A Community of Samurai Students in Massachusetts
Honma arrives in Boston
Honma was one of five young samurai from Fukuoka who arrived in Boston in October 1867. Led by Hiraga Yoshinari (1826-1882), their teacher and himself a Fukuoka samurai, the five students came to the United States by the order of their daimyo overlord, Kuroda Nagahiro (r. 1834-1869). They were part of the first wave of Japanese students who were authorized to study abroad by the Tokugawa shogunate, as it aimed to reform and strengthen Japan by learning from Western powers. Just thirteen years old at the time of his arrival in America, Honma was the youngest among this group of Fukuoka students and had been studying English under Hiraga in the treaty port of Nagasaki, near Fukuoka.
The Eiichiro Honma papers in MIT Libraries Distinctive Collections reveal how Honma settled into his life in Massachusetts and how, in that process, he became part of a small but ambitious community of young Japanese students there. All of these students belonged to the samurai class, which had functioned as Japan’s ruling elite since the early seventeenth century. It was while they were in America, however, that the Tokugawa shogunate (Japan’s last government run by the warrior class) fell in 1868, ushering in revolutionary political, social, and cultural change in Japan. The documents within the Eiichiro Honma papers give us uniquely intimate insights into how such dramatic historical events resonated in the lives of Honma and other Japanese students in Boston.
Letter from Honma to Hiraga, 1869
One of the oldest documents in the Honma papers dates from November, 1869, when Honma was enrolled at the Highland Military Academy, a private military school in Worcester, MA. Initially, at least, Honma and many other samurai students sought to receive military training as part of their education in America. As Dan Takuma (who graduated from MIT four years after Honma) recalled, the samurai upbringing of Dan, Honma, and other Japanese students led to the belief that “humans were meant to make war and that it was honorable to do so” (Dan, 1928). However, Honma’s 1868 letter (addressed to his “sensei,” Hiraga), suggests that his education in Worcester had a broader function of improving his English and preparing him for his studies at MIT.
Honma writes to Hiraga: “I hope, by this time, you have my letter at your hand, as it is some time ago, that I mailed it here. It would have been better for me to write you, after receiving an answer from you, but as it is the order of the school that we should write today, and not on any other day, and that we should write to our parents, if we have any, I proceed to fulfil the order of the school [underline added by Honma for emphasis]. You know that we cannot write to our parents at home for many reasons…So we must surely write to you as our father, at present, which you are in[sic] deed, though not by blood.”