"Boys be Ambitious!": The Moral Philosophy of William Smith Clark and the Creation of the Sapporo Band

In 1877, an American educator named William Smith Clark began his one year contract with the Meiji government to head a new agricultural college in Sapporo, Hokkaido. While there, he taught the basics of Christianity to his Japanese students under the guise of moral education. This paper seeks to understand the religious and moral philosophy that was absorbed by the students at Sapporo Agricultural College and how this laid the foundation for two prominent Japanese Christian intellectuals who came out of the "Sapporo Band": Uchimura Kanzô and Nitobe Inazô. In order to accomplish this, this thesis first examines William Clark's educationaland religious views as influenced by his background, followed by a discussion of what Christian-related activities took place at Sapporo Agricultural College before and immediately after Clark's departure. In the last chapter, the religious elements that were taken away by students like Nitobe and Uchimura from their Sapporo experience will be examined. Such an exercise will show that they and other graduates shared the basic elements of a Christianity run by laymen, with an emphasis on Bible study and a disregard for ecclesiasticism and denominationalism, as well as the addition of a spiritual lineage that they traced to William Smith Clark. Sapporo graduates also adopted a philosophical system that encouraged the development of self-cultivation and independence of thought not unlike that of certain Neo-Confucian schools