Target and method

This article discusses the relationship between technical education and industrialisation by examining the employment-seeking process of engineering graduates of the Imperial College of Engineering (ICE) in Tokyo—one of Japan's earliest institutions of higher technical education.Footnote ⁵ To support and promote Japan's industrialisation, the Meiji government established the Ministry of Public Works in 1870. This was an essential institutional development. At that time, the Ministry of Public Works relied on hiring foreign engineers to whom it paid exorbitant salaries. Training Japanese engineers to replace foreign engineers became a solution to reduce costs. When the modern Western-style education system was introduced into Japan, some ministries began to develop rapid training programmes.

In 1871, the Ministry of Public Works established a systematic educational institution named Kōgaku-ryō (Engineering Board) for training engineers. The school opened in 1873 and was renamed Kōbu-dai-gakkō (the ICE) in 1877. The first 23 students majored in one of seven engineering courses and graduated in 1879 after completing a six-year programme.Footnote ⁶ When the Ministry of Public Works was abolished in 1885, the ICE was transferred to the Ministry of Education. One year later, the ICE was further transformed into the College of Engineering of the Imperial University.Footnote ⁷ By 1886, 493 students had been admitted to study at the ICE; among them, 211 graduated from the school and another 100 graduated from the Imperial University.Footnote ⁸ Engineers who entered the ICE and finished the programme there or at the Imperial University constitute the main subjects of this study.

Numerous previous studies have examined the relationship between technical education and industrial development in Meiji Japan. Educational sociologist Ikuo Amano, business historian Ryōichi Iwauchi, and historian of technology Hoshimi Uchida conducted statistical analyses on the employment structure of engineers.Footnote ⁹ The educational backgrounds and promotions of engineers were analysed by business historian Naofumi Nakamura for the railway industry and by historian Seiji Tsunekawa for electrical engineering and civil engineering.Footnote ¹⁰ My earlier study of the ICE also provides a critically renewed evaluation for operation systems.Footnote ¹¹

Based on this rich previous scholarship, this article examines the previously neglected job-seeking difficulties faced by ICE graduates. It analyses published memoirs by engineers to reveal their employment-seeking process, especially when they first entered the job market as fresh graduates. Since handicrafts and manufacturing occupations were held in low esteem in Japanese tradition and these early engineering graduates possibly faced similar prejudice. Their memoirs provide invaluable clues to trace their inner struggles to overcome social difficulties. For example, one of the major primary sources in this study is Kyū Kōbu-dai-gakkō shiryō, furoku (Historical Materials on the Former Imperial College of Engineering, Supplement)—a collection of memoirs by 17 graduates from the ICE that was published in 1931. As part of the compilation of the 50-year history of the University of Tokyo, ICE alumni who were alive at the time were asked to describe their experiences. I have verified its factual reliability.Footnote ¹²

In addition, by surveying the early university-educated engineers who entered the private sector, I collected an exhaustive list of books dealing with the employment situation up to 1900. I referred to a list of 684 engineers who had graduated from engineering schools and worked for companies by 1905, compiled by business historian Hidemasa Morikawa, and a catalogue of about 300 biographies or autobiographies of engineers who were associated with companies among graduates by the end of the 1920s, compiled by historian of technology Hoshimi Uchida.Footnote ¹³

Memoirs can, of course, contain errors and biased information; subjects may exaggerate their past unfavourable situations. To increase the credibility of testimonies, it is necessary to refer to multiple memoirs and collate them with other information. Many of the memoirs were written late in the lives of the engineers as autobiographies rather than contemporaneously or as biographies by other people involved in the field. It can be assumed that the people who publish autobiographies have attained a fairly successful position and are likely to have an optimistic view of their lives. It should be noted that successful people tend to overstate the difficulties that they have overcome in the past, as is often the case in popular autobiographies. On the other hand, many engineers would not have recorded cases in which they did not consider themselves successful, and it is possible that the experiences of such individuals were even worse than the stories presented here.

