Hidden among the patriots, industrialists and scholars buried in one of Colonial America's oldest cemeteries, lies a tombstone that is not on the tourist brochure.
The plot belongs to Kanichi Asakawa, and a group of Japanese middle schoolers flew thousands of kilometers to see it on Tuesday. They left flowers on his grave and knelt together before his seldom-visited tombstone.
One of the first Japanese scholars hired as a professor in the US, Asakawa is credited as one of the founders of East Asian studies in the country. He was a frequent lecturer on Japanese relations during World War II, even as many Japanese were detained in internment camps.
Yet he remains a relative unknown, except with the fiercely loyal group of Japanese scholars and historians fighting to keep his memory alive.
"We follow his steps, back 100 years ago," Kawasaki Yasuhiro, the school administrator who organizes the yearly student trips to New Haven, said through a translator.
Asakawa's ascent from the son of a poor samurai to Dartmouth student to Yale professor has developed nearly a folklore status among scholars. They say he was such a devoted scholar that while studying the English dictionary, he would memorize the pages then eat them until he consumed the entire book.
"He got the best grades in his class," Japanese Consul General Hiroyasu Ando said in a speech at Yale last year, "and he delivered his graduation address in perfect English."
Asakawa came to the US in 1894 and may have been the first Japanese to study at Dartmouth.
"His fees were waived," Dartmouth archivist Peter Carini said. "It was the first time anyone received that sort of treatment."
He began teaching at Yale in the 1906, becoming a full professor in 1937. It was a time when studying international relations meant studying Europe.
"Before Pearl Harbor, there may have been about five scholars in the United States who knew anything about Japan," said Harvard history professor Akira Iriye.
Asakawa translated the centuries-old Documents of Iriki, which allowed English scholars to study Japanese feudal history. He donated 45,000 volumes of Japanese texts to the Library of Congress and more than 21,000 to Yale, forming the foundation of their Japanese collections.
"He studied Japan from the outside," Yasuhiro said. "During that time, people in the world didn't know how to think of Japan."
Wataru Hashimoto, 14, said he'd like to study in the US someday.
"He could do it back then, a very different time," Hashimoto said through a translator. "Now it's even easier to go overseas. If he could do that a hundred years ago, I could do it now."
Asakawa opposed the military buildup of imperial Japan and, during World War II, wrote to top politicians in both countries, urging peace.
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