Orita Hikoichi was born in 1849 to the samurai class. He served as a retainer to Lord Satsuma and accompanied the sons of Iwakura Tomomi, who planned to attend Rutgers University, to the United States. Orita Hikoichi, however, attended Princeton University under advice from Reverend Edwin T. Corwin. Currently, Princeton University holds records of his time there, including diary entries he wrote while a student there from 1872 to 1876. There are two volumes of entries that follow him through his undergraduate career and are mostly in English, which was quite impressive for the time. For the most part, his accounts are short and straightforward, yet some express his feelings of loneliness and curiosity which many Japanese travelers often neglect to include in their accounts. 
His entries also give some perspective on his social life while in America. He talks about visiting friends in New York City and New Brunswick, including an entry about losing a close friend of his. While he spent a lot of time studying, Orita was also baptized at Princeton University. He fondly accounts his baptism by President James McCosh and Professors Stephen Alexander and the Second Presbyterian Church. He was known for being quite devout and attended college chapel daily.
Orita Hikoichi was one of the first Japanese students to graduate from Princeton University in 1876 and even gave his presentation in Japanese! Once he returned to Japan, he worked to reform the education system in Kyoto alongside many other diplomats who had also studied abroad. He implemented reforms that modeled university teaching at Princeton. He mostly worked on adjusting and creating higher education in Japan but advocated for more Japanese and Chinese texts in schools as opposed to other foreign languages. He founded Kyoto University in 1897 and died in 1920.
Sources:
https://library.princeton.edu/special-collections/collections/hikoichi-orita-diary