Introduction

The chapters in this volume were first presented at a joint IIAS-ISEAS international conference entitled Asia-Europe Encounters: Intellectual and cultural exchanges 1900-1950, which was held at the Museum of Asian Civilizations in Singapore. The conference attracted a particularly interesting mix of scholars – junior and senior academics, from universities across the globe, whose research covered the length and breadth of Europe and Asia. The present collection of essays builds on the results of this conference. The editors hope to have succeeded in maintaining the diversity that made the conference so dynamic. This volume therefore contains chapters by leading researchers in the field as well as early-career scholars, and covers a range of countries from India and Sri Lanka to China, Japan, Russia, Uzbekistan, Germany, and France.

The conference had been convened to explore the intellectual and cultural flows between Asia and Europe that occurred during, and were formative of, the political and social changes over the first half of the twentieth century. As the original call for papers stated, the first half of the twentieth century saw some of the most intense political and social changes experienced thus far in world history. Shiraishi Takashi's coinage of the 1910s and 1920s as an ‘age in motion’ in Southeast Asia might be extended as a reference to Asia-Europe relations during the half-century more generally. It was an age in which high imperialism began to unravel and global power shifted. The period around 1950 marked the ending of one age of Asia-Europe interactions and the beginning of another.

This volume explores the intellectual and cultural flows between Asia and Europe during the momentous political and social changes of the first half of the twentieth century. More specifically, it situates those flows in a context of an increased mobility of artists, writers, educators, and missionaries, as well as an increasingly global consciousness among those who worked or wrote from home. While cultural and intellectual exchange in the larger area of Eurasia was by no means a new phenomenon, it was in the first half of the twentieth century that these interactions were marked by an unprecedented increase in transnational traffic and in the development of cosmopolitan subjects, resulting in new collocations of ideas and cross-cultural influences.

INTRODUCTION: BRITISH CHEMISTS IN JAPAN

EDUCATION IN WESTERN science at the tertiary level was an integral part of the industrialization policy of the Meiji government. Chemistry was widely regarded by Europeans and Japanese in the nineteenth century as the most practical and utilitarian of all scientific disciplines. This subject was therefore well represented in the teaching at both the Imperial College of Engineering, Tokyo (Kōgakuryō. or Kōbu Daigakkō.), and Tokyo Kaisei Gakkō (one of the antecedent schools of Tokyo University). They were both established in 1873 and were the two flagship institutions of early Meiji higher education. The National (Komaba) College of Agriculture, which opened in Naitō Shinjuku in 1877 and moved to Komaba in 1878, also attached importance to the study of chemistry. Despite the long-lasting image of German science as being the model for Japanese science from the Meiji period onwards, British and American teachers were dominant in Japanese higher education between the 1860s and 1880s, and many Japanese overseas students went to British and American universities and colleges to finish their training during this period. German presence in Japanese higher education (and in politics and administration) increased from the 1880s onward. In early Meiji, German influence had been largely confined to medical sciences as Dutch-style medical education, the strongest speciality of Dutch learning in Japan in the Tokugawa period, had been germanized in the early 1870s.

Edward Divers and Robert William Atkinson were two of the most influential teachers of pure and applied chemistry in Meiji Japan. Divers, one of the major advocates of pure chemistry, taught at the Imperial College of Engineering, while Atkinson, who trained a sizeable number of Japanese industrial chemists, taught at the Tokyo Kaisei Gakkō and Tokyo University. Divers and Atkinson belonged to different generations of British chemists.

DIVERS AND ATKINSON's BACKGROUNDS

Edward Divers was born in Newington, Surrey on 27 November 1837. His parents were Frederick Divers and Lucy Divers, née Chambers. Frederick's occupation was recorded as ‘mariner’ on Edward's birth certificate and ‘spirit merchant’ in his marriage certificate. It is unlikely that Divers could expect financial help from his family towards his academic education and he would have to earn his living.

INTRODUCTION

TRAINED IN Tokyo and London with two British chemists, Sakurai started his career as one of the first Japanese chemistry professors at Tokyo University in 1882. He then came to play a pivotal role in the promotion of scientific research in Japan in the twentieth century as a founder of: the Institute of Physical and Chemical Research (Rikagaku Kenkyūjo, or Riken, in 1917), the National Research Council of Japan (Gakujutsu KenkyūKaigi, or Gakken, in 1921) and the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (Nihon Gakujutsu Shinkōkai or Gakushin, 1931). He was also one of the authors of a pioneering study in English published in 1913 of the Japanese classical drama, Nō. Sakurai was a loyal friend of his co-author, paleobotanist turned birth control advocate, Marie C. Stopes (1880–1958).

CHILDHOOD IN KANAZAWA

Sakurai Jōji, or Jōgorō as he was called in his childhood, was born in 1858 as the sixth son of a samurai family of the Kaga domain in Kanazawa, the domain capital. Sakurai lost his father, Jintarō, in 1863 at age four, so he was raised by his mother, Yao, who played a role in determining his academic path. To put Sakurai's early education into context, it is useful to compare it with the parallel case of the ‘first generation’ of Japanese physicists in the early Meiji period. It is characterized as a group of boys born in the 1850s, all from samurai families, who were trained in the Chinese classics up to age fifteen at a domain school. They were then chosen by their domains to pursue Western learning either in Japan or abroad according to the kōshinsei system of the Nankō (the antecedent school of the Tokyo Kaisei Gakkō). The kōshinsei literally meant the students offered to Emperor Meiji (1852–1912, r. 1867–1912) by domain lords.

Though a son of samurai, Sakurai's early educational background deviated from this pattern in several important ways. First of all, he entered the Nankō in 1871 not as a kōshinsei, for which he was too young (the age range being sixteen to twenty), but under the new selection system by means of written and oral examinations in a Western language.