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Welcome to Keio Academy of New York!

You’ve just started inhabiting an earthly paradise in Purchase, which started in 1990 with the Utopian idea of the “American Dream” in the transpacific context.

Then, what is the American Dream?

Very lately I was deeply impressed by the musical version of The Great Gatsby performed at Broadway Theatre. Mark Shacket’s production of the musical turned out to be very faithful to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s original novel The Great Gatsby published in 1925, nearly one hundred years ago, which so vividly described the American Dream as to attract quite a few readers of different generations.

The plot is very simple. Working his way up from the bottom, the protagonist Jay Gatsby became a billionaire with the aim of regaining his lost love Daisy in vain. Although the story ends with Gatsby’s tragic death, whoever reads the novel must be fascinated with the American Dream Gatsby wanted to achieve. Yes, the American Dream was once defined as the frontier spirit of the United States that encourages its people to believe that in this nation life should be better and richer and fuller for everyone, abound with opportunities for each according to ability or achievement, regardless of one’s class or race or gender. In this sense, Jay Gatsby is a typically American Self-Made Man who made every effort to open up a new frontier.

What intrigues me most is the last sequence of the novel, in which the narrator Nick Caraway, lamenting the death of his friend Gatsby, speculates on the origin of New York City in the early 17^th century and the American Dream represented by Manhattan island. He became aware of　“the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors’ eyes—a fresh, green breast of the new world” and “Its vanished trees” that “had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams.”

In the meanwhile, the year of 1630 saw a historical sermon delivered by John Winthrop, great governor of Massachusetts Bay Colony. This sermon entitled “A Model of Christian Charity” invited the Puritan immigrants from England to build “a city upon a hill,” that is, a kind of American Utopia. Governor Winthrop was so deeply proud of this ambitious project as to command universal applause: “The eyes of all people are upon us, so that if we shall deal falsely with our God in this work we have undertaken, and so cause Him to withdraw His present help from us, we shall be made a story and a by-word through the world.”

However, as the idea of Enlightenment permeated 18^th century western civilization, Christian theocracy was gradually secularized by modern democracy, ending up with the American Revolution (1776-1783) leading to the independence of the United States of America from Great Britain. Thus, Thomas Jefferson, one of the Founding Fathers, composed a punch line in his draft of “The Declaration of Independence” (1776): “We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness …”  Logically thinking, perfect equality is incompatible with perfect liberty. And yet, skillful rhetorician as he was, Jefferson created magic words repressing all the contradictions of his Utopian vision within his text. This is the reason why “The Declaration of Independence” has been influential enough to inspire the leaders of underdeveloped countries and the civil rights movements to attack all the discourses of sexism and racism.

It is well-known that our own founding father Fukuzawa Yukichi sensei began his book An Encouragement of Learning (『学問のすゝめ』、1872) with a punch line by paraphrasing Jefferson’s famous sentence “all men are created equal” as follows: “Heaven, it is said, does not create one person above or below another” （「天は人の上に人をつくらず、人の下に人をつくらず」）. Although Fukuzawa sensei attacked all the religious discourses but Unitarianism, his visits to the United States in 1860 and 1867 induced him to completely accept and comprehend the American Dream of Democratic Utopia based on Winthrop’s “City upon a Hill” and Jefferson’s “Declaration of Independence.”  Without this heritage of the American Dream we would not have been deeply moved by a young African American feminist poet Amanda Gorman’s poem “The Hill We Climb” she recited on January 20^th, 2021 at the inauguration of the 46^th president of the United States, Joe Biden:

If we’re to live up to our own time
Then victory won’t lie in the blade
But in all the bridges we’ve made
That is the promised glade
The hill we climb
If only we dare
It’s because being American is more than a pride we inherit,
it’s the past we step into
and how we repair it

At this point, let us note that while Winthrop, Jefferson, Fitzgerald and Gorman all developed the American Dream, it is an antebellum biracial Native American, Ranald MacDonald, who pursued the Japanese Dream and became the first teacher of English in Japan in 1849. Oppressed by racism and dying for the freedom in the Far East, he shipped on December 2, 1845 at Sag Harbor in the whale ship Plymouth on a whaling voyage. On July 2, 1849, he saw smoke on Rishiri island of Hokkaido and was rescued by the Ainu and turned over to the Japanese. In the end, MacDonald pioneered English education and trained quite a few skillful translators including Moriyama Einosuke, who resolved many problems of foreign affairs in Meiji Japan since the arrival of Commodore Perry’s black ship in 1853.

MacDonald’s narrative provided his contemporary novelist Herman Melville with resourceful information. Reopen his masterpiece Moby-Dick (1851) and take a glance at Chapter 24: “If that double-bolted land, Japan, is ever to become hospitable, it is the whale-ship alone to whom the credit will be due; for already she is on the threshold” (94, Norton). Therefore, it is McDonald’s adventure that seduced Melville, Commodore Perry and many Americans to weave out the Japanese Dream, helping to construct the discourse of Japonism as represented by such Boston Brahmins as Percival Lowell, William Sturgis Bigelow and Charles Longfellow, a major American lawyer John Luther Long, who wrote a short story “Madame Butterfly” (1898), an Irish Greek American writer Lafcadio Hearn a.k.a. Yakumo Koizumi (小泉八雲), the author of Kwaidan (『怪談』、1904).  Don’t forget that the rise of American Japonism coindided with the rise of European Impressionists like Camille Pissaro, Edouard Manet, and Edgar Degas influenced by Japanese Ukiyoe paintings. Therefore, it is no coincidence that Keio Academy of New York was primarily conceived as a radically new institution for bilingual and bicultural education during the bubble economy in the 1980s nicknamed as the decade of “Japan as No.1,” “Pax Japonica,” or “Neo Japonism” that revived the “Japanese Dream,” bringing about the popularity of postmodern Japanese arts and sciences exemplified by manga, anime and microelectronics.

Therefore, Keio Academy of New York is an earthly paradise located at the fantastic intersection between the American Dream and the Japanese Dream. It is Fukuzawa sensei who became keenly conscious of the very intersection that created the transpacific imagination. This is the beginning of what we designated “Triculture” consisting of American, Japanese and Keio cultures. 

I Hope you will create your own Tricultural voice while you are studying at this privileged school.

From left: Assistant Headmaster Yamamoto, Headmaster Tatsumi,
President Itoh of Keio University, Trustee Mr. Sasada, Trustee Mr. Tsurushima