Since the Yogakusha, a foreign language school, was founded in Yonezawa in 1871, Charles Henry Dallas and five other foreign masters taught successively at the Yonezawa Middle School till March in 1880.
During the 1880's when Westernism was overwhelming throughout the country, the Yonezawa Middle School was taking a leading role in the spread of new progressive Western ideas among the people of Yonezawa, a rural town in the Tohoku districts, and among the graduates and students of this school were many devotees of democratic rights.
It was in 1887 that a church of Methodist communion was founded for the first time in Yonezawa and J. C. Cleaveland was sent there as a missionary. He complied with the request to teach English at the Yonezawa Middle School as well, which started working in accordance with the new ordinance concerning middle schools promulgated the previous year by the Government.
On the other hand, Mrs. Cleaveland, with the assistance of her interpreter, opened the class of the English language and knitting for women at the parsonage. This class was up-to-date and so attractive that it was not long before it gained much popularity among young women and girls there.
In the same year, Julius Soper, the missionary of the Methodist Episcopal Church in Tokyo, visited Yonezawa, and lectured on the necessity of woman's education and insisted upon the need of foundation of a girls' school. It was true that his lecture left a deep impression on the minds of audience, but there were no reactions among the native men of importance to build one immediately.
The Woman's Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church in Japan sent Miss R. J. Watson in order to investigate whether the foundation of a girls' school there would be within the bounds of possibility. Miss Watson, knowing the popularity of Mrs. Cleaveland's class of the English language and knitting, started the invitation for the new school.
The opening ceremony of the Yonezawa Eiwa Girls' School took place in the Assembly Hall of Commerce and Industry in January, 1889, with many guests and men of importance there in attendance.
The number of pupils was favorably increasing and the school was well under way, and Miss R. J. Watson, Miss Mary E. Atkinson, Miss G. Baucas and Miss A. M. Otto were appointed in succession to principal of this school, and Miss M. B. Griffiths, Miss L. Imhof and Miss B. J. Allen cooperated with them in evangelistic work. Nevertheless this school was to be closed in 1895, only seven years after its opening.
In this paper I want to consider the details of this school, chiefly through the minutes of the Woman's Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church in Japan, in which the reports of each principal and missionary in charge of evangelistic work were recorded, and to inquire into the unavoidable circumstances that must have obliged them to close the school in such a short period of time.

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Born at Hagi, Province of Nagato (Yamaguchi-Ken) died at Yamato City, Kanagawa-Ken at the age of 95.
In Tokyo, he entered several different schools, public and private, and was well educated there. In U.S.A. he studied in a business school at the beginning, later specialized in biology together with law and economics in Yale University.
As a member of society, he has contributed to the development for the international relationship in various fields. Later he became much interested in livestock breeding and kept a farm house in Nasu, Tochigi-Ken.
As a unique biographer, he wrote a book entitled “General Capron” (Kepuron Shogun) who was distinguished for his pioneering devotion to the cultivation in Hokkaido district at the beginning of Meiji Era.

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At the end of the second year of Meiji (1869 A. D.) an English oyatoi came to Nanao, a port town in Kaga, in order to teach English and French at a school there.
The name of the school was Nanao Gogakusho i. e. Nanao Foreign Language School that was established by Kanazawa Clan as the branch school of Chienkan, English language school founded by the clan in Kanazawa.
This Englishman's name has been known as Osborn, but it was not until seven years ago that his first name became known. His full name was Percival Osborn, and at the same time his Japanese wife's name and his career in Japan etc. were proved as the fruit of the late Mr. Tsukahara's and my many years' study.
Percival was born in London on the 16th of September in 1842. His father John Jenks Osborn was an American army officer stationed at Aachen in Germany and he was given an education in Germany and Switzerland besides England. So he learned German and French in addition to English.
In 1867 he landed in Japan via China. When he came to Nanao, his Japanese wife named Seto was pregnant and on the 15th of June in 1870 his son George was born there.
The number of his pupils was about thirty and many among them grew up to make their names immortal. They contributed greatly to the modernization of Japan, and especially following six men are famous : Joji Sakurai ; a doctor of science, Jokichi Takamine; a doctor of pharmacy and science, Isoji Ishiguro; a doctor of engineering, Jintaro Takayama; ditto, Seijiro Hirai; ditto, and Sotokichi Uriu; an admiral.
For about two years from 1871 he had been employed as a teacher of English and French at the school of Okayama Clan.
In Novenber 1872 he was employed in the Kanagawa prefectural government and had filled the post of foreign secretary for nearly seventeen years. Japanese government decorated him with the third order for his sincere service to the local government.
In 1890 he went back to England with his wife and two children. His daughter Agnes was born in Yokohama in 1876.
After he returned to his native country, he lived in comfort and died at Vevey in Switzerland in 1905. Now his granddaughter Margaret is in good health and lives at Uckfield in East Sussex, England.

