the Japanese about modern science from about 1871 to 1875.
Clark attended what is now Rutgers University, where he studied chemistry and biology. During his college years, he formed close relationships with Japanese students and befriended William E. Griffis, a famous oyatoi. Clark first taught science at a school in Shizuoka City. Here he trained many Japanese science teachers. He then moved to Tokyo where he founded one of Japan’s first departments of chemistry at the Tokyo Imperial College.
Clark wrote about Japan on numerous occasions. He wrote as the Japan correspondent in the Rutgers Targum, The New York Evangelist, and The Child’s Paper. He went on to publish books that compiled his writing describing his experiences in Japan and photographs from his stay. These included Life and Adventure in Japan in 1878. From Hong-Kong to the Himalayas: or, Three thousand miles through India in 1880, and Around the World in Eighty Minutes. Clark then taught in the Japanese ministry in New York and Philadelphia but later returned to Japan in 1891.
Clark also played a role in Portsmouth Peace Treaty formed in 1904 between Russia and Japan to end the war between the two nations. His is accredited with speaking highly of Japan at the Portsmouth Peace Conference and fighting for better terms for Japan.
Clark later moved to Florida in 1905 and invited a Japanese family to live on his land. He soon passed away in 1907 of natural causes. Edward Warren Clark was a major contributor to the modernization of Japanese education in the 1870s and helped form a bridge between Japan and the United States of America.
Sources:
Candee, Richard M. “Promoting Japan in America: the Life Work of E. Warren Clark (1849 – 1907).” Portsmouth Peace Treaty, Japan-America Society of New Hampshire, 2005, www.portsmouthpeacetreaty.org/EWClark.cfm.
“Edward Warren Clark.” Travels in Shizuoka, WordPress, travelsinshizuoka.wordpress.com/individual-authors/edward-clarke/.