George Cyril Allen : Pioneer of International Exchange between Britain and Japan

Abstract

George Cyril Allen (1900-1982) contributed to promoting cultural exchange between Japan and Britain for sixty years since the Taisho Era, and received the Order of the Rising Sun Third Class in 1961, and the Japan Foundation Award in 1980.He graduated as a commerce major from the University of Birmingham, which was the first university to offer a degree in commerce in the British Isles, and was designed to produce promising businessmen, embodying a thought-out course of principles and practical knowledge.By the recommendation of his respected teacher (Professor W. J. Ashley), Allen took his new post as an English lecturer at the Commercial High School in Nagoya, Japan, at the age of twenty-two. From September 1922 to March 1925, he taught Commercial Science, History of Commerce, and English. Thus he began his continuous sixty-year study of Japanese economic affairs, and Japan as a nation.Upon his return, as well as throughout his life, he kept in close touch with his old Nagoya students and the alumni society, and visited Japan again in 1936, 1954, 1967, 1979 and 1980 for conducting research and enhancing friendship. Thanks to these exchanges, he actively wrote about the Japanese economy, including issues of price levels, international exchange, banking, and currency, as well as on the British economy.Later in life, he completed the book entitled Appointment in Japan : Memories of Sixty Years (1983) recording his observations of, and deep attachment to, Japan. This book is basically about his life and impressions of Japan, but a major theme is the dramatic changes of the Japanese scene, along with industrial and commercial fields. It includes a lot of comments on the rapid development in earlier decades, and remarkable success in the last two or three decades. He took on a comparative perspective between Japan and Britain.He has a strong interest in Japanese education. In this book he did not describe the educational process at the Nagoya Commercial High School and his role in it, but lively and concretely elaborated on a mode of life among students and teachers through the eyes of a foreign teacher.