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Miss Ellen MacRae came to Japan with six other English Christian lady teachers, invited to became the principal of the Ladies' Institute in 1887, when the Japanese were most anxious to westernize themselves in their history. The Ladies' Institute was founded by Professor Toyama and Prime Minister Ito, who intended to cultivate Japanese girls in the western fashion through personal religious influence of the Christian ladies.
But in a few years the Japanese came to prefer modernization and nationalism to westernization. Miss MacRae and the other ladies were dismissed suddenly and unjustly. They indignantly went hnme in 1892.
She came back to Japan again alone and at her own expense in 1896. She devoted herself to Christian work as an ordinary missionary in Sendai, where she was also in charge of the Women's Divinity School, and often made missionary trips to neighbouring towns.
But she had to go back to England because of her elder sister's illness in 1906, and she was never to see Japan and people who loved her very much.
In England she worked as a circulating missionary for women prisoners. She died at the age of 76 in London in 1921.

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In 1868, English Idioms, the first dictionary of English idioms in Japan, was published. Though the editors, Tokujiro Obata and Jinzaburo Obata, mentioned in its preface the dictionaries that they used in the compilation of English Idioms, they did not specify the edition of Webster's dictionary. In this paper, the author compared the 1859 edition and the 1864 edition of Webster's Unabridged Dictionaries, and drew a conclusion that it is the 1864 edition that Obata brothers used to compile their dictionary.

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It was about ten years after the educational system was established in 1872 that many middle schools made efforts to set up their own syllabi. Among them the syllabus of Osaka Middle School is considered the first one and that was quite well organized. There is no denying the fact that it was adopted or partially adopted by other middle schools.
In this article, sixteen syllabi in thirteen prefectural middle schools have been examined and analyzed. And the writer has found that there were four types in them and that two syllabi, quite unique, were independent of the Osaka version ; Tochigi and Shizuoka Middle Schools.
A syllabus is the overall plan for the teaching-and-learning process and it includes what items to teach and how to teach them. The writer believes that syllabi are one of the sources to know the historical development of teaching English in the classroom.

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“Bansho-shirabesho” (the National Institute of Foreign Languages) was established in 1856, with the objective of studying and teaching Western learning. It belonged to the Tokugawa shogunate and was on a high academic level at that time. Only Dutch was taught at first, and in 1860 the English teaching started out of necessity.
It is the intention of this paper to explain how the English teaching was given in that institute.

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The paper describes the brief history of translating Kojiki into English. B. H. Chamberlain published his translation of the Kojiki in 1883. The Kojiki is the earliest source book in Japanese literature and history. His translations are accurate and it has detailed notes. He referred to forty-eight Japanese writings on Kojiki for the translation. His introduction to the book is full of new ideas which surprised Japanese scholars, even Kojiki specialists.
On the method of translation he said : “So-called equivalent terms in two languages rarely quite cover each other.” He cites the chief examples, the names of titles. For example Yamato-Take-no-Mikoto, His Augustness Yamato-Take. Post Wheeler is opposed to this way of translating. He believes it is unnecessarily burdensome. In 1968 Donald Philippi published the complete translation of Kojiki again. He criticized Chamberlain for not interpreting the etymology of Proper Names such as the names of personage, Gods and places. Regardless of any criticism, his honor of being the 1 st translator has never been overlooked.

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In 1605, the British vessel 240 ton Tiger and the pinnace, Tiger's Whelp met Japanese swordsmen aboard a junk off the coast of Bintam Island in the Straits of Malacca. The British boats were commamded by Sir Edward Michelborne and the captain of the Tiger was John Davis. Sir Michelborne was determined to find a route to the Far East, including Japan.
The meeting of two groups remained peaceful for two days or so. But the Japanese, having lost their original vessel on the Borneo coast because of a storm, started planning to hijack the British vessel after their second boat, a Chinese junk sprang a leak. Fighting broke out when several British sailors boarded the junk and tried to inspect its cargo. Two groups of Japanese, one on the junk and the other on the Tiger, suddenly attaked the British with swords. Captain Davis was killed immediately after the fighting started. The British finally used demi-culverin guns to destroy all the Japanese as well as their own cabin.
The incident caused Sir Michelborne to give up the expedition and return to England via India and Africa. Captain Davis is famous for his discovery of the Falkland Islands, the scene of the Argentine-British War of 1982. An account of the incident, presumably written by Michaelborne's secretary, appears in “Hukluytus Postumes, or His Pilgrims”, but the story has been mistold in Japan. I have tried to describe the events as they actually took place.