Economy and employment opportunities

When considering employment for graduates of educational institutions, we must look at their relationship with the economy, as these factors are generally correlated. After the long-term recession that began in 1880, the short period between 1886 and 1889 witnessed a sustained ‘boom of enterprise’. Capitalist companies were successively born in response to the government's financial policy. However, the reaction to the enterprise boom soon led to a depression lasting from 1890 to 1891.Footnote ¹⁴ Subsequently, the second and third enterprise booms, triggered by economic expansion, occurred during the Sino-Japanese War (1894–95) and Russo-Japanese War (1904–05).Footnote ¹⁵ Historians refer to this series of industrial expansions from 1886 to the early 1900s as Japan's ‘industrial revolution’.Footnote ¹⁶

Technological innovation also occurred during this period. In his examination of industrial modernisation between 1870 and 1900 with a focus on the spinning sector, Teijirō Muramatsu, a historian of technology, points out the shift from traditional tool-based production processes to mechanical production as an industrial revolution in the spinning industry. He analyses three factors contributing to raising the recognition of the spinning industry among historians of technology as a benchmark for the Japanese industrial revolution. These are as follows: (1) traditional skills were able to play an active role, albeit for a short period; (2) concurrently, the use of Western technology to import entire plants and establish factories failed miserably, contrary to expectations; and (3) finally, there was a collaboration between Japanese engineers (many of whom had studied in the West) and modern industrial capitalists.Footnote ¹⁷

Enterprise development and innovation are associated with the expansion of the technical workforce. Table 1 shows the number of engineers by sector in Japan from 1880 to 1920, as reported by the economic historian Hoshimi Uchida. It is important to note the chronological public–private relationship in this table. First, the total number of engineers was 86 in 1880. Initially, they all worked in the public sector. The only sector that responded to Westernised technology was that of government-run enterprises. Second, the number of engineers was limited, even as late as 1890, with fewer than 500 engineers. The proportion of engineers working in the private sector increased rapidly; 182 engineers worked in the private sector compared with 300 in government departments. Third, the proportion of engineers working in the public and private sectors reversed in 1900. The proportion of engineers in the private sector continued to increase until 1920. These statistics show that the number of engineering graduates steadily increased. However, during this period, there were major waves of boom and bust affecting employment opportunities. The difficulties and struggles of individual engineers in their employment-seeking process remain unclear—an issue on which this article attempts to shed new light.

Table 1. Total employment of engineers in Japan, 1880–1920

Note: Pioneers are those who became engineers before technical schools were established in Japan, including those who learned from foreigners hired to work in Japan or who studied abroad. University graduates include those graduating from the engineering departments of the Imperial University in Tokyo (est. 1886) and its predecessor schools, as well as the Imperial Universities in Kyoto (1897), Tohoku (1907), and Kyushu (1911). Technical colleges include higher technical colleges established after 1900, including Tokyo (originally est. 1881) and Osaka (1896). Source: H. Uchida, ‘Japanese technical manpower in industry, 1880–1930’, in Industrial Training and Technological Innovation, (ed.) H. F. Gosel (New York, 1991), pp. 112–35, at p. 117.

Educating engineers and the transition of educational policy

This section provides an overview of the changing policies implemented by the Ministry of Public Works to educate and employ engineering students, which explains why the graduates had to seek jobs instead of being hired by the governmental sectors. Since the ICE was established by the Meiji government with the aim of replacing costly foreign engineers, the Ministry of Public Works planned to employ ICE graduates. For example, the ‘Lessons and Rules of ICE’ (Kōgaku-ryō gakka narabi sho-kisoku), revised in February 1874, begins with Article 1: ‘Kōgaku-ryō is under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Public Works and is a school that educates industrial officers who serve in the Ministry.’Footnote ¹⁸ Article 9 stipulates that the students should ‘serve the Ministry after graduation’.Footnote ¹⁹ For graduates of the ICE to be hired by the private sector or other government departments, it was necessary to lift the restrictions on service.Footnote ²⁰

