Steaming from Beirut to Kyoto: Travels and Trials of an Educational Model

In the 19th century, the Ottoman and Japanese Empires gave high priority to education overhaul as part of reforms aimed at centralizing the state, developing the economy, and otherwise reinvent themselves as modern polities. In this climate, American Protestant missionaries ventured across different seas to places as distant and different as Beirut and Kyoto to preach. They found little audience for their message until they agreed to provide much demanded educational services.                                                                                                      
This paper examines how the oldest and largest missionary board in the United States – the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM) – came to play a role in establishing universities in Lebanon and Japan. How did a missionary group decide to invest into an institution with a secular curriculum? The model of a missionary college - institution with a secular curriculum and evangelizing spirit - germinated in Beirut with the opening of the Syrian Protestant College (today’s American University of Beirut) in 1866 and matured in Kyoto with the establishing of Dōshisha English School (today’s Dōshisha University) in 1875.                                               
How did the idea of religiously inspired institution of secular learning travel across both the Atlantic and the Pacific oceans in less than a decade? My research suggest that the role of the native migrants and returning students helped establishing both institutions. In Beirut, SPC did not come about by a farsighted benevolent act of the American missionaries but as a desperate attempt to catch up with emerging Arab educational initiatives. In Kyoto, Dōshisha was founded by a native Japanese who, besides being an ABCFM missionary, came back after a decade of living in Massachusetts to help build "a new Japan." Thus, both institutions emerged at the crossroads of needs and purposes; the line between foreign and indigenous was neither as clear not always relevant.