Philosophy and Inflation. Miki Kiyoshi in Weimar Germany, 1922-1924

Abstract

T NHE custom of sending promising young scholars abroad to study began even before the Meiji Restoration with the opening of Japanese ports to the West. The main mission of these students was to report back home about things Western: scientific knowledge, engineering technology, jurisprudence, or learning in the humanities. In the twentieth century the government sent higher school teachers, university lecturers, and assistant professors abroad for further training. Others went overseas to study on their own resources, or with the support of a private institution or well-to-do patron. In their letters to friends and colleagues back home these young scholars abroad reported about the courses their universities offered, conferences they attended, the intellectual trends they encountered, impressions of daily life, and other observations of the West, sometimes in great detail. Published from time to time in scholarly journals as correspondence from abroad, such reports helped Japanese intellectuals to keep informed of contemporaneous events and trends in the West. The ties they developed also served to bridge the worlds of Western and Japanese scholarship on a more personal level. For instance, it was through contacts established by colleagues and former students studying abroad that Nishida Kitaro N[IB&*M (1870-1945), who never left Japan himself, established personal links with the German philosophers Edmund Husserl (1859-1938) and Heinrich Rickert (1863-1936). Japanese scholars abroad also