38 people who are quiet and interested in books have some unu-sual proclivities and are regarded as eccentric or strange, but Dr. ciable person who was at the center of conversations at student discussion gatherings. I had many other close friends during my time at university, but it was Dr. Enryō who left the strongest impression. As we can see, Enryō was a proactive person but also an avid reader—a person of rare concentration who could lose himself in quiet reading even in a noisy dormitory. Enryō’s notebooks from his university days are still preserved at Toyo University. The most conspicuous among them is a thick study notebook with the inscription, “Autumn, Meiji 16 [1883], Notebook, Third Year Humanities Student, Inoue Enryō.” This notebook is a collection of extracts copied from Western literature, and from this we can learn about Enryō’s interests at the time. According to Ger-man Inoue Enryō researcher Rainer SCHULZER, who analyzed this notebook, of the fifty-nine Western works quoted the majority were on Western philosophy, while the others covered a wide variety of subjects including biology and anthropology (evolutionary theory), geography, physics, lexography, chemistry, history, and literature. During the Meiji 10s, 1877–1886, society was undergoing changes due to modernization and people’s worldview was being shaken. They couldn’t just go on holding all of their old ideas, but they weren’t yet ready to believe that all of the new ideas were valid. When he found himself in that situation, as can be seen from his notebook, Enryō was not like that at all. He was a very amicable and so-
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