Creating the Next 60 Years

Project Report
September 14th, 2013
ICU 60th Anniversary Project Gallery Lecture:
ICU History and Campus Archaeology
Dr. J. Edward Kidder, Prof. Emeritus, ICU

60th Anniversary Project

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Creating the Next 60 Years

ICU was pleased to invite Dr. J. Edward Kidder back to campus on September
14, 2013, to give a gallery lecture as a part of the university’s 60th anniversarycelebrations. Kidder’s talk covered not only a brief history of ICU, but also
touched on the ancient peoples who lived in the area, and the cultures thatexisted throughout the ages. Kidder is a veritable ICU veteran, having taught atthe university from 1956 to 1993. He was present during the early years ofICU, as it was developing into the institution it is today.
He held a number of positions at ICU. Among them, he served as Dean of theCollege of Liberal Arts, and as Vice President of Academic Affairs. He also
acted as the first Director of the Hachiro Yuasa Memorial Museum, and as
Director of the ICU Archaeology Research Center. In addition to serving inthese positions, he also conducted a great number of archaeological excavations,which gave him an intimate understanding of the history of the land uponwhich ICU now stands.
Kidder’s lecture gave the audience a very personal look at ICU’s history. Hepresented a number of slides showing photographs of his time at ICU,
including photos of his colleagues and students and of the excavations he01

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undertook.

Part One: The Founding of ICU

Kidder began his talk by describing the time just before the university wasfounded.
The land in Mitaka where ICU now stands used to belong to the NakajimaAircraft Company. Kidder explained that the ICU campus had been the homeof the Musashino Plant, where they built an aircraft called the Ki-44 Shoki, afour-machinegun, single-seater fighter plane that was both fast and could
operate at higher altitudes.
Kidder showed an aerial photograph taken of the campus in 1956 andexplained that many of the structures were still in place when he arrived inJapan. By 1962, only a few fragments of the old factory remained, and much of
the campus, including the dormitories and church, was already in place. He
also showed a slide of what was called “East Grove,” a historic building thatused to be used to house younger faculty at the time. Many in the audiencegasped in recognition at the old photograph, something that happened quite
often over the course of Kidder’s lecture.
Kidder explained why the site in Mitaka was chosen as the future home for
ICU with a quick overview of the end of World War II. According to Kidder,B-29 bombers flew out of the Mariana Islands, which had been hard-won, andfor the bombers, “priority number one was the Musashino Nakajima Plant.”
The reasons for this was that the Musashino plant was making about 40% ofthe engines made for Japanese fighter planes at the time. It was an important
strategic target, and was known as target #357. Over the course of thebombing campaign, 828 planes in 8 sorties had attempted to destroy the plant,
but even with all that, it remained standing at the end of the war.

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Kidder believes that this was “providential, in a way.” When ICU was looking
into the various candidates for the future home of the university, the site may
not have been chosen had the plant and its surrounding buildings been destroyed
during the air raids.
The reason the former aircraft factory was determined to be the best was because
it “was abandoned, and would be easy to acquire, and that sort of thing. But it
had this fantastic one building…this building that was intact, untouched, andperfectly usable. Big enough to start a school.”Part Two: Early Years of ICU

During ICU’s early years, it implemented a number of innovative policies andprograms, for which Kidder believes the university deserves more credit. Manyof those innovations have been adopted by other Japanese universities, although
in the beginning, they created conflict with the Ministry of Education. Kidder
explained a few of those innovations.
The open-stack library concept was revolutionary. At the time, Japanese libraries
were generally “possessively managed by some librarian, and you practically had
to bribe them to get your books.” With an open stack library, “you can wander
through, you browse, you can pick out the book you want.”
The student union building was innovative not only for a Japanese university,
but for universities in general. Kidder stated that even the college he attended
had had no student union building. It was “totally un-academic. Where you
could have all kinds of student activities.”
The ICU dormitories also ended up as a source of conflict, as the Ministry told
the university that they “couldn’t have dormitories for both boys and girls on thesame campus.” Kidder mentioned his belief that the dormitories are one of thegreatest innovations, as many former students still identify themselves by thedorm they lived in.
Another innovation was that student fees were all-inclusive. While other schools

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charge building fees, facility fees, and have various other add-ons that increase
the cost of tuition, at ICU, while the cost has always been relatively high, thetuition fee has always been all-inclusive.
One of the biggest issues ICU faced was in how to coordinate between theJapanese educational year, which runs from April to March, and the educationalyears in many other countries, which usually run from fall to spring. This was abarrier to one of the key focuses of ICU: internationalism. ICU developed athree-term system to overcome the issue, and accepted students from abroad in
the fall term, creatively implementing the system.
Another barrier to internationalization was that students were required to havefour years of university residence in order to earn their degree, a rule that made it
almost impossible to offer exchange programs at universities in other countries.
Eventually, through some more creative financial paperwork, they solved thisissue as well.
Other innovative policies included a drop period for registered courses, reducing

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the Ministry’s allowance for 12 years of registration down to 8 years, andintroducing a policy that allowed for the expulsion of a student who received
three terms of D grades in a row.
Kidder continued.
“In our heyday, we were taking about 1 out of 20 applicants through theregular examination system. We were very, very selective and they were very,
very bright…you had to circumvent, you had to be very devious, andsometimes you had to come very close…to the margin to beat some of those(Ministry of Education) regulations. (But) over time, things have changed…
greatly. And most of those (problems) don’t apply today the way they did.”Part Three: Archaeological History of the Area

