INTRODUCTION

JAPAN'S INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION began around 1886, but its universities had in fact been turning out graduates in mechanical engineering since 1879. A first intermediate-level engineering school, set up in 1881 under the name of Tōkyō Shokkō-gakkō (Tōkyō Vocational School), produced graduates from 1886 on. By 1920 more than 14,000 engineers and technicians had passed through colleges of this type and through Japan's universities. This figure equates broadly to that of America of 30 years before, of United Kingdom of 40 years earlier, and Germany ten years prior to that, though the rate of increase was somewhat higher than America's and had exceeded that of the other two countries. A particular feature was the advance of Japan's industrial revolution in parallel with the rapid training of engineers and technicians at its higher industrial education institutions. This study looks at the mechanical engineers who played a pivotal role as the industrial revolution unfolded, and examines the features of education in the early universities and the activities of their graduates before the First World War. The aim is to clarify the part played by engineers who graduated from universities during Japan's industrial revolution.

During the period of Japan's rapid economic growth after the Second World War much research was done on the technical education in the late 19th and early 20th centuries by Miyoshi Nobuhiro and colleagues. More recently, Toda Kiyoko has produced detailed work which takes a new look at this subject, and Wada Masanori cites evidence to criticized previous research that focused on the success element of the Imperial College of Engineering, the first institution to produce graduates in mechanical engineering.

In relation to the careers of engineers who enjoyed an advanced industrial education, Morikawa Hidemasa has analysed 170 specialist managers in large enterprises of the Meiji period and shown that 36 of them came from science-based higher educational institutions. He then pointed out that among graduates of the Imperial University and its forerunners, those who had been in the engineering stream became specialist managers more quickly than those who had studied the humanities. In addition, he maintained that as seven of the specialist managers from the engineering side had been university lecturers before turning to the private sector, universities of the Meiji period were ‘open-minded’ and their research-based education ‘practical’.