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present. Indeed, under the self-imposed hastiness of belated modernity, Asia
swiftly embraced what Max Weber keenly perceived and wrote in 1946 as a transi-
tion from generalist education to expert education in order to sustain modern
bureaucracy (Weber 2011 [1946]). These “imported” instrumentalist principles of
higher education had a great impact on the nature and mission of Asian universities
which, in turn, led to a widespread reformation and creation of numerous new
higher education institutions across Asia (Zhou and Park 2015 ). The general spirit
behind the early twentieth-century HE reformation was far from being entirely dis-
couraging and politicized in order to attain industrial modernization; there was also
a genuine enlightenment among intellectuals. Bertrand Russell described thus his
encounter with Chinese HE students during his one-year sojourn in the Republic of
China in 1920:
They wish their country to acquire what is best in the modern world... As the first step to
this end, they do all they can to promote higher education, and to increase the number of
Chinese who can use and appreciate Western knowledge without being the slaves of
Western follies. ( 1993 [1922], p. 214)His was a Western^1 view of China but not as generalizable across Asia. Korean HE
was, for example, suffering under the geopolitics among the surrounding empires
(Schmid 2002 ), and it had a significant role in the anti-colonial movement (Atkins
2010 ). Japanese HE, on the other side of the Asian colonization process, took an
important role in Meiji and post-Meiji Japanese modernization. Meiji Ishin generated
a unique HE and schoolmen:
The man regarded as Japan’s first professional academic anthropologist, Tokyo Imperial
University’s Tsuboi Shogoro (1863–1913), was a physical anthropologist rather than an
ethnographer. It was left to his student Torii Ryuzo (1870–1953) to inaugurate ‘scientific’
ethnographic fieldwork in the recently acquired colony of Taiwan, studying the island’s
aboriginal peoples (whom he called ‘untamed barbarians’) on four trips between 1896 and- (Atkins 2010 , p. 62)
This biography reflects the general spirit of university under Meiji restoration,
closely linked to hegemonic ambitions in the Asian geopolitical setup, which were
reified with the victory over Russia in 1904–1905 and dismantled with the defeat in
the Second World War. Noted Japanese scholar Takeuchi Yoshimi cites John
Dewey’s visit to Japan and China and elaborated the following on the modernization
in both nations (Takeuchi 2005 [1961], p. 154): “While Japan appeared on the sur-
face to be quite modernized, the roots of this modernization were in fact shallow. If
this were not corrected, he warned, Japan would almost certainly come to ruin.”
Takeuchi used Dewey as a mouthpiece to point out an idea that was politically sensi-
tive for him: Japanese modernization was a soft copy and block import of Western
modernization of the imperial/colonial kind, whereas the university student-led
May Fourth Movement was a genuinely local Chinese initiative.
(^1) Throughout this chapter, the terms “West” and “Western” are used in their broader sense, as in the
“West and the rest” by Stuart Hall ( 1992 ).
J. Park