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130 8 Implementing the First National Plan for Education The American Model, Phase I, 1873–1875 With the proclamation of the Gakusei, the First National Plan for Education, on August 3, 1872, the Ministry of Education faced an enormous challenge.1 It was charged with implementing a truly ambitious plan at the opening of the following school year in April 1873. The responsibility for enforcing the primary provision, which called for an elementary school in every community to accommodate every child, was suddenly placed upon the ministry that had been organized for only a year. Two unlikely individuals were placed in charge of the ministry to carry out its unprecedented mandate. Tanaka Fujimaro, former samurai from Nagoya, Japan, and Dr. David Murray, mathematics professor from Rutgers College in America, were brought together in Tokyo on an historic mission in mid-1873. Tanaka, as head of the Ministry of Education, and Murray, his senior advisor, were destined to work together for the next five years endeavoring to bring about the great transition from feudal to modern Japan through education. To review the background circumstances briefly, Tanaka Fujimaro had been dispatched by the Ministry of Education on the Iwakura Mission in 1871 to survey western systems of education. It was during this mission that David Murray signed a contract as senior advisor to the Ministry of Education from the summer of 1873. After traveling throughout North America and Europe on a year-and-a-half tour of education in twelve western countries, Tanaka returned to Japan in March 1873, several weeks before the Gakusei became effective.2 During his prolonged study of western systems of education, Tanaka had become deeply impressed with the American system. Upon his return home, he immediately assumed the senior administrative position at the Ministry of Education, and was responsible for the nation’s educational policies from 1873 to 1879.3 Four months after Tanaka returned home from the West, Dr. David Murray arrived in Japan to assume his duties as a ranking official of the Ministry of Education . According to his contract with the Japanese government of March 15, 1873, Murray was to “take charge of all affairs connected with Schools and Colleges.”4 In his words, he served the Japanese Department of Education as the “Superintendent of Schools and Colleges.”5 As the highest paid official in the Ministry of Education, Murray’s salary of 600 yen per month, nearly the equivalent of $7,000 per year, was far higher than he received as a professor at an American university in 1872.6 It also surpassed the salaries of both Tanaka Fujimaro and Hatakeyama Yoshinari, Implementing the First National Plan 131 president of the nation’s premier institution of higher education, Kaisei Gakkō, who was Murray’s former student at Rutgers College. The relationship between David Murray and the Japanese government originated with the letter that Mori Arinori, first Japanese diplomat assigned to Washington , sent to leading American educators in 1871. Mori solicited their advice on the proper role of education in the modernization process. David Murray, then professor of mathematics at Rutgers College, went to great lengths to answer Mori’s letter on behalf of the college president. Little could he have imagined that as a result of his thoughtful and reasoned reply of March 1872, he would become a senior official of the Japanese government the following year. Since Murray’s contract placed him in an extraordinarily influential position directly under the director of the Ministry of Education, his character, his attitude toward the Japanese, and his depth of knowledge about educational affairs proved crucial. Murray’s farewell address before the New Brunswick Historical Club clarified his basic attitude toward his unusual assignment. It revealed not only his personal commitment to the task but the influence of the Japanese students he befriended at Rutgers College during the Tokugawa era. Those who have regarded Japan from an outside viewpoint have supposed it to be an uneducated nation and that consequently the whole fabric of education would require to be revised from the foundation. Nothing could be more erroneous. On the contrary Japan stands today among the nations where education is held in the highest regard, and where it is nearly universal. . . . I have been most deeply interested in the efforts of the nation to connect itself with the great march of modern progress. . . . I go with an earnest purpose to use whatever experience I have gained in my previous labors in education for the best...

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