Kidder got into the meat of his talk with a brief discussion of thearchaeological significance of the area around ICU. He summarized thehistory of ancient geological movements that led to the creation of landbridges between Japan and the continent. He explained that it was during
these eras that the megafauna such as mammoths and giant deer wereintroduced to Japan. He explained that, much later on, the Jomon Period wasa “fantastically rich period in Japanese history,” when temperatures werewarmer than they are today. Kidder described some of his findings using
photographs of some of the digs he conducted while in Japan.
The land under ICU is “just one of many…maybe 50 good sites along theNogawa…it was apparently a very, very pleasant place to be (during) the early
Jomon times, the middle Jomon, around 3000, 4000BC. There are sites allthe way up and down the valley…it leads down to the Tamagawa. The guessis that 50 more should be dug in the region.”

Rivers in Japan are managed by the national government, and it was next tothe Nogawa that Kidder and his colleagues got their “first big break.” It wascalled “Location 28.” In order to accommodate the construction of a golf

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Creating the Next 60 Years

course, the river was going to be redirected. During the excavation, thearchaeologists and students dug down through layers of Jomon Era relics
all the way down to the Paleolithic era.
The reason the findings were so important was because it was the first time
“we had a full sequence of Paleolithic tool types from top to bottom, goingback about 28000 years.”
Kidder showed a slide of some of the pieces they discovered arranged inchronological order. The older pieces near the bottom of the photographincluded roughly cut hand axes and scrapers, but the audience could
follow the passage of time in the increased sophistication of the tools as
they went up to the top of the photograph, which included smaller pieces
which were balanced and shaped and, “therefore can be used for points for arrow or spear points because the trajectory will be predictable.”
They also discovered a great number of tiny tools called microliths, which
could be hammered into wooden hammers and were perhaps used to cut
grass and other plants. Most of the obsidian used to make the tools would
have come from the mountains in modern-day Nagano Prefecture. Kidder
explained that the fact that they would go so far to get the best materials
tells archaeologists a great deal about their culture.
Apparently ICU was expanding at a fantastic rate by 1957, and Kidder
described how he offered to teach a course in archaeology. They began thecourse with excavations on campus, but at the time Kidder was “terribly
ignorant of what the law was demanding in regard to how one went about
this sort of thing.” He asked the university’s lawyer to look it up for him,and eventually Kidder signed a few papers and thought that he wascovered.
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However, three or four year later he received a letter from the Cultural Properties
division at the Agency for Cultural Affairs stating that he had been digging
illegally in “the sacred soil of Japan.” Luckily, it turned out that the office was run
by a man who was a graduate student at Kyoto University when Kidder was there
on a Fulbright grant. He told Kidder that while they knew he was digging,
unfortunately Japanese law did not allow a foreigner to run an archaeologicalexcavation in Japan. Kidder would have to find a Japanese person to sign thepapers for him, and then continue to do his work in that way which he did.
Eventually, the Agency allowed him to sign his own name to the work, as“everyone (knew) this (was) a farce.”
After the ICU Archaeological Research Center was formed in 1975, they
completed 15 excavations, and Kidder said that he was told that he was “the only
foreigner who was ever allowed to dig or conduct excavations in Japan.”
Many of their digs were conducted in Koganei, which at the time was seeing a
big increase in corporate relocation. As the law requires excavations to becompleted on a site before it is developed, Kidder and his colleagues, sometimes
numbering as many as 150 students from various schools around Tokyo, did agreat amount of work in the area.
Kidder described some of their finds, from a figurine his wife discovered while
walking on the hillside one day, to a stone floor which Kidder believes is the only
existing one in the area. Another very interesting find was made almost
accidentally when the gardeners at the nearby golf course told them of something
they found while moving a tree.
That particular dig started in 1973 and lasted two years. By 1974, they had
discovered the remnants of a house, with the double runoff ditch that would
surround it, holes for posts to hold up the roof, the fireplace, and other items.
But the most interesting item was a pot buried beneath where the entrance would
have been: a placenta pot, which is thought to have been used to store the07

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Creating the Next 60 Years

placenta and other material produced after a child is born. The group had neverfound such an item before.
ICU’s campus was a rich source of archaeological treasures, from arrowheads andaxes from all eras, to stone weights, pots, fishing gear and earrings that had such aunique polish and finish that Kidder believes they may have been imported fromoutside of Japan.

Part Four: Conclusion

Kidder’s easy speaking style and warm, joking manner had the room ringing with
comfortable laughter for the entire hour. It seemed to be less a lecture, than it wasa relaxed conversation among friends. Kidder concluded his lecture with aphotograph of the Honkan as it appeared in 1957. In some ways, the building was
almost unrecognizable, as it had not yet been renovated and the trees around it
had not yet grown into the lush green bounty we see today. But, to Kidder, theheart of the building was unchanged.
“It was…it is a fantastic building. It housed
everything we had at the time. There was justno other place to put anything. The whole
library was on the second floor. The science
people were down there. We had offices on
one side and classes on the other side…to me,
this is the sacred soil of Japan…this building
is…the core of ICU. And I think that every
generation of student will see this as what heor she remembers most…I think we should
ensure that it becomes the iconic image ofICU.”

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