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Welcome to Purchase, welcome to Keio Academy of New York in the 35^th anniversary year of the school.

Back in 1990, when our school was established by president Dr. Tadao ISHIKAWA, its mission was to promote Bilingual and Bicultural education. However, in 2022, in the wake of Covid-19, we renovated the mission by replacing “Bicultural” with “Tricultural” education. Let me remind you of the new mission here:

“Keio Academy of New York promotes trans-Pacific, trans-cultural and trans-disciplinary learning. The mission of Keio Academy of New York is to develop, foster and utilize “Tri-cultural” education by combining the best of Japanese, American and Keio cultures, to produce graduates who have a strong sense of “moral-independence” and “self-reliance” which has been a Keio tradition since Keio Gijuku’s establishment by Fukuzawa Yukichi in 1858.”

From the perspective of a literary and cultural Americanist who has taught American intellectual history in the Faculty of Letters of Keio University for more than three decades, this mission statement draws on a number of renovative ideas cultivated by trans-Atlantic precursors such as Benjamin Franklin, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Matthew Arnold. Without Franklin and Emerson Fukuzawa sensei could not have come up with the American idea of democracy. What is more, in his provocative article “Culture and Anarchy” (1869) Matthew Arnold, distinguished professor of the University of Oxford in the Victorian era, defined “culture” as "the great help out of our present difficulties; culture being a pursuit of our total perfection by means of getting to know, on all the matters which most concern us, the best which has been thought and said in the world."

Fukuzawa sensei himself digested the best which has been thought and said in post-Enlightenment Anglo-America and invented his own philosophical concepts such as: 1) “Gijuku” （義塾）as private school modelled after the British public school system, which beautifully coincides now with the American style independent school system; 2)“Dokuritsu-Jison”（独立自尊） as moral independence and self-reliance as influenced by Franklin and Emerson;3 ) “Jitsugaku“（実学） as science as the privileged approach to empirical truth, not a discourse of pragmatic utilitarianism or mammolism;4) “Kihin no Sengen” （気品の泉源）as the source of honorable character, which derives from the virtue of decency as embodied by English gentlemen; 5) “Hangaku-Hankyo” （半学半教）as the idea of  teaching while learning, learning while teaching, which questions the distinction between student and teacher, recalling the famous statement by a Romantic poet William Wordsworth: “ The Child is the father of the man” (“My Heart Leaps Up”[1807]); 6) “Shachu-Kyoroku” （社中協力）as collaboration within the company, which helped expand the global network of mitakai, that is, alumni association of all Keio graduates and its special members; 7) “Jiga-Sakko” （自我作古）as the attitude towards creating history to define the future, denoting a sense of purpose and courage to do something unprecedented.

Now I would like to redefine the last concept “Jiga-Sakko” （我より古を成す）as a kind of frontier spirit in postbellum America.  Fukuzawa sensei paid his first visit to the United States in 1860, staying exclusively in San Francisco. It is in 1867 that Fukuzawa sensei first visited New York by way of Panama and the West Indies. In his autobiography he recalls that it took him twenty seven days making a trans-Pacific journey on the rapid liner the Colorado from Yokohama to San Francisco. Then, on the Golden Age, a specific Pacific Mail Steamship Company steamer he headed for New York on January 26^th,1867:

There were as yet no transcontinental railways, so we embarked again for Panama by the Pacific Steamship Company line after a wait of two weeks. We crossed the Isthmus by train, and then again took ship to New York, our voyage ending on March nineteenth. We went directly to Washington and called on the Secretary of State at once to proceed with our deal. (Autobiography, Chapter IX “I Visit America Again” (133).

It took him approximately 50 days, nearly a couple of months completing his transcontinental journey. In order to simulate Fukuzawa sensei’s journey, I and my wife Mari boarded a transcontinental Amtrak on August 21st this year at Emeryville Station in San Francisco and, by way of Chicago, reached on August 24^th Penn Station in New York. It took us only 4 days (nearly 100 hours) completing our transcontinental journey. Nonetheless, to most of you our 4 day transcontinental journey sounds too long, for air travel will take only 4 hours between the West Coast and the East Coast.  Today’s world is getting smaller and smaller.

What I would like to emphasize here is that it is the steam-driven civilization that privileged Fukuzawa sensei to carefully witness the rise of the frontier spirit in Gilded Age America. Historically speaking, in the age of the Civil War the western half of the continent was none other than wilderness. Therefore, the transcontinental railroad President Abraham Lincoln started to construct in 1862 by empowering the Central Pacific and Union Pacific railroad companies symbolized the frontier spirit civilizing the whole continent. In the wake of the disappearance of frontier in 1890 that marked the end of the westward expansion, settlement and civilization, professor Frederick Jackson Turner of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the first theoretician of American frontier, explained in 1893:

…the frontier promoted the formation of a composite nationality for the American people. …In the crucible of the frontier the immigrants were Americanized, liberated, and fused into a mixed race, English in neither nationality nor characteristics. … Since the days when the fleet of Columbus sailed into the waters of the New World, America has been another name for opportunity, and the people of the United States have taken their tone from the incessant expansion which has not only been open but has even been forced upon them. … Movement has been its dominant fact, and, unless this training has no effect upon a people, the American energy will continually demand a wider field for its exercise.(“The Significance of the Frontier in American History”)

Optimistic as it sounds, Turner’s frontier theory still teaches us lessons for seizing the opportunities, keeping moving forward and creating something from scratch in terra incognita, that is, the wider unknown and untouched field. To sum up, without the frontier spirit the United States could not have developed its original history. Note that the disappearance of the frontier does not signify the disappearance of the frontier spirit. Insofar as the frontier spirit is the cultural engine of the United States, this country keeps refreshing the frontier spirit by means of renovating and even re-inventing the idea of the frontier. I believe that it is this frontier spirit that inspired Fukuzawa sensei to come up with the concept of “Jiga-Sakko” as a kind of pioneer spirit in the age of civilization at the trans-Pacific intersection between Japan and the United States.

Of course, in order to create something new you have to confront and endure hardship and uncertainty. However, if you overcome challenges, you will definitely discover and cultivate the intellectual frontier.

Don’t forget “Jiga-Sakko” and the frontier spirit. I hope this will help you to make your school life more fruitful and more exciting.

Congratulations on your admission and thank you for your attention.