Tekijuku's Three Thousand Disciples: The Place Where Fukuzawa Yukichi and Ōmura Masujirō Were Born

From 1838 to 1862 — twenty-four years. The total number of disciples that passed through Tekijuku exceeds three thousand.

Three thousand in twenty-four years — an annual average of over 120. As a private school with a single Ōsaka town-house as its school building, it was an astonishing scale.

Nearly all the core figures who would carry Japan's modernization thereafter were included among this disciple group.

In 1855 (Ansei 2), the twenty-one-year-old Fukuzawa Yukichi came from the Nakatsu domain to Ōsaka and entered Tekijuku.

For the next three years, he studied rangaku and Western medicine under Kōan. Fukuzawa later vividly recollected his Tekijuku days in his autobiography 'Fukuō Jiden.

' Days spent forgetting cold and heat and meals to throw himself into all-night reading meetings and translation competitions.

The concentration on learning acquired within the strict dormitory life became the foundation for his later Keiō Gijuku (opened 1858) and Fukuzawa's lifetime of intellectual activity.

Born into a Chōshū-domain physician's house, Ōmura Masujirō entered Tekijuku in 1846 (Kōka 3) and mastered rangaku under Kōan.

Thereafter, on Kōan's recommendation, Ōmura studied further with Edo rangaku scholars, and in the Bakumatsu became the military advisor of the Chōshū domain.

He commanded the actual combat of the New Government army in the Boshin War (1868-1869), and after the Meiji Restoration led the founding of the modern army.

The foundation of the army that fought the Russo-Japanese War began from the Western military science that Ōmura learned at Tekijuku.

To list other principal disciples — Hashimoto Sanai of the Fukui domain (executed in the Ansei Purge, thinker), Sano Tsunetami of the Saga domain (founder of the Japanese Red Cross), Nagayo Sensai of the Ōmura domain (founder of medical administration under the Meiji government), Takamine Seiichi of the Buzen-Nakatsu domain (father of Takamine Jōkichi, later the discoverer of adrenaline), and Kitasato Shibasaburō (father of modern bacteriology), who studied under Nagayo Sensai.

Tekijuku was a rare educational institution that supplied nearly all the core personnel of Japan's learning, administration, and medicine from the Bakumatsu through the Meiji.

Tekijuku itself closed after Kōan's move to Edo (1862), but its building is preserved in Chūō Ward, Ōsaka City, as 'Important Cultural Property — Former Ogata Kōan Residence (Tekijuku).

' The school became the origin of the present Faculty of Medicine of Ōsaka University, and Kōan's lineage continues to the present as the core of modern Japanese medicine.

The small private school Kōan began at Semba in Ōsaka in 1838 made the foundations of Japan's medicine, education, and military of two centuries later.