Remembering a Great Educator and Pacifist

MINATO Akiko

Today’s world is filled with news of war and conflict. In Japan, meanwhile, people talk of the need for “education of the heart” to address the spiritual vacuum among young people. What both Japan and the entire world require at this juncture is people like Nitobe Inazô, who made his mark as an educator and pacifist during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It is disappointing that not many Japanese know much about his life, though his face has been on the ¥5,000 note since 1984. The money is slated for a redesign in July 2004; I would like to spread the word about him before he disappears even from our banknotes.

TRACING INAZÔ’S LIFE

During the Meiji (1868–1912), Taishô (1912–26), and early Shôwa (1926–89) periods, Nitobe’s name was quite widely known, not just in his native Japan but in the nations of the West, too. He was best known internationally as the author of Bushido: The Soul of Japan, and later as the under secretary general of the League of Nations. But he was active in a bewildering range of fields, and it is difficult to sum up his accomplishments in just a few words.

Nitobe Inazô was born in 1862, six years before the Meiji Restoration, during an age when Japan had no normal relations with the nations of the West. He belonged to the upper class of Japanese society at that time, born into a samurai family in the Morioka Nanbu domain (now part of Iwate Prefecture in northern Honshû). As the son of a samurai, he started out with a traditional course of education that included the Chinese classics, Buddhism, and Japanese culture. Following his father’s death in 1867 he was raised by his mother and grandfather, and then, at the age of 10, he was adopted by his uncle Ôta Tokitoshi and went to Tokyo. (After his adoption, Inazô used the surname Ôta, but in 1889 he officially rejoined the Nitobe family to take the place of his deceased elder brother.) It was there that he started to learn English and got his first glimpses of Western culture.

In 1877 Inazô entered the second class to matriculate at the Sapporo Agricultural College (forerunner of today’s Hokkaidô University), which is now widely remembered as the place where the American professor William Clark made his mark. It was in Hokkaidô that he was baptized as a Christian, along with his friends Uchimura Kanzô and Miyabe Kingo. This was a significant development in the history of Japanese Christianity: Protestantism first reached Japan’s shores only in 1859, and here just two decades later Inazô and his college classmates were taking up this faith.

After graduating from the Sapporo school, Inazô began his studies at Tokyo University (later to become Tokyo Imperial University; today the University of Tokyo). During his entrance examination he was asked what he wished to study. He told the questioning professor “agriculture and English literature.” When the instructor wondered what connection there might be between these subjects, he declared his desire to become “a bridge across the Pacific” —a link between Occident and Orient.

He cut his studies in Tokyo short in 1884, heading to the United States to study first at Pennsylvania’s Allegheny College and then at Johns Hopkins University. The Baltimore chapter of the Religious Society of Friends—the pacifist denomination commonly known as the Quakers—accepted him as a member in 1886; he subsequently also became known to the Philadelphia Quakers, among whom he found his bride, Mary Elkington.

The daughter of a well-established Philadelphia family, Mary had enjoyed a stern but caring upbringing, studying at the Quaker Westtown School. With an education spanning philosophy, literature, world history, geography, Latin, and French, she was active as an educator and a pacifist. She also made efforts to improve the position of women in society. After hearing Inazô lecture on the need for female education in Japan, Mary told a friend: “I felt immediately that this was the only man who could point the way to my life’s work.”

This lecture was a providential encounter for Mary and Inazô—and indeed for America and Japan. They overcame the objections from both of their families to wed on January 1, 1891. It goes without saying that Mary influenced her husband deeply throughout his life, guiding his actions as a teacher and a pacifist.

The couple moved to Japan a month after their wedding, and Nitobe took the lectern at his alma mater, the Sapporo Agricultural College. Misfortune struck soon afterward when the couple’s first son, Tômasu, died just days after birth. After this painful experience, they used a sum of money that they received from Mary’s family to establish the Sapporo En’yû (friends from afar) School, a night school for children deprived of educational opportunities, and they worked there without pay. Inazô headed this school until his death; few know, however, that Mary took over as principal when he was gone.

Hard work took its toll on Nitobe, and he went to the United States to recuperate. It was there that he published Bushido: The Soul of Japan (1900). He returned to Japan refreshed enough to take on a series of positions: He was a professor at Kyoto Imperial University and concurrently served in Japan’s colonial government in Taiwan. In 1906 he became head of the First Higher School in Tokyo; in 1908 he was appointed an editorial advisor to the business journal Jitsugyô no Nippon; and in 1913 he assumed a professorship at Tokyo Imperial University. And in 1918 Nitobe became the first president of Tokyo Woman’s Christian University, my own alma mater. (The singular woman was chosen on purpose to signify the school’s goal of educating each student entering it as an individual.)

