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is a Japanese high school founded in 1878 as the . It was well known in the 1950s and 1960s for the large proportion of graduates who gained admission to the prestigious University of Tokyo; though it suffered a decline in the 1970s, as of 2005 it was once again being referred to as the "best public high school in Japan". Scholar Studies 1904 Student Expulsions Young-ah Soh ^[2]

Contents

History

Notable alumni

References

External links

History

First Tokyo Middle School was established on 26 September, 1878 in Tokyo's Hongō-ku; soon after, it moved to Kanda-ku, and would move several more times in the next two decades. In 1904, Korea's Joseon Dynasty government granted scholarships to 50 students for overseas study; 44 of them enrolled at First Tokyo Middle School. However, they were all expelled due to a protest they organised in 1905 over the signing of the Eulsa Treaty, which effectively made the Korean Empire a protectorate of the Empire of Japan. 25 were permitted to re-enrol the following year, but the leaders of the protest, including Choe Nam-seon (who would later become active in the Korean independence movement), were permanently expelled. By 1918, only four decades after its founding, First Tokyo had already become the first step on the "escalator course" which students expected would lead them to Tokyo Imperial University.^[3] Japanese historian Saburo Ienaga, who attended First Tokyo in the late 1920s when it was located in Hanzōmon, near the Imperial Palace, described the school's unique characteristics and educational philosophy in his 2001 autobiography: students wore Western-style suits instead of the standard high-collared Japanese boys' school uniform (a practise suggested to have been inspired by Eton and Harrow), the principal forced students to swim in the middle of winter and ignored the complaints of parents who worried this might endanger or even kill their children, and the teaching style emphasised extracurricular activities even at the expense of preparation for examinations.^[4]
After World War II, First Tokyo Middle School went through a number of changes; it officially changed its name to Hibiya High School on 26 January, 1950, and began admitting female students in April of the same year. Its first coeducational class enrolled 300 boys and 100 girls. Though First Tokyo's track record for getting its students into higher schools and university in the pre-war period was beneath that of other elite middle schools (specifically Fourth Tokyo Middle School), between 1953 and 1967, Hibiya High School consistently ranked first in the number of graduates entering the top-ranked University of Tokyo, and due to its reputation for excellence, enrolled students from as far away as Kyūshū.^[5] In common with the rest of the Tokyo public school system, its prestige declined during the early 1970s. Until 1974, at least 20 graduates were admitted to the University of Tokyo each year (down from the peak of 193 graduates in 1964), but according to one account, the school had "dropped out of the spotlight altogether" by 1975. In 1993, not a single student from Hibiya High School gained admission to the University of Tokyo. However, under the leadership of the new principal Nagasawa, appointed in 2001, the school underwent a "renaissance". In 2005, it was once again described by the ''Dong-a Ilbo'', a South Korean newspaper, as "the best public school in Japan"; the following year, 12 students gained admission to the University of Tokyo, and two years later, that figure more than doubled to 28.

Notable alumni

★ Natsume Sōseki, author^[6]

★ Kunio Maekawa, architect

★ Hideo Kobayashi, author and literary critic

★ Yokoyama Taikan, painter

★ Yukio Kasahara, Lieutenant General in the Imperial Japanese Army during World War II

★ Nobuyuki Abe, 36th Prime Minister of Japan

★ Nishi Takeichi, Lieutenant Colonel in the Imperial Japanese Army, killed in action during World War II

★ Hisatsune Sakomizu, Chief Cabinet Secretary of Japan in 1945

★ Susumu Tonegawa, molecular biologist, 1987 Nobel Prize winner in Physiology/Medicine^[7]

★ Saburo Ienaga, controversial historian

★ Shigeo Hirose, robotics expert^[8]

References

1. 日比谷高等学校
2. 平準化崩した校長の手腕…“日本版旧京畿高校”日比谷高が３３年ぶりに復活 Hyeon-gi Gim
3. Maekawa Kunio and the Emergence of Japanese Modernist Architecture, , Jonathan M., Reynolds, University of California Press, , ISBN 0520214951 See page 41.
4. Japan's Past, Japan's Future: One Historian's Odyssey, , Saburō, Ienaga, Rowman and Littlefield, , ISBN 0742509893 See Chapter 4, "Recollections of Middle School".
5. Education and Training in Japan, , Thomas P., Rohlen, Routledge, , ISBN 0415168422 See pages 20-22.
6. 新書で入門 漱石と鴎外 (A pocket paperback introduction: Soseki and Ogai), , Akio, Takahashi, Shinchosha, , ISBN 4106101793
7.
8. Staff profile

External links

★ Hibiya High School