Thursday, October 22, 2026 | 7:00-8:30 PM ET
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Rutgers Meets Japan: A Trans-Pacific Network of the Late Nineteenth Century (Rutgers University Press, 2026)
Presenter: Haruko Wakabayashi, Associate Teaching Professor, Rutgers University-New Brunswick
Discussant: Hiromu Nagahara, Associate Professor of History, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Moderator: Nick Kapur, Associate Professor of History, Rutgers University-Camden
The Modern Japan History Association invites the wider community to a conversation with Haruko Wakabayashi (Rutgers-New Brunswick), who will be speaking about her recent co-edited volume Rutgers Meets Japan: A Trans-Pacific Network of the Late Nineteenth Century. 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 for three and a half years. 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 weeks before his graduation, and his friend Griffis’ departure to Japan. Griffis and Kusakabe were only a small piece of a vast transnational network of leading modernizers of Japan in the 1860s and 70s. The Japanese students in New Brunswick were young and innovative men of samurai and aristocratic lineage, who were sent by reform-minded leaders of Japan, which was undergoing a dramatic transformation. They came to New Brunswick seeking Western knowledge that was much needed for the modernization of a newly forming nation. New Brunswick became the hub of a network of Japanese nationals that extended to the major cities of New York, Philadelphia, and Boston, and from there to the smaller towns of New England. Once in New Brunswick, these Japanese students were embraced by Protestant ministers, educators, and missionaries—both men and women—whose network encompassed Rutgers College and the neighboring New Brunswick Theological Seminary, and which stretched to Dutch Reformed parishes throughout the Eastern seaboard, and westward as far as the Dutch enclave of Holland, Michigan. Meanwhile, the American teachers and missionaries who left for Japan became part of a network of reformist leaders and Japanese returnees that extended to schools, colleges, and missions in Japan, and formed the foundations of Japan’s modern educational system. Through contributions from scholars and archivists in the U.S., Canada, and Japan, Rutgers Meets Japan aims to reconstruct the early Rutgers-Japan connections and examine the role and impact of this transnational network on Japan and the U.S. in the late nineteenth century. Hiromu Nagahara (MIT) will serve as interlocutor.
