ABSTRACT
E. W. Clark is recognized as an important interpreter of Japan to the West, and is also known for having been a close friend of W. E. Griffis both at Rutgers and in Japan. Davidson McDonald was different in personality from Clark. He was a mature man in his late thirties, and he was a medical doctor as well as an ordained minister with considerable pastoral experience. McDonald would need all his strength of personality. For the circumstances in Shizuoka were very different in the spring of 1874 from what they had been less than three years before when Clark had first come there. George Cochran meeting with E. W. Clark in Shizuoka in October 1873 had led to McDonald going to Shizuoka, it was equally responsible for Cochran becoming a contract teacher at Nakamura Masanao's Dojinsha school in the Koishikawa district of Tokyo.
