In May 1957 I took the picture below three months earlier at an earlier dedication of the new Seisen Ryo. Paul Rusch is the third man in a dark suit on the right.
I spent most of 1957 and much of 1958 as a GI in Japan. In 1957 was a personnel clerk stationed at a camp outside of Tokyo, and because I was a sergeant I was able to obtain a weekend pass virtually every weekend. Somehow my father back in Cleveland heard about an Episcopal-affiliated organization in Japan, the Kiyosato Educational Experiment Project—KEEP, a project Paul Rusch started and headed. He suggested I look into the group. I called the Tokyo office and was invited to visit the project. I went twice.
Rusch (1897-1979) went to Japan in 1925 as a missionary for a one-year stay. He fell in love with the country, the culture, and the people (although he never married) and stayed on, becoming a teacher at Rikkyo University in Tokyo. Rikkyo was founded in 1874 as St. Paul's School by the Episcopal Church missionary Bishop Channing Moore Williams. It was a private school that taught Christian Bible studies and English. At that time, Japan was rushing to catch up with the advanced nations of the West, and the field of education also had a strong utilitarian tendency. Today Rikkyo has 20,000 students and 2,700 teachers and staff.
In 1927, on a fund-raising tour in the States, Rusch was exposed to the Brotherhood of St. Andrew, an international lay Christian religious organization with historical roots in the Episcopal Church. When he returned to Japan in 1931, he became active in the Brotherhood and in 1933 was key in obtaining land on the slope of a mountain in central Honshu and raising money with which to build a clubhouse and student center, naming the camp Seisen Ryo (清泉寮), "pure spring hostel." That first building was dedicated in July 1938.
Rusch stayed on in Japan while most Americans who could leave in 1940-41 left. In December 1941 he like other enemy aliens were interred in a former girl's school in Tokyo where they were held for six months and finally exchanged for Japanese who were stuck in America when the war broke out. I found the first half of Hemphill's book—Rusch's life as a missionary, building Seisen Ryo, and internment—more interesting than the second half, perhaps because the life was more interesting.
He returned to Japan with the Occupation as a U,S. Army Lieutenant Colonel in the Civil Intelligence Section, although he never learned to speak or read Japanese. His unit's work laid the background the war crimes trials that opened in April 1946, but "he had no intention of staying in the army any longer than necessary." He intended to restore the camp and remain in Japan. "The camp had originally been just for the boys who came to the summer sessions; now he thought about the community itself and he called the development plan 'The Kiyosato Educational Experiment Project.'"
By the time I arrived in 1957, 800 acres had been added to KEEP's original land. There was a church, a 20-bed rural hospital (the only medical facility in a couple hundred square miles of rural, mountain landscape), an experimental farm, a vocational school to teach Western agricultural techniques, a nursery school, and a library.
—To be continued