However, the ministry soon realised that this would lead to an excess of engineers being employed by the ministry. In anticipation of an increase in the number of graduates from the ICE, the ministry introduced an on-leave employment system as early as October 1875 as a countermeasure against oversupply. The Minister of Public Works Hirobumi Itō (1841–1909) reported to the Minister of Grand Council of State Sanetomi Sanjō (1837–91) on the ministry's policy as follows:

A business historian, Yō Nakanishi, interpreted the rule as a measure to prevent wastage and the loss of valuable technical personnel.Footnote ²² This rule might have been introduced on a temporary and supplementary basis, given that the private sector was not fully developed.

However, the Ministry of Public Works, which had jurisdiction over the ICE, suffered budget cuts before the first students graduated in 1879.Footnote ²³ From a financial perspective, the ministry changed its policy of educating ICE students at government expense as early as 1877. The first 13 students out of 46 were allowed to enter the school through private funding in April 1877, while about 50 students each year received government stipends.Footnote ²⁴ After 1878, the school allowed only privately funded students to enrol, except for a few excellent government-sponsored students each year.Footnote ²⁵

In May 1882, the Ministry of Public Works also exempted government-sponsored students at the ICE from service for seven years because it could no longer guarantee employment for students in the ministry. According to the official record, the reason for the change in this policy was the increasing yearly number of graduates.Footnote ²⁶

However, despite these revisions, there were no significant changes in the employment destinations of the new graduates from 1879 to 1885. To take graduates from the Course of Chemistry at the ICE as an example, as shown in Table 2, 25 graduates were employed in government departments and seven were employed by the Ministry of Public Works (including four by the ICE) as teachers. Other major employers included additional central government departments, such as the Ministry of Agriculture and Commerce and the Ministry of Finance, and local government departments. Only two graduates were employed in the private sector. In other words, 88 per cent of graduates became public officials, working in schools and local government departments.

Table 2. Job after graduation for chemistry students at the ICE

Note: ‘Schools’ here refers to schools other than colleges and universities. Source: M. Wada, ‘Kō bu-dai-gakkō ni okeru kagaku-ka no ichizuke’, Kagakushi kenkyū 39.2 (2012), pp. 55–78, at p. 60.

It is worth asking whether privately funded students were employed in the private sector; unlike government-sponsored students, they were not obliged to serve in the Ministry of Public Works. In the ICE Course of Chemistry, all 19 students in the first five graduating classes were studying at the government's expense, while the six students who graduated in the sixth and seventh years were all privately funded. The seven-year service rule did not apply to these six students. Nevertheless, privately funded students also found work with the government. Masachika Shimose worked at the Bureau of Printing in the Ministry of Finance, Toratarō Kawanami at the Mint, Toshishige Hosokawa at the Bureau of Railway Work in the Ministry of Communications, Kichijirō Ishikawa at the Navy School, and Saburō Ogata at the Mint.Footnote ²⁷ The results indicate that public departments were still the leading employment destinations for ICE students, at least in chemistry.Footnote ²⁸

The Ministry of Public Works frequently took measures to address the oversupply of engineers, but the difficulties faced by these graduates were foreseen even before the establishment of the ICE. Yoshiaki Yasunaga (1855–1918), secretary of the Society of Engineering and a graduate of the second cohort of the Course of Mechanical Engineering, presented an anecdote on Yōzō Yamao (1837–1917) and the founding of the school at a meeting held in 1891:

In his address, Yasunaga further states: ‘It is regrettable that our country's industry has not developed in line with the rate of increase in the number of members (of the society).’Footnote ²⁹ He notes that, as of January 1891, when this meeting was held, the number of engineers had increased but had not yet met the expectations of the developing industry. He concluded his address by stating that the growing membership of the society was a sign that industry would flourish. The trend towards a booming economy had begun a few years before this statement was made in 1891, but there was still a sense of stagnation among engineers, and demand for engineers in industry was still low.