In 1919 Nitobe headed overseas again, and the following year he settled down in Geneva to serve as an under secretary general of the newly established League of Nations. He remained in Geneva until 1926, when he returned once more to Japan. He served in the House of Peers and as chairman of the Japan Council of the Institute of Pacific Relations.

The nation adopted an increasingly militarist path beginning with the 1931 Manchurian Incident. As Japan distanced itself from the principles of peace and democracy, the gap between it and America grew as well. In March 1933 Japan withdrew from the League of Nations, isolating itself decisively on the international stage. Braving criticism from both Japan and the United States, Nitobe and his wife did what they could to keep channels of communication open across the Pacific. They traveled to Canada in 1933 to attend the fifth conference of the Institute of Pacific Relations, which was held in Banff. But shortly after this gathering, on October 15, Nitobe died at the age of 72.

Mary Nitobe brought her husband’s remains back to Japan and in 1934 took up her position as head of the Sapporo En’yû School. Her life was not easy in a rapidly militarizing Japan, but she stated firmly: “Nothing saddens me so much as being asked, ‘When will you return to America?’ I am the wife of Inazô, a Japanese man. My country is Japan.” A pacifist to the end, Mary died in 1938.

A CHRISTIAN EDUCATOR

Exactly 150 years ago Japan went through a decisive year in its history. In 1853 US Commodore Matthew Perry sailed his “black ships” into the port at Uraga, establishing a new point of contact between East and West. Six years after that Japan experienced another major influence from abroad as Christian missionaries made their appearance in the nation. This represented the start of an encounter between the Western mind grounded in a Christian value system and the Japanese mind grounded in an Oriental value system. From 1878 on, when Nitobe was baptized in Sapporo, he played a key role in introducing a Christian view of the person to his compatriots.

The structure of Japanese consciousness is often described as “collective.” The Japanese way of thinking is one that finds comfort in being part of the group. The philosopher and literary scholar Mori Arimasa described Japan as having a “second-person culture”—one where the subject of discourse tends to be the second-person “you” rather than the first-person “I.” This is a mental landscape in which the self is far from firmly established.

It was in this traditional Japanese environment that Nitobe Inazô stressed the importance of education focused on the personality (personhood) of the individual. The personality that Nitobe spoke of was predicated on a vertical relationship between a human being and a personal God. He explained it in this way: “One must be ready to center one’s dealings not on people but on heaven. A person must have a place within that does not move, that makes no concession—a strong, stubborn faith. This faith is born from the vertical relationship between God and human, and it is through this relationship that the human personality is forged.”

For Nitobe, possessing personality was not a matter of having great knowledge, fame, or status; rather it meant being one who can accept others and fulfill his or her social responsibilities. Two of his statements express his thinking on education quite well: First, “Where there is no personality there can be no responsibility.” And second, “It is not enough merely to know. It is more important to do. But most important of all is to be—to exist as you, yourself.”

These ideals were at the core of Nitobe’s efforts in the field of education, which he sought to bring to women, young children, the disabled, and orphans—weaker members of society who had not been given much attention by educators previously. The Sapporo En’yû School mentioned above was one institution geared for children lacking educational opportunity, and Nitobe took no money for the work of running this school.

In an article in the Christian women’s journal Shinjokai Nitobe wrote of his desire “to foster a spirit of giving, so that people will contribute to the nation, to society, and to humanity with the heart of Christ, willing to sacrifice their very selves if necessary.” Nitobe himself embodied this spirit, and we who succeed him as Christian educators should seek to propagate it in our own time.

CREATING WOMEN LEADERS THROUGH EDUCATION

Beginning in 1859, when the first Protestant missionaries arrived in Japan, the number of educational facilities for women rose swiftly. By 1899 there were 37 schools exclusively for female students. In the Japan of the nineteenth century, people were bound by a feudalistic family system and collective restraints, and the social position of women was far from equal to that of men. Drawing on his Christian beliefs, Nitobe spoke out against this situation: “God has created all humans—including women, children, and the disabled—and they are all precious in His sight. Women are not simply childbearing tools. They possess personality just as men do, and should be raised in the same manner as men.” He stressed that improving the position of women in society was the most pressing issue facing Japan, arguing for the liberation of women from the oppression of feudal ways and the recognition of the equality of the sexes.

In the Japanese society of those times it required real courage for a man to make public statements arguing for improving the status of women in society. This made Nitobe a most valuable figure—a man who fulfilled his social responsibility to improve the position of women, looking to heaven for guidance and not wavering in the face of other humans. He was not merely a proponent of the education of females; he was a practitioner.

