Academic Freedom and the Japanese Imperial University, 1868-1939

Byron K. Marshall offers here a dramatic study of the changing nature and limits of academic freedom in prewar Japan, from the Meiji Restoration to the eve of World War II.

Meiji leaders founded Tokyo Imperial University in the late nineteenth century to provide their new government with necessary technical and theoretical knowledge. An academic elite, armed with Western learning, gradually emerged and wielded significant influence throughout the state. When some faculty members criticized t...