In 1838, Tekijuku Opened in Ōsaka: A Learning Community That One Rangaku Scholar Started

In 1838 (Tenpō 9), at Semba in Ōsaka (the modern Chūō Ward of Ōsaka City). The Ashimori-born rangaku scholar Ogata Kōan, this year, opened the rangaku school 'Tekijuku' (officially Tekitekisai-juku).

He was twenty-nine. The previous year he had returned from Nagasaki study, and started the school while opening a medical practice in Ōsaka.

The initial disciples were a few; a small tile-roofed town-house was the school building.

For the next twenty-five years, from this place figures would successively arise who would carry Japan's modernization.

Kōan studied rangaku under Naka Ten'yū in Ōsaka in 1825, became a disciple of Tsuboi Shindō in Edo in 1831, and in 1836 in Nagasaki, with shaved head and physician's bag (the sign of a Dutch-medicine physician), learned rangaku and Western medicine directly.

He held the most substantial educational background among rangaku scholars of the time.

But Kōan's distinctive feature lay in the point that he chose not to monopolize his own learning but to transmit it to the next generation in an open place.

The opening of Tekijuku was the embodiment of that resolve.

The name 'Tekitekisai' took from Kōan's pen name 'Tekitekisai.' 'Teki' means 'to accord' — to accord with one's nature, to accord with the heavenly principle — deriving from the Confucian scholar Cheng Mingdao's words 'All things accord with me.

' Not mere learning of Western technology, but the intent to position the school as a place of human formation through learning was contained in the name.

This ideal would run through the twenty-five years of Tekijuku education.

Tekijuku's location, Semba in Ōsaka, was at the time the center of the Japanese economy.

A hub of nationwide commodity distribution, a place where people of diverse classes gathered.

An open society mixing merchants and scholars, different from the warrior Edo and the aristocratic Kyoto.

By deliberately building his school in Ōsaka rather than Edo or Kyoto, Kōan made it possible to create a learning community outside the frame of the class system.

This choice of location determined the class-crossing character of the later Tekijuku.

Kōan's judgment at opening determined the underflow of Japan's modernization.