The European Imprint on Japan’s Commercial Schools in China, 1890–1945

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article revisits scholarship on the Tōa Dōbun Shoin, an innovative international business school operated by the Japanese in Shanghai from 1901 to 1945. After reviewing the school’s history, we carefully examine the institution’s course mix, language programming, product-studies focus, and research trips. We conclude that Japanese educators did not design the Tōa Dōbun Shoin curriculum all on their own in China, which has been the assumption of scholars since the end of the Second World War. Instead, architects of the institution amply borrowed from a flourishing commercial school system in late nineteenth-century Europe, showing particular interest in the curriculum at the Institut Supérieur de Commerce at Antwerp in Belgium. Both the European and Japanese business schools, it is argued, need to be re-examined in the context of the burgeoning global trade in which they operated.