INTRODUCTION

MINING WAS A particularly important industry for the Meiji government that urgently needed to be promoted. This is demonstrated by the efforts of Japanese politicians to advance this field, and the relatively large number of foreign mining engineers whowere invited to Japan after the 1860s to modernize the industry, transfer their scientific knowledge and train miners. Given its great importance, it is surprising how little attention has been paid to the establishment of a modern education system for mining engineers and miners in Japan, and its impact on the country's overall development. The topic of ‘mining schools’ (kōzan gakkō), meaning institutions whose curriculum was entirely or to a large part geared to the requirements of mining, is much less prominent in both Japanese and Western publications than other areas of technical education. Even in the book by Fathi Habashi, Schools of Mines, only 16 of the 588 pages deal with Asia. Ten of these pages cover Japan, and contain a few short paragraphs on some prominent foreign mining engineers who were called to the country. While various articles in Japanese deal with individual mines and individuals working in this field, there are as yet few overarching accounts of mining education in Japan. One exception is a relatively short chapter in the volume on mining and metallurgy in the series Nihon kagaku gijutsu-shi taikei, which will be discussed later.

In Europe the intensification of mining and metallurgy associated with the flourishing of the natural sciences in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries had spurred the foundation of mining schools and mining academies. These played an important role in the development of scientific and technical knowledge far beyond the field of mining.