THE LONDON SCHOOL of Economics and Political Science was founded in 1894. By the time of the First World War it had an established reputation as an international centre for research and teaching in the social sciences with special emphasis on the contemporary world. Japan had come onto the international scene during these two decades as a successful economic and political power. Economically it had completed a programme of modernization and established itself as a major industrialized and trading power; politically it had set up a quasi-democracy with political parties and parliamentary institutions.

It was not surprising that Japan should attract interest overseas. The Japanese government was anxious to project the country's image as a modernized progressive country and it encouraged Japanese scholars to travel around the globe in order to project a favourable image of their country. LSE had the funds from the Martin White Foundation Lectureship which enabled them to invite prominent academics from abroad in the field of Sociology. Thus it invited Lafcadio Hearn, an Irishman educated partly in Britain and a long-term teacher in Japan, to deliver a course of 8 public lectures on Japanese civilization in 1904 just before the outbreak of the Russo-Japanese War. Hearn, a prolific publicist, was gratified by the invitation but confessed that he did not fancy writing ‘a serious thesis on the Sociology’ of Japan. He declined the invitation and died in September 1904.

Okakura Yoshisaburō, younger brother of the famous publicist, Okakura Kakuzō, himself no stranger to international lecturing circles, took his place. His three lectures on the ‘Spirit of Japanese Civilization’ were delivered to a large audience the following year. Two years later one of the most eminent Japanese academics of the day, Baron Dr Kikuchi Dairoku, president of the Imperial University of Tokyo, gave a course of 15 lectures on ‘Education in Japan’ in which he drew the attention of a surprised world to the high educational standards of the Japanese people and to how their system balanced and combined the modern with the traditional. In these two instances LSE introduced Japan to a wider world. It showed itself to be an institution not limited to parochial subjects.