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Photograph (c. 1930s) of Doshisha's Shōeikan building. Built in 1884, it is the oldest building on the campus, and the second oldest brick building in Kyoto city today. Doshisha University
The clock tower of "The Kyoto Imperial University," in Kyoto Calls You (1929). Built in 1925, it still stands as the symbol of the university today
Similar to museums, modern educational facilities were another category of sights that only rarely appeared in travelogues after the turn of the century. Nevertheless, tourist guidebooks from the Meiji period through the 1930s almost always introduced both Doshisha (est.1875 as Doshisha English School) and Kyoto Imperial University (est. 1897) to readers.
Missionary-connected travellers during the Meiji period, such as H.B. Tristram (see below) and Isabella Bird, were especially interested in Doshisha, a Christian institution.
“[...] we rode to the Dōshisha, the earliest and greatest missionary educational institution in Japan, and of which the famous Joseph Neeshima, one of the earliest and most eminent of Japanese Christians, was principal until his death, the year before our visit [...]. I little expected to find so vast a collection of buildings. The grounds and halls cover many acres. There is a fine lofty chapel, a library of three thousand English volumes, halls and schools for theoretical and practical chemistry, physical science lecture halls with splendid apparatus, dining halls, a theological department; all separate buildings in Western not Japanese style, none of them excepting the chapel having any architectural pretensions [...]”
H.B. Tristram, Rambles in Japan, the Land of the Rising Sun (London: Religious Tract Society, 1895), 208–11
Left: Introduction to Dōshisha, in Murray’s Handbook (1891), 291. Right: “The Kyoto Imperial University,” in Kyoto Municipal Government, Kyoto Calls You (1929), 37
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