Difficulties of graduates

There is testimony suggesting that, before the industrial revolution in Japan, a company could not prepare a job worth paying the higher salary of an engineer. A chemical engineer called Santei Utsumi (1868–1919) tells an anecdote regarding early manufacturing:

Salaries for engineers recruited into the private sector would have been based on the salaries of the government offices where they worked, indicating that the private sector, at least in the chemical industry, could not afford the labour costs for engineers at that time.

Beginning in 1883, ICE students could not find work in industry immediately following graduation. Hikomatsu Iwasaki (1859–1911), who was educated at the government's expense and who graduated from the Course of Mechanical Engineering, finished school in May 1883. He was suddenly exempted from the obligation to serve and left free to pursue any employment. However, the demand for mechanical engineers was very low at the time and he suffered greatly when he could not find a job after graduation. He was eventually recruited by the Ships Bureau of the Navy through a personal contact. In 1884, he was called to work on a Hokkaido project in the Ministry of Agriculture and Commerce and henceforth worked in the railway sector.Footnote ³¹

University graduates’ difficulties in finding work due to the underdevelopment of industry continued until 1895. Chōkurō Kadono (1867–1958) enrolled in the ICE in 1885, the year before the closure of the school; he was part of the 13th cohort and graduated from the Course of Civil Engineering of the Imperial University in 1891. He reflects on seeking work in his memoirs:

There are some testimonies about graduates’ starting salaries in the memoir collections. While graduates of the contemporary University of Tokyo concurrently earned a degree regardless of their grades and were given a starting salary of 50 yen by the government, graduates of the ICE were placed in a lower position. In the public sector, ICE graduates first earned a maximum of 30 yen.Footnote ³³ According to the testimony of Takeo Iwata (years of birth and death unknown), who graduated from the Course of Telegraphy at the ICE in 1880, this was because the Minister of Public Works, Yōzō Yamao, believed that it would be harmful and useless to give large sums of money to young graduates.Footnote ³⁴ As a result, the salaries of the graduates from the ICE, which was under Yamao's jurisdiction, were cut. However, it may be that Yamao's policy aimed to encourage graduates of the ICE to work in the private sector by keeping salaries low while they were in government in order to foster private-sector industry.Footnote ³⁵

The period from 1886 to 1889 was known as the ‘private enterprise boom’ and the number of engineers employed in the private sector increased as the economy improved. For example, Kōran Sugahara (1859–1940) graduated from the Imperial University in 1886 and began to receive 120 yen a month when he moved to the private sector in 1888, having previously received 35 yen a month at the government's Railway Bureau. Engineers in the railway sector generally received a salary increase of more than 20 per cent when they moved to the private sector.Footnote ³⁶ Kyōzō Kikuchi (1859–1942), who graduated from the Course of Mechanical Engineering at the ICE in 1885, worked in the public sector; however, in 1887, he was invited to work in the spinning industry and moved to the private sector on the condition that he be allowed to study abroad at the expense of the company.Footnote ³⁷

Conflicts with traditional workers

When graduates from the ICE found employment in the public sector, they did not have immediate opportunities to take a leading role in their workplaces. Conflicts arose with the traditional foremen. Kamesaburō Yoshimoto (1861–?), who graduated from the Course of Civil Engineering at the ICE in 1884, reported his experience:

