ABSTRACT

The establishment of departments of geography in Japanese universities took place only at the beginning of this century. The geography departments of the Faculty of Literature, Kyoto Imperial University, and of the Faculty of Science, Tokyo Imperial University, were established in 1907 and 1918 respectively. The geography department of the Tokyo University of Science and Literature (Tokyo Bunrika University, which changed its name to Tokyo Kyoiku University after the Second World War and which , still later, transferred to Tsukuba to become the present University of Tsukuba) was founded in 1926 . Western geography per se, however , had already been introduced into Japan at the beginning of the nineteenth century and, after the establishment of the Meiji government system of education in 1872, geography came to be considered an important course in school curricula. Previous to its institutionalisation at the university level, geography was taught in higher educational institutions such as teachers' training colleges and commercial colleges. Considerable numbers of geographical books were written by professors at these establishments, as well as by certain intellectuals who were interested in geography; many of these works, however , were translations or adaptations of foreign geography textbooks. It should be noted that the above authors wrote these books in the second half of the nineteenth century, naturally for use as texts and reference works, but also as literature aimed at the enlightenment of the Japanese people . Geographical knowledge of industrialised and colonised countries served the mass educational drive towards Westernisation and modernisation, which were almost synonymous in the Japan of that period .