1899
Our Japanese classmate, Kan-Ichi Asakawa, died in 1948. His record at Tokyo's Waseda University as a "Full Mark Boy" had led President William Jewett Tucker of Dartmouth to sponsor his enrollment in Hanover. There his notable record led to nearly 40 years at Yale, beginning as a graduate student of feudalism in Japan and in Europe, becoming eventually a full professor. Incidentally he lectured or wrote frequently on such subjects as the Russo-Japanese War, and later on World War II when America confronted Japan in the Pacific. As Curator for many years of Yale's Oriental Library he assembled the first adequate American collection of authoritative books on Japan. Last June in this column we reported Yale senior Lindsey Kiang's completion of a graduation thesis on the life, the work and the character of our world-famous classmate. We hope that a copy of that 12,000-word essay may some day be filed in the Dartmouth Alumni Records Office.
Mr. Kiang's treatment of his subject seems exhaustive and fair. He had the unique advantage of access to Asakawa's personal diary, meticulously kept from early youth. Therein the author traces his subject's ordeal, beginning at Dartmouth, in learning to live under two radically different cultures. This ordeal he endured in silence, except for his diary. And out of this struggle for pure, disinterested Truth, Kiang argues, developed Asakawa's stern self-control, his refusal to be swayed by anything except plain tivity. "Let me not," he writes in his "diary, "be curious what others may think of me. Every day I see how strong a force is Vanity or self-interest. Let me be free from that, and a third-person to myself."
All this systematic, even passionate, disavowal of self, however, did not turn this scholar into a cold, merely intellectual person. (1) For eight years in early life in New Haven he was supremely happy in his marriage to a fine American girl, Miriam Dingwall, who unfortunately died in 1913. (2) He was always warmly friendly to his Dartmouth classmates, and devoted especially to George Clark in Plymouth, who for years gave him summer sanctuary for study. (3) In later years he was congenially associated with several former members of the Yale faculty. (4) When in 1920 the present writer spent three delightful weeks with his family as guests in Clarkland we all found this austere scholar a kind and companionable friend in the daily routine of work and play.
Lindsey Kiang has given a workman-like and sympathetic treatment of a man whom many found somewhat aloof; but Kiang painstakingly traces this "aloofness" to a quiet, resolute withdrawal into himself. Only thus could Asakawa, the historian, hope to achieve that absolute impartiality so indispensable to one who would write history justly. But I believe there was still another source, a potent source of what Lindsey Kiang finally calls "Asakawa's Withdrawal into Greatness." That was the life-long influence of the personality of the president of Dartmouth College in our day. I believe that the vibrantly moral and spiritual character of "Prexy" Tucker, his whole dedicated personality became the lasting, paramount influence on Kan-Ichi Asakawa's thinking and living. Thus his own naturally eager, persistent, single-minded pursuit of intellectual honesty became spiritually illumined by living contact with a great soul.
But let this devoted student pay tribute in his own words to the source of this illumination. The following quotation is the closing passage in a talk given by Asakawa to men of '99 at their Fifteenth Reunion in Hanover in 1914:
"It is fitting to close my remarks with another powerful quotation from his message. With the Biblical text, 'Freely ye have received, freely give,' William Jewett Tucker said: A man must learn how to give the whole of himself. I count this the secret of all success, as it certainly is the secret of all influence.... We do not get very far into life until we learn how costly a thing it is to live. The progress of the world is carefully registered, could we but see it, in the expenditure of personal power. "Freely ye have received" — that means that somebody gave freely, gave of himself to you. "Freely give" — that means, maintain the great succession. Pass on good gifts to men. Pour out of yourselves into the heart of the world.' "
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