87 In the future I hope the Academy will develop into a vocational school that will become a great vessel for ensuring national in-dependence, with departments for history, languages, and reli-gion, making it worthy of being called the University of Japan and securing both academic and national independence. Here he made clear his ambition to turn the Philosophy Academy into a Japan-centric university that researches the language, history, and religion necessary in order to preserve the independence of the state. This proclamation, coming only three years after founding of the school, would seem to have been motivated by his personal ex-perience visiting the world’s earliest universities in the form of the University of Oxford and the University of Paris. The expressions “University of Japan” and “Japan-centric univer-sity” were used in contrast to the idea of Western universities with their organizational structures and departments, as well as their West-ern instructors and texts on which Japanese schools had previously been based. These expressions did not imply not learning from the West. The basic idea was to improve what was unique to Japan. To do this he wanted to utilize the good points of Western learning. He also announced these policies in the form of “Improving the Philos-ophy Academy” in magazines and newspapers. As an aside, in his speech at the ceremony for the relocation of the Philosophy Academy Enryō mentioned that he wanted to “culti-vate men of balanced wisdom and virtue.” In “Improving the Phi-losophy Academy,” too, he said that no matter how much progress is made in intellectual education, it will not be effective unless moral education is provided in tandem. In other words, he believed that
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