Nitobe’s efforts influenced many people who would become Japan’s leaders in the field of women’s education. The early twentieth century saw the establishment of a number of women’s schools. In 1900 Tsuda Umeko founded Joshi Eigaku Juku (Women’s School for English Learning), later to become Tsuda College. Tokyo Woman’s Christian University was launched in 1918, with Nitobe as its first president and Yasui Tetsu as dean (she would succeed Nitobe as president). In 1929 Kawai Michi took the helm at the new Keisen Girls’ School (now Keisen University). Nitobe was deeply involved in all these endeavors. The efforts he devoted toward the education of women leaders for the nation, along with the views on gender that underpinned them, have great significance for today’s Japan, where there are still few women in visible positions of leadership.

We must not forget the key role that Mary Nitobe played through her support for her husband’s work. Her impact on him is easy to see from the writing of Kotoko, their adopted daughter: “My mother was a marvelous woman of strong faith and deep love. All people who believe Inazô to be a praiseworthy man should understand that he achieved that status thanks to the support of his wife.”

At the ceremony marking the opening of Tokyo Woman’s Christian University in 1918, Nitobe had the following to say: “The warnings one hears, that our nation will go into decline if women are allowed into positions of power, are nothing but the rants of cowardly men. Men and women together form a woven tapestry, with one the warp and the other the woof. That tapestry cannot be called complete if the warp or the woof is allowed to remain weak.” In his view both men and women were created by God and invested with personality, and people needed to develop an understanding of personality that saw equal value in the two sexes. If people, whether men or women, take this as their starting point, they can see the concepts of maleness and femaleness as being the products of historical, societal, and cultural factors rather than the results of innate differences between the genders. Nitobe’s theory of personality forms a valid foundation for the age of gender equality we hope to see in the twenty-first century.

THE GLOBAL REACH OF NITOBE’S PACIFISM

When Nitobe stated that he wanted to be a bridge across the Pacific, he did not mean a one-way conduit for bringing Western culture to Japan. He intended to export Japanese thought and culture to other nations through his activities. It was toward this end that he published Bushido in America in 1900. By 1905 this book had been released in 10 English editions, and translations were available in languages including Chinese, Czech, French, German, Norwegian, and Polish.

Bushido was not a book extolling militaristic virtues, despite what one might think from its title, literally, “the way of the samurai.” It was rather an attempt to answer the question of what sort of basis Japan had for its moral education—in other words, what played the role that Christianity played in the West as the spiritual foundation. In summary, Nitobe’s book describes bushidô as the traditional spirituality of Japan—not a code of war, but rather a code to guide the human heart. As the code of the days when the warrior caste ruled, it would not survive unchanged in the modern Japan but would be sublimated by Christianity, the creed Nitobe himself had adopted, and become a code of sacrifice, service, and tolerance. The author wrote this work with care to increase understanding of Japan among people in the West—in particular his wife, Mary. President Theodore Roosevelt was greatly impressed by Bushido, and he presented copies to his family and friends. This classic work contributed considerably to Nitobe’s efforts to be a Pacific bridge, bringing knowledge of Japan’s spiritual landscape to the Western world.

In 1920, when Nitobe took his post in the League of Nations, Japan was beginning to move toward an isolationist stance—a move that would become complete in 1933, when Japan left the world body. Even during these difficult years, Nitobe strove to be a Pacific bridge, serving as head of the Japanese Council of the Institute of Pacific Relations, a group dedicated to objective, academic analysis of the problems facing the Pacific region and the promotion of peace and friendship across the ocean.

Nitobe made a speech at the IPR’s fifth conference, held in Banff in 1933, that would be in a way his last testament as a pacifist. “There is today a chasm between the governments of Japan and the United States. But this does not mean that individuals have any ill will toward one another. Nobody will reject the possibility that these days of friendship we spend together here may lead to the forging of peace between the people of both our nations, who share common cultural and traditional assets. This contact between individual human beings from different countries promises limitless benefits for our world, which today faces calamity on a vast scale.”

Nitobe Inazô lived in an age when international exchange was far less common than it has become today. His words then drove home the importance of mutual understanding for different people’s varied ways of thinking. Today Japan finds itself in need not merely of a Pacific bridge, as Nitobe strove to provide, but of a global bridge. The Japanese must not let themselves see the nations of Asia as “geographically near, but a world apart,” as they have tended to do in the past. We must take to heart the message of the Nitobes—Inazô and Mary’s belief in the importance of understanding the differences in each other’s hearts and accepting one another—and bear this message forth into the twenty-first century.

Nitobe Inazô and Mary, proponents of education of the personality, women’s educators, and pacifists, have great significance for today’s Japan. They and their message merit close attention in the years to come.

Translated from an original article in Japanese written for Japan Echo.

© 2003 Japan Echo Inc.