The year of 2025 sees our Quintricennial, that is, the 35^th anniversary of Keio Academy of New York. Since Keio’s integrated educational system has consistently celebrated its affiliated schools’ anniversary every 25 years, following the Catholic example of celebrating a Jubilee year, which is a time of spiritual renewal, forgiveness and reconciliation, our Quintricennial not only symbolizes the year of coral and jade but also the perseverance in surviving the Covid-19 pandemic and the triumph of “Triculture.”

Of course, when Keio’s president Professor Ishikawa Tadao decided to establish our academy here in Purchase, New York in the 1980s, the combination of the seemingly fashionable signifiers “Keio” and “New York” must have sounded simply arbitrary in the age of advanced capitalism. In fact, President Ishikawa built our campus by complying to the request of Japanese expatriates in New York and purchasing part of the property of Manhattanville College of the Sacred Heart where Ms. Shoda Michiko had studied before her marriage with Prince Akihito in 1959, for which Dr. Koizumi Shinzo, the 7^th president of Keio University, was responsible (for more detail, see “Headmaster’s Voice” #30).  Historically speaking, however, the encounter of “Keio” with “New York” turns out to be not so much arbitrary as inevitable.

Being a newly elected board member of the Japan History Council of New York established in December 2020, which has managed The Digital Museum of the History of Japanese in New York since May 2021（https://www.historyofjapaneseinny.org/aboutus/）, I have been asked by its directors to propose an idea for “narrativizing” the moment Keio’s founder Fukuzawa Yukichi sensei landed on New York in postbellum America.　 At this point, let us recall how this museum appreciates an analogy between history and story:

Every person and entity has a story to tell. Since the first Japanese official delegation set foot in New York in 1860, thousands of Japanese and Japanese Americans have resided in New York, and have had an impact on a wide array of fields ranging from business to public service to art. Many became U.S. citizens, and as Japanese Americans, contributed greatly to U.S.-Japan relations by building bridges between the U.S. and Japan. While some are well-known for such contributions to history, others are lesser-known, or have passed away without being recognized. 

Re-interpreting this mission statement in the context of the 35^th anniversary of Keio Academy of New York, it occurred to me that the year of 2025 sees the 165^th anniversary of Fukuzawa sensei’s first visit to the United States in 1860 as mentioned in the above statement, whereas the year of 2027 will see the 160^th anniversary of Fukuzawa sensei’s first landing on the Manhattan island in 1867, where he stayed at Metropolitan Hotel between Broadway and Prince Street, and purchased a number of books at Appleton Bookstore such as Francis Wayland’s Elements of Political Economy (1837), Peter Parley’s Universal History, on the Basis of Geography (1837), G.P. Quackenbos’s Natural Philosophy: Embracing the Most Recent Discoveries in the Various Branches of Physics (1860) and others, most of which gave him inspirations for lectures at Keio Gijuku.

Moreover, we should not ignore that Fukuzawa sensei’s first son Ichitaro and grandson Eiichi Kiyooka both studied at Cornell University located in Ithaca, New York, in the 1880s and the 1920s respectively. While it is Fukuzawa Ichitaro who learned the tolerant spirit of Unitarianism through Rev. Arthur May Knapp and informed his father of the Unitarian discourse, it is the grandson of Professor Kiyooka who translated his grandfather’s autobiography (originally dictated by the author in 1897) to be published in 1966 by Columbia University Press.

In addition, very recently Kanagawa Prefectural Museum of Cultural History provided me with their collaborative research report on the New York branch of Yokohama Specie Bank (the archetype of the Bank of Tokyo and MUFG Bank) specializing in foreign exchange, which was also founded in 1880 in response to the idea of Fukuzawa sensei and Okuma Shigenobu, the founder of Waseda University. According to Terasaki Hiroyasu, the leader of the collaborative research, once it was established in 1880, Yokohama Specie Bank dispatched a young excellent banker Adachi Nanishiro to the United States to build its first foreign branch office in lower Manhattan, ending up with 168 branches all over the world by the mid-1940s. It is unforgettable that once he came back to Japan, another young banker Nagai Sokichi working at the New York branch office of Yokohama Specie Bank between 1905 and 1907 became so well-known under the pseudonym of Nagai Kafu, one of the founders of modern Japanese literature. He wrote from experience Tales of America (1908) and inaugurated Keio’s literary magazine Mita Bungaku in 1910, teaching a number of talented students including Abe Shozo a.k.a. Minakami Takitaro and the aforementioned President Koizumi at Keio University.

Since my own grandfather was the manager of the London Branch of the same bank in the 1910s (see “Headmaster’s Voice” #22), a further research on the transatlantic connection, I believe, will endorse the close relationship between Keio Gijuku and Anglo-America.
 

Photos:

• Fukuzawa sensei with Theodora Alice Shew in San Francisco in 1860 「慶應義塾福澤研究センター」所蔵
• Prof. Eiichi Kiyooka, the translator of The Autobiography of Fukkuzawa Yukichi, with Headmaster Tatsumi together with the former’s sons-in-law
• The head branch of Yokohama Specie Bank renovated as Kanagawa Prefectural Museum of Cultural History