Nomen est omen?｜Michito Tsuruoka, Associate Dean of the Graduate School of Media and Governance
On May 31 this year, the Waseda-Keio baseball game in the Tokyo Big6 Baseball League was played in the presence of the Emperor for the first time in 32 years. Speaking of the Waseda-Keio game, one still hears the popular myth that “at Keio, they call it the Keio-Waseda game.” Keio people tend to respond by saying that “Keio doesn’t sweat the small stuff,” as though Keio were magnanimously letting Waseda have its way. Waseda people, unsurprisingly, are not particularly amused. Of course, saying this only invites the suspicion that Keio really does want to call it the “Keio-Waseda game.” But probably not. We have been having variations of this argument for decades.
Still, names do matter. Yet on this fundamental point, Keio itself is remarkably casual. I have spent a fair amount of time at Keio, first as a student and now as a faculty member, but I still sometimes wonder whether to call it simply “Keio University” (Keio Daigaku, 慶応大学) or use its full formal Japanese name, “Keio Gijuku University” (Keio Gijuku Daigaku, 慶應義塾大学). At academic conferences and other formal occasions, I generally make a point of introducing myself in Japanese using the full name, “Keio Gijuku University.” But depending on the occasion—or simply my mood—I quite often drop the “Gijuku.” When appearing in newspapers, magazines, or on television, I generally go along with whatever style they use.
Between “Keio” (慶応) and “Keio Gijuku” (慶應義塾), there is no question that the latter is the formal name. Yet there is nothing particularly wrong with the former. By contrast, I have never heard anyone from Aoyama Gakuin University shorten its name to “Aoyama University.”
When it comes to abbreviating university names in Japanese, Todai for the University of Tokyo and Kyodai for Kyoto University immediately come to mind. Applying the same formula to Keio gives us Keidai. Indeed, in newspaper articles and headlines, where space is at a premium, one occasionally encounters phrases such as “Keidai professor.” Unlike Todai or Kyodai, however, Keidai is almost never used in conversation. We simply say Keio. It is no longer than Keidai, whether written or spoken, so there is little reason not to.
What, then, happens in English? No matter how hard one looks, examples of “Keio Gijuku University” are extremely difficult to find. From quite early on, it has simply been “Keio University.” This is strikingly different from Aoyama Gakuin University and Kwansei Gakuin University, both of which invariably retain “Gakuin” in their English names. So where did “Gijuku” go?
There is a certain irony here. It was Fukuzawa Yukichi, Keio’s founder, himself who gave the school the name Keio Gijuku in 1868. “Keio” was simply the name of the era at the time, just like Showa. Gijuku, on the other hand, reflected Fukuzawa’s vision of a new kind of school, inspired in part by British public schools. Arguably, then, Gijuku was the more meaningful part of the name. Yet in English, that is precisely the part that disappeared.
This is all the more curious because juku is everywhere within Keio. Students are jukusei, graduates are jukuin, and we use jukunai to mean “within Keio.” Zen-juku refers to Keio as a whole. I actually rather like this profusion of juku terminology, which makes it a little sad that none of it survives in English. The head of Keio is called the jukucho in Japanese, a rather distinctive title. In English, however, the jukucho is simply the “President,” which somehow sounds rather ordinary.
Completely unrelated, but the English title for the head of the Imperial Household Agency’s Board of the Ceremonies is “Grand Master of the Ceremonies.” If anything, the English sounds more impressive than the Japanese.
In any case, thanks to the disappearance of “Gijuku” in English, Keio has ended up with a university name that is easy to pronounce and easy to remember overseas. Had it been “Keio Gijuku University,” very few people outside Japan would probably have pronounced it correctly.
Nomen est omen: a name is said to reveal something of the thing it names. Keio’s ability to shift effortlessly among 慶應義塾大学, 慶応大学, 慶応, and Keio University may itself be a product of Fukuzawa Yukichi’s pragmatic spirit. Come to think of it, when I joined Keio nearly 10 years ago, there was no ceremony at which I was formally presented with my letter of appointment. And why should there be? I already knew what job I had come to take up.