This article focuses on the foundation phase of the Faculty of Business Administration, which was established in 1949 at Kobe University. It concerns books written by Yasutaro Hirai housed in the Kobe University Library for Social Sciences and analyses the scribbles in those books, which have seemingly been read by many students. These students scribbled all over the books during the limited period from the late 1940s to the mid-1950s. It appears as though the voices of the students from that time are revived through the scribbles. These include support for and criticism of Hirai, who had advocated business administration at the university since the pre-war days, as well as criticism from the standpoint of commerce, which he often mentioned in contrast with business administration. The article attempts to approach the history of the mentalities, focusing on the students, by taking up their inner voices from the scribbles and discovering how they perceived the foundation of the new faculty and a new academic discipline (business administration) as well as the fact that the teachers had mixed feelings about this matter. In modern society, the spread of the SNS has facilitated simultaneous, two-way communication between people. However, for students at that time, library books were one of the few mediums in which they could anonymously express their opinions and ideas to members of the same organization. The books became a place for communication, where those who saw such opinions and ideas could support or argue against them. Thus, library books can be said to have functioned as an SNS. The teacher who wrote the books and the students that read his books talked to each other directly through their life at university, including lectures, thought logically and wrote down their real opinions and feelings. Their scribbles are the traces of such real opinions and feelings and can be considered an “intellectual layer of traces” that has been read and added to over time.