Let us consider the factors that prevented engineers from easily finding jobs. First, there was the issue of the labour system in enterprises. Factories were forced to control the production process indirectly through their oyakata (foremen). As labour historian Kiyoshi Yamamoto pointed out, the foreman contractor system was a common practice in the iron industry in the 1890s. It was the foreman who made decisions and had the following rights: (1) to hire and fire workers under his command so as to organise his own kumi (team); (2) to add apprentices; (3) to train the workers within the kumi; (4) to undertake the work and control the process and schedule; (5) to pay the workers; and (6) to make a profit.Footnote ³⁹ Under the foreman contractor system, craftsmen entered into an official employment contract with the company, but the foreman had the right to appoint and dismiss all craftsmen in the factory. Thus, there was no room for professionally trained modern engineers in the manufacturing industry where traditional production processes persisted.Footnote ⁴⁰

This foreman-dominated atmosphere remained in factories after 1900 and company management would not have been able to hire many young engineers who had just completed school. Engineer Gonpei Kuwada (1870–1949) recalls his difficulties while he was at the private Kawasaki Shipyard from 1903 to 1910:

In addition, senior craftsmen tended to be extremely secretive about the skills they had acquired to protect their profession. In contrast, because school-educated engineers had learned to look at things rationally and scientifically, they saw that it would be necessary to thoroughly improve equipment first to increase production. In the case of Tōyō Bōseki, which led the spinning industry in Japan, its official history states that ‘before and during the First World War, there was a juxtaposition between senior craftsmen who worked in the field and younger mechanical engineers from schools. They often competed with each other for superiority and were unable to work together in alignment’.Footnote ⁴² The change from the traditional method of working craftsmen to a rational factory management system was completed after World War I. In addition to a series of improvements to the equipment, the previously secretive skills of craftsmen were gradually disclosed, allowing them to cooperate.

Those with higher education levels tended to be less willing to work in the private sector. Eiichi Shibusawa (1840–1931), widely known as the ‘father of capitalism in Japan’, laments the low status of the private sector at the time in his memoirs: ‘the general atmosphere was still the same as in feudal times. All who studied aspired to be officials, and the highest honour was to become an official.’Footnote ⁴³ On this topic, he presented an episode that occurred in 1884. In a gas company that Shibusawa helped to manage, he received an informal agreement to employ an engineer from the Imperial University. However, when the engineer discovered that the gas company owned by Tokyo Prefecture was intended to be operated as a private business, he turned down the job:

Mining Engineer Tomoaki Kuwada (1848–?) recalls an atmosphere in which engineers avoided employment in the private sector in around 1889:

A man such as Kuwada, who was held back by other engineers around him but who ambitiously embarked on a private business, was exceptional at the time.

Moreover, a group of engineers shunned employment in industry. Makoto Sengoku (1854–1941), a mining engineer who graduated from the ICE in 1880, lamented that industry was sluggish. One of the reasons he gives in an article published in 1882 is the old practices towards industry:

There are also many anecdotal accounts of young men who studied at higher-education institutions of the time who disliked engineering.Footnote ⁴⁷ A physicist, Aikitsu Tanakadate (1856–1952), had intended to enter the ICE at the end of 1873. However, he was disappointed in the courses offered at the college, such as constructing a lighthouse and bridge and laying electrical wires. Instead, he was interested in courses related to national politics.Footnote ⁴⁸ A prominent political scholar, Sakuzō Yoshino (1878–1933), who had been a lecturer of the Faculty of Engineering at Tokyo Imperial University and later became a professor of the Faculty of Law at the same university, recalled that engineering students wished to find honour through politics rather than through science and engineering.Footnote ⁴⁹ Dairoku Kikuchi (1855–1917), president of Tokyo Imperial University in 1898 and Minister of Education in 1901, stated that many boys wished to be officers and avoided practical occupations.Footnote ⁵⁰ Henry Dyer (1848–1918), the first principal of the ICE, also observed samurai tendencies among the students at the school. He insisted that ‘[t]he engineer is the real revolutionist’, but felt that ‘every Japanese student seems a born politician’.Footnote ⁵¹ Dore suggests that warriors and rulers—the two main roles of samurai in the Tokugawa period (before 1867)—were still regarded as the most honourable occupations in the Meiji era.Footnote ⁵²

