The Days of a Man [1900 



too lenient with them on account of their imperfect 

 knowledge of English. The new association therefore 

 resolved to ask our faculty to exact from Japanese 

 the same standards as from the others. It was also 

 arranged that questions of admission to Stanford 

 from Japanese secondary schools should be referred 

 to a committee who would undertake the investiga- 

 tion necessary to fix the status of any institution. 



Present that evening was D. Brainerd Spooner, 

 Stanford '99, a student in Philology then resident in 

 Tokyo, where he acted as secretary to the Minister 

 of Siam, exchanging instruction in English for similar 

 lessons in Siamese. Spooner and James F. Abbott, 

 his classmate, who will appear in later pages, entered 

 the Imperial University of Tokyo for graduate work 

 in 1901, the first non-Asiatics to be admitted to that 

 institution. This move at once aroused some clamor 

 among the students, who maintained that the 

 national university was for Japanese alone. The 

 professors, however, made the foreigners welcome 

 and soon quieted criticism. Mitsukuri even looked 

 farther, writing to me especially to express his regret 

 that our men remained for a term only, as he wished 

 to establish the principle of an open door in higher 

 education. Spooner, a tireless and erudite student 

 of Sanskrit and other Oriental lore, has been now for 

 years an official of the British government in charge 

 of archeological surveys in India, in the course of 

 which he brought to light the famous crystal vase 

 which still held the finger bones of Buddha. 



As a sequel to the dinner we were invited to an 

 interesting excursion arranged jointly by the gradu- 

 ates of Stanford and the University of California, the 

 professors in Biology at the Imperial University - 



C 12 ] 



