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. Griffis and Kusakabe were a small piece of a vast transnational network of leading modernizers of Japan in the 1860s and 70s. Through contributions from scholars and archivists in the U.S., Canada, and Japan, Rutgers Meets Japan aims to reconstruct these early Rutgers-Japan connections.
Review Quotes: "Based on careful archival research, this book presents a compelling picture of a transpacific network between the U.S. and Japan. Among the signal contributions of this work is its engaging and poignant discussion of the experiences of both Japanese students on the Eastern Seaboard and American missionaries in Japan in the decades after the opening of the Japanese treaty ports."
--Steven J. Ericson "author of The Sound of the Whistle: Railroads and the State in Meiji Japan" (6/6/2025 12:00:00 AM)