Professor or Civil Servant? University Autonomy, Scholarly Freedom in Meiji Japan

Abstract

The budding Meiji state, in its pursuit of Western technology, recognised that in order to understand it fully the introduction of basic sciences and scientific methods was also necessary – this led to the establishment of modern Japanese higher education, with the Tokyo Imperial University as its first result. Although in accordance with the development of scientific and academic spheres corresponding ideas of university autonomy and freedom of research were introduced, it was not long before conflict broke out between the government, which was in the very process of creating the ideological foundations of the nation, and academics publishing their results. In this article I aim to examine two of these cases: the Kume incident of 1893 and the Tomizu affair of 1905. Both cases ended with the suspension, and then the dismissal of the professors, but there were significant differences: while in the case of the historian Kume Kunitake the government pushed its decision through without any opposition from the university, the Tomizu affair ended in a scandal which rocked the whole Japanese academic world, forcing the government to retreat.