Samurai in Japan, then engineers at MIT
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In 1867, five Japanese students took a long sea voyage to Massachusetts for some advanced schooling. The group included a 13-year-old named Eiichirō Honma, who was from one of the samurai families that ruled Japan. Honma expected to become a samurai warrior himself, and enrolled in a military academy in Worcester.
Japan’s ruling dynasty, the shogunate that had run the country since the 17th century, lost power. No longer obligated to become a warrior, Honma found himself free to try other things in life. In 1870, he enrolled in the recently opened Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he studied civil engineering. By 1874, Honma had become MIT’s first graduate from Japan.
“Honma may have thought he was going to be a military officer, but by the time he got to MIT he wanted to do something else,” says Hiromu Nagahara, an associate professor of history at MIT. “And that something else was the hottest technology of its time: railroads.” Indeed, Honma returned to Japan and became a celebrated engineer of rail lines, including one through the mountainous Usai Pass in central Japan.
