150th Anniversary Symposium: Rutgers Meets Japan

In 1867 Taro Kusakabe (1845-70), a young samurai from Fukui, Japan, began studying at Rutgers College. Several years later, his former tutor and Rutgers alumnus William Elliot Griffis (1843-1928) left for Japan to teach, first in Fukui and later in Tokyo. The year 2020 marked the 150^th anniversary of two landmark events in the history of the Rutgers-Japan relationship: the untimely death of Kusakabe only months before his graduation and his friend Griffis’s departure to Japan. This conference is held to commemorate and celebrate the special friendship between Rutgers and Japan. It will illuminate the roles of students, teachers, and missionaries, particularly those from Rutgers and the Dutch Reformed Church, in the modernization of Japan in the late nineteenth century. It also aims to shed new light to the nature of early cultural contacts between the United States and Japan and the diverse perspectives through which the encounter was remembered and told.

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