ABSTRACT
Although there were a variety of Western influences on the development of education in Japan after 1868, one of the most striking observations is about the institution of Japanese engineering education and is to be found in Henry Dyer’s reported quip that ‘Britain’s first modern engineering college has been created in Japan’.1 Dyer’s own position, as the founder of that college in 1877, owed much to the priority which the Meiji government put upon technology in its drive for modernisation and the technological means to avoid Western colonisation.2 Dyer has been pictured trying to reform Glasgow University along the lines of the Technische Hochschule in Zurich, but with little success. Aged just 25 and paid a salary 20 per cent higher than that of a contemporary Japanese Cabinet Minister, Dyer was apparently invited to do for Tokyo what he could not do for Glasgow.3 Despite meagre resources, the Meiji government spent almost 40 per cent of its total budget on salary payments to foreign experts in 1868-72, 2.4 per cent in 1873-7, and 1.2 per cent in 1878-82.4 Engineers formed the largest group of foreign experts, and among them British engineers were prominent.