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This paper is concerned with Saburo Shioda (1843-1889), an experienced diplomat died in Peking, where he served as a Japanese Minister to China, and his vast collection of foreign books, more than half of which are now possessed by National Diet Library, Tokyo, Japan.
The author happened to find a way to access to those books included in the Library : The books bearing a call number beginning with an alphabet from G to K, such as G-62, H-70, I-60, J-18, K-48, that are found in the Catalogue of the Imperial Library, 1898-1903, were identified as such. Those books, amounting to more than 700 in number, are of various fields; namely, philosophy, history, geography, social science, politics, law, education, art, language, literature, science, medicine, engineering, and others, published in 1716-1890. Among the collection there are three authored by Shioda himself. These three as well as the other large number of books in English tell us that the language which he first learned from a Japanese teacher, Gohachiro Namura, in Hakodate in 1856 when he was 13 years old, became a second language to him, helping towards enriching his knowledge on men and things and making him a person whose death was lamented by the people of both Japan and other countries.
The records now available indicate that Shioda had willed his private library for public use, that his 454 French books were donated to Futsugakukai, Socété de Langue francaise (the core of Hosei University), by his son in 1890, and that Mrs. Shioda donated the remaining 748 English books and 7 sheets (maps and documents) to Tokyo Library (present National Diet Library) in 1892. There is a possibility of finding the French books in Hosei University. In the history of French studies in Japan, Shioda is well-known as one of the first two Japanese that really acquired internationally recoginized skill in French.
Shioda was elected to membership in the Peking Oriental Society in 1886 and to be the president of it in 1888. Some information obtained on the Society and its journal is also given in this paper.

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The first Japanese translation of the whole work of Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations was done by two young Japanese editor-writers in 1888, twenty years after the Meiji Restoration. Since then five other complete translations have appeared in succession. My attempt is to show, by comparing the six translations with each other as to diction, clearness, conciseness and sentence structure, that the first one by Ishikawa and Saga is, though written about 100 years ago and generally considered an unsatisfactory one today, more readable than its successors.

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Dr. Joji Sakurai (18581939) is a pioneer of modern chemistry in Japan. He studied at University College, London from 1876 to 1881. He majored in chemistry and graduated with honors.
After coming back from London he contributed to the development and modernization of chemistry in Japan and also worked internationally for mutual understanding.
we should also forget his devotion to the teaching of English in Japan.

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Four years after the Satsuma Rebellion was brought to a tragic close, the Kagoshima-gakko was founded to give secondary education mainly through English studies to the local rising generation.
The educational system and organization, regulations and the courses of study of the school are not satisfactorily known. The writar, who came by the rare booklet Prospectus of the Kagoshima-Gakko published in July, the 14th year of Meiji, set himself to introduce some of the basic facts about the institution : the purpose of its foundation, regulations for admission, examinations and grades, sessions and vacations, and the schedules of studies, etc.
Especially, the syllabuses of the courses are dealt with in some detail, together with the writer's exploration to identify the English textbooks used in the Kagoshima-gakko.

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The history of Japanese-languge magazines deliberately edited with an eye to the interests of a predominantly feminine readers is generally held to have begun in June of 1884, for that was the date of the initial number of a periodical known as Jogaku shinshi, which is regarded as the earliest women's magazine to have been published in modern Japan. This pioneer effort was soon followed by a steadily increasing stream of other journals and periodicals designed to be read more or less exclusively by women. After the enactment of a law providing for universal compulsory education at the elementary level, the female reading population futher increased; women became more aware of the possibilities for self-improvement, entertainment, and education made available by magazines and periodicals, By the last decades of the Meiji era, the stream of periodical publications aimed at women had swollen to a flood - a flood which continues unabated up to the present day.
The earlier years of periodical publication for women were characterised by strong overtones of didacticism. The ideal of education was paramount, and considerable emphasis was laid upon the English language, or, alternatively, upon translations and adaptations from the English, as a means of achieving progress on both the national and domestic levels.
Even a casual inspection of some women's magazines from Meiji Japan is sufficient to make clear their surprisingly high degree of interest in English studies. Certain of the Meiji periodicals also encouraged their readers to make positive efforts towards the learning of English, not only for themselves, but for their school-age daughters as well. Some of these even included special columns or sections devoted to the practical study of English. A remarkable case in point is provided by the ninth issue of Jogahu soshi (February 1886), in a leading article which describes the difficulties facing prospective adult female students of English, discusses means of overcoming these obstacles, and encourages readers to persevere in their efforts. A propriately enough, in addition to its Japanese title, Jogahu seishi also gives its title in English as “The Ladies' Journal of Education”.

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