Takuma Dan (SB 1878)
Mining engineer, industrialist, and internationalist
Introduction
Like Honma, Takuma Dan was also born in 1858 to a samurai household in Fukuoka. In 1871, Dan was sent to study in America and joined MIT four years later as a second-year student. At the Institute, Dan majored in Course III (Mining Engineering) and graduated after completing a senior thesis entitled “Experiments on the manufacture of cast iron from Katahdin and Manhattan iron ores in the Institute blast furnace.” After graduation, Dan was hired by Mitsui, a major industrial conglomerate, to manage a coal mine in his native Fukuoka prefecture, ultimately serving as the group’s chairman from 1914 to 1932.
Takuma Dan, Nagatomo Kuroda, and Kentaro Kaneko
Dan’s Fukuoka Origins and MIT Education
Takuma Dan was originally born as a son to the Fukuoka samurai, Takunojō Kōya. While Takuma was eventually adopted out to the Dan family (a common practice among samurai households to ensure the existence of family heirs), he nonetheless benefitted from his biological father’s close relationship to the Fukuoka daimyo, Nagahiro Kuroda. Known as a “Dutch-maniac” (ranpeki) daimyo, Nagahiro was an early advocate of adopting Western technology and scientific knowledge, going so far as studying and promoting smallpox vaccination in his own domain. As Dan’s official biography notes, this apparently led to the accidental death of one of Dan’s elder brothers, who was volunteered by their father to receive one of the first doses of the vaccine. Perhaps partly because of this, Nagahiro looked after Kōya’s remaining children and chose Dan to accompany his own son and heir, Nagatomo (the last Fukuoka daimyo), when the latter was sent to study in America in 1871. Nagatomo, Dan, and Kentarō Kaneko (another Fukuoka samurai, who eventually studied at Harvard Law School), arrived in Massachusetts on March 2, 1872.
Like Honma, Dan spent his first years in Massachusetts studying English and other subjects at various schools. In 1875, he joined MIT as a second-year student, choosing to major in Mining Engineering. He was mentored by one of MIT’s leading professors at that time, Robert Hallowell Richards, who was the head of Course III by the time Dan arrived at MIT. Not incidentally, both Richards and his wife, Ellen Swallow Richards (the first woman to be admitted to MIT as a student and to be hired as its instructor), contributed significantly to the development of American mining industry. Partly because Honma was already studying railroad engineering, Dan sought to study the raw material that made railroad possible, i.e. the making of iron. Under Richards’ guidance, Dan completed his thesis, “Experiments on the manufacture of cast iron from Katahdin and Manhattan iron ores in the Institute blast furnace,” and graduated in 1879.
Letter from Takuma Dan to Eiichiro Honma, 1879
The Eiichiro Honma papers include one intriguing letter that was sent to Honma from Dan, dated June 12, 1879. By then, both of them had returned to Japan but neither of them had seemingly landed the kind of job they had hoped for as MIT-trained engineers. In this letter, Dan advises against making a temporary job that Honma had taken on in their native Fukuoka into something permanent. Dan urged Honma to wait for a more promising opportunity to emerge in one of Japan’s urban centers, decrying what he saw as the inherent conservatism of his home prefecture: “I think there will be great deal to do always at Kioto or some such large places, but I fear that you can[sic] not depend upon such a place as Fukuoka—there is no money, and the people are mistrustful, and I have some notion that the governor is changeable and fickle himself.”