Accessing Technical Education in Modern Japan

Erich Pauer, born in Vienna in 1943, specializes in Japanese economic history and the history of technology. He has taught at the Universities of Bonn and Marburg (Germany) and has published widely on these subjects. He is currently affiliated with the CEEJA (Centre Européen d’Études Japonaises d’Alsace) in Colmar, France. Regine MATHIAS is Professor Emerita of Japanese History, at the Ruhr-University Bochum, Germany. She has studied Japanese History and History at the Ruhr-University Bochum and Kyu- shuUniversity and obtained her PhD from the University of Vienna with a thesis on the development of wage labor in Japanese coal mines. After her retirement from the Ruhr-University, she is currently working at the Centre Européen d’Études Japonaises d’Alsace (CEEJA). Her main field of research is Japanese social and economic history, with a focus on Japanese mining and labor history. She has published on labor in Japanese coal-mines, Japanese mining scrolls and their value as historical sources as well as on German-Japanese relations and gendered working patterns in prewar Japan.

• Acknowledgements Editors’ Notes on Translation Introduction: Books, Craftsmen, and Engineers: The Emergence of a Formalized Technical Education in a Modern Science-based Education System, by Erich Pauer 1. The Translation of Technical Manuals from Western Languages in Nineteenth-century Japan: A Visual Tour, by Ruselle Meade 2. The Translation of Western Books on Natural Science and Technology in China and Japan: Early Conceptions of Electricity, by Christine Moll-Murata 3. Creating Intellectual Space for West-East and East-East Knowledge Transfer: Global Mining Literacy and the Evolution of Textbooks on Mining in Late Qing China, 1860-1911, by Chen Hailian 4. François Léonce Verny and the Beginning of the ‘Modern’ Technical Education in Japan, by Nishiyama Takahiro 5. The Role of the Ministry of Public Works in Designing Engineering Education in Meiji Japan: Reconsidering the Foundation of the Imperial College of Engineering (Kobu-dai-gakko), by Wada Masanori 6. From Student of Confucianism to Hands-on Engineer: The Case of Ohara Junnosuke, Mining Engineer, by Erich Pauer 7. The Fall of the Imperial College of Engineering: From the Imperial College of Engineering (Kobu-dai-gakko) to the Faculty of Engineering at Imperial University, 1886, by Wada Masanori