Early engineers shunned the private sector and engineering because of the class from which they came. Some students were torn between their identities as engineers in modern society and as samurai in the society in which they had grown up. A majority of early university students were from shizoku (former warriors) families, which constituted one-fifteenth of the population. When the ICE chose 11 out of 23 first-year students in 1879 and sent them to Britain the following year, 10 belonged to the shizoku and only Rinzaburō Shida (1856–92) was from the heimin (commoners) class.Footnote ⁵³ Other institutions showed a similar trend. More than 80 per cent of the students in the science and engineering fields at the Imperial University were from the shizoku class in 1890.Footnote ⁵⁴ According to a survey conducted by Dainihon hakushiroku (Who's Who in ‘Hakushi’ [Doctoral Degrees] in Great Japan) and published in 1930, 74 per cent of 100 doctors in engineering were from the shizoku class, 7 per cent from the heimin class, and 19 per cent were unknown.Footnote ⁵⁵

In around 1887, in the middle of the Meiji era (1868–1912), university graduates all sought jobs in the government. However, after the Meiji era ended, a tendency emerged among graduates of both government and private schools to avoid government careers and seek employment in companies and banks. Tomitarō Karasawa, a historian of education, explains this tendency as a response to a change in the hierarchy of students’ origins. The majority of university graduates in the Meiji era were children of former samurai and the younger sons of wealthy farmers. In particular, education in Japan in the early years of the Meiji era developed primarily between samurai teachers and students. However, in the late Meiji era, the socio-economic situation changed. The proportion of the warrior class decreased while the proportion of urban merchants and intellectuals increased.Footnote ⁵⁶

In Daigaku to jinbutsu (Universities and Figures), published in 1914, Shūdō Nishikiya tells the stories of university graduates and analyses the businessmen among the graduates of the Imperial University. He notes that 1893 or 1894 was when the atmosphere among graduates seeking employment in the private sector changed. Then he continues: ‘However, many were those who had once risen to high positions in government and then resigned at the invitation of the private sector. In the last four or five years, there has been a phenomenon of students going straight into the private sector after graduation.’Footnote ⁵⁷

In other words, according to Nishikiya, in around 1909 or 1910, students of the Imperial University reversed their evaluation of private companies and government departments in terms of place of employment. He states: ‘Even so, looking at the situation as it is, the managers of each factory must be engineers from a university by all means!’Footnote ⁵⁸ He ironically points out here that plant managers and other people in representative positions were required to be Imperial University graduates, although the number of graduates from other technical colleges, such as higher technical schools in Tokyo and Osaka, had increased. Here, we can see that the educational background of engineers was important in Japanese society. Nevertheless, the story also suggests that industry had grown to a point at which it could pay engineers well enough.

The content of the subjects taught at the university differed from the state of the developing industry and it was not possible to respond immediately to demand from the field. The private sector also failed to understand how to use engineers effectively. Masatoshi Ōkōchi (1878–1952), a lecturer and professor at Tokyo Imperial University from 1903 to 1925, pointed out the problems with industrial education at universities in around 1910. In his view, the educational content of engineering was too biased towards design. He suggested adding various academic courses necessary for the administrative and managerial affairs of a factory. He also urged a shift in the company's understanding of engineering education and noted: ‘In principle, the higher the degree, the less immediately useful they are, especially for university graduates.’Footnote ⁵⁹ He further argued that university graduates were, however, meaningful for long-term company development. From the above claim, it can be inferred that many troubles existed among companies, capitalists, and engineers, with complaints and requests for consultation coming to Ōkōchi. His claim further indicates that it was not until the end of the Meiji era that private companies began to realise that highly educated engineers were not always ready to work in factories upon graduation. In other words, in the early stage of industrialisation, university-educated engineers were treated in the same way in the manufacturing process as traditional workers who were immediately incorporated into practical work in the factories.