INTRODUCTION

THIS PAPER EXAMINES the major characteristics of technology formation in the Japanese railways through an analysis of the railway engineers’ groups at the Imperial Government Railway (IGR) during the first half of the Meiji period. In particular, it focuses on the role of an intra-firm vocational school, the Training School for Railway Engineers (TSRE, Kōgisei Yōsei-jo) as a way to examine the relationship between training institutions and the transfer of technology.

Of particular interest is the question of why the TSRE could play an important role for the independence of railway technology in Meiji Japan, compared with the other training institutions such as the Imperial College of Engineering (ICE, Kōbu-dai-gakkō).

TSRE was a retraining institution for young engineers. Its course of study was relatively short at one to two years. It was established in May 1877 within the Railway Bureau in Ōsaka as an educational institution for the fast-track education of civil engineers for railway construction, and provided short-term, intensive training in basic science as well as specialized disciplines such as civil engineering. Instructors at TSRE includedboth top-level hired foreign engineers (o-yatoi gaikokujin) and Japanese engineers who had studied abroad. TSRE's curriculum emphasized both basic and practical subjects. The students were divided into three classes, and the students in the first class completed their course of studies concurrently with a work assignment in a construction zone and received on-the-job training (see Appendix 1). Such emphasis on readiness to take up work assignments can also be seen in the type of students who were admitted to TSRE.

There are several groups of source materials related with TSRE. The first group deals with educational history. Amano Ikuo, a specialist in educational history, is an example. He was the first to focus on the significant role of TSRE and its graduates in 1965. He investigated the formation and distribution of engineering manpower in the early Meiji period, and described the following difference. In the Civil Engineering Bureau, the mainstream engineers were trained by the ‘formal type’ education at ICE from the late 1870s. In contrast, mainstream engineers in the Railway Bureau were trained by ‘external-type’ elements like study abroad, and ‘informal-type’ education such as the TSRE, from 1870 to 1894. This is a significant point, but Amano does not explain why such differences in the recruitment systems of these two sections occurred.