As the song goes, 'after changes upon changes, [they] are more or less the same'...
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The transformations which are being accomplished are under the direction of foreigners in Government service, and of Japanese selected for their capacities, who have studied for some years in Europe and America; and the Government has spared neither trouble nor expense in securing the most competent assistance in all departments, and it is only in comparatively few instances that it has been badly advised by interested by interested aliens for the furtherance of personal or other ends. About 500 foreigners have been at one time or other in its service, and though they have met with annoyances and exasperations, the terms of their contracts have been faithfully adhered to. Some of these gentlemen are decorated with high-sounding titles during their brief engagements; but it must be remembered that they are there as helpers only, without actual authority, as servants and not masters, and that, with a notable exception, the greater their energy, ability, and capacity for training, the sooner are their services dispensed with, and one department after another passes from foreign into native management. The retention of foreign employes forms no part of the programme of progress. "Japan for the Japanese" is the motto of Japanese patriotism; the "Barbarians" are to be used, and dispensed with as soon as possible.
--Isabella Bird, Unbeaten Tracks in Japan: An Account of Travels in the Interior, Including Visits to the Aborigines of Yezo and the Shrines of Nikko and Ise, vol. I (1880; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), p. 10. [emphasis mine]
How little Japanese attitudes toward foreign academics have changed over the past hundred years is suggested by the experience of one of the most illustrious of the early kyoshi, the Leipzig-trained physician Erwin Baelz, who served from 1876 to 1902 as chief adviser in developing the medical school and hospital at Tokyo University. Dr. Baelz's diary reveals a gradual devolution from his admiration in the 1870s for Japan's eagerness for Western knowledge, to his indignation in the 1880s as he watched growing numbers of foreign colleagues dismissed and repatriated without any thanks for their contributions, to his own frustration in the 1890s as he found himself bypassed in major faculty decisions and sought to leave but was repeatedly held back by unfulfilled promises to improve his situation.
At his own twenty-fifth anniversary festivities, Baelz touched on what he saw as the root of Japan's shabby treatment of foreign scholars. The Japanese, Baelz suggested, often seemed not to understand the true source and nature of Western science, mistaking it for a sort of machine that could be easily carted off to new places and made to perform the same work, rather than seeing it as an organism requiring a carefully nurturing atmosphere. Foreign scholars from many countries had worked hard to implant the spirit of modern science in Japan, but although they had come to nurture the tree itself, their mission had largely been misunderstood. The Japanese had treated them as no more than peddlers of the final fruits, and had been content to take the latest plums from them, without seeking to appropriate the spirit that had nourished the tree. Baelz concluded:
Soon there will be very few foreign teachers left in the country. Let me advise you to give those that still remain more freedom than you have done in the past, more opportunity for independent work; and let me urge you to keep in close touch with them in fields besides that of their strictly educational work . . . . In that way you will learn more of the spirit of science, the spirit with which you cannot become intimately acquainted in lecture theaters . . . but only in daily association with those engaged in research.
--Ivan P. Hall, Cartels of the Mind: Japan's Intellectual Closed Shop (New York: Norton, 1998), pp. 121-22. [emphases mine]
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