Boys, Be Ambitious!

An unlikely gimcrack that for years has been the hottest-selling art object in Hokkaido, Japan's northernmost big island, is the small plaster bust (price: $1) of a stern-faced New England schoolmaster who died in 1887. William Smith Clark stayed only eight months on Hokkaido, but the visit, in 1876, was long enough for him to be enshrined by the islanders as something between seer and saint. On leave from his job as president of Massachusetts Agricultural College (now the University of Massachusetts), Clark helped found the school that was to become the outpost island's pride, its own first-rank university. Last week, as the university's 5,300 mackinawed students settled themselves on the snow-blown campus for the year's winter term, they slogged past an old landmark--a large statue of Clark--and a raw, new one: the shell of the still unfinished William Smith Clark Memorial Student Center.

Bibles & Battles. When young, westward-looking Governor Kiyotaka Kuroda summoned Clark to set up an agricultural college at Sapporo, capital of Hokkaido--Japanese students returning from Massachusetts had recommended Clark reverently--the island was only a few steps from wilderness. To Congregationalist Clark, the wilderness was a God-sent challenge; he kissed his wife and eleven children goodbye and set out--with 50 Bibles in his luggage.

Governor Kuroda explained that Yasokyo (Jesus religion) was frowned on by the Mikado. Undeterred, Clark lined up his 16 students and announced firmly: "It is my intention to awake a lofty ambition in you, and to turn you into gentlemen and Christians, so that you may control your appetites and passions and thus conquer the sin of self." The Yankee educator eased the problem of appetite control by smashing all his scholars' sake bottles, made the students promise to shun both weed and wine and to glorify God. Classes began with hymns and prayers, and the first question on Clark's first examination in physiology read: "Furnish evidences of the existence of one intelligent and benevolent Creator."

In the evenings, while their instructor darned his socks, Hokkaido's students heard uplifting tales of the Civil War. Clark, who ended the war as a colonel with the 21st Massachusetts Volunteers, would tell his awed audience: "At the battle of Chantilly, Virginia, on Sept. 1, 1862, I was surrounded by Confederates and was called on to surrender. Bullets whistled overhead; my uniform was torn to pieces. Gentlemen, an American never surrenders. But I managed to retire, and returned to the Union forces unharmed." When the fiery Clark left for Massachusetts, he gave his students a ringing injunction: "Boys, be ambitious!"

Fish & Physics. If Clark's evangelism failed--there are only a few Christians among the present students--his ambition took firm root. To its agriculture and liberal arts offerings, the university has added faculties of law, medicine, engineering and economics. Last fall the university opened a new laboratory for nuclear physics. It is also bustlingly commercial, with two experimental farms, a model fishing fleet, a profitmaking cannery.

The university's graduates include such top industrialists as Takeshi Mitarai, president of the Canon Camera Co.; Mitsugu Sato, head of the firm that supplies more than half of Japan's dairy products; and Hohei Sugimatsu, president of the Nissan Chemical Co. One of Hokkaido's noted scholars is Physicist Dr. Ukichiro Nakaya, a world-respected authority on snow crystals and the elasticity of ice. Since development of the rugged northern island (pop. 5,000,000) is a prime government objective, it seems certain that Hokkaido University will keep on growing.

To William Smith Clark the ambitious growth would be satisfying; so would the new student union (the first one in Japan) and the faculty-exchange program carried on with the University of Massachusetts. But possibly even more pleasing would be the sight of young Japanese scholars pursuing knowledge with Yankee vigor. When frostbite threatens in a Hokkaido lecture hall--outside temperature sometimes reaches 40DEG below and that indoors is often only somewhat more temperate--the sufferer rushes outdoors, rubs his ears hard with snow, then bundles right back to resume his notetaking.

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