"I want to be a man like no other. I will travel to America, study the ways of the world, start a business, and achieve my goals"

After returning to Wakayama, Kumagusu decided to study abroad by October of the same year. It’s not clear why he made that decision, especially considering he had dropped out of school because of illness. He arrived in San Francisco in January 1887, when he was 19 years old. Though he had enrolled in the Pacific Business College, he stopped going to classes after the second day and dropped out a few months later. In August, he traveled across the continent to Michigan, where he enrolled in the Michigan State Agricultural University, but there, too, he struggled to keep up with his classes. Instead, he observed at the Michigan University Museum and devoted himself to collecting plant specimens beside the Huron River. The next year, he dropped out of the agricultural school and began to do research on his own.

During that time, there were many other Japanese exchange students at Michigan University, and about 40 different names appear in Kumagusu’s journals. The document exhibited here is called “Unusual Criticisms”, and is a hand-written, personal newsletter for those students. He released his first volume in August 1889, then the second in September, and supposedly a third in September of 1890, but that one has never been found. The contents of these newsletters included things similar to information you might find on an Internet blog today, such as events that happened between students, told in a satirical manner.

The student that appears second from the top on the right hand side is Eiichiro Ono, who would become Yoko Ono’s father as well as president of the Japan Industrial Bank later in life. His name is one of the first to appear in Kumagusu’s diaries, so perhaps Kumagusu held him in great esteem. However, Ono apparently didn’t think much of Kumagusu. When his son, Shunichi, went to study in America, he warned him of three things: “Don’t be tainted by socialism, don’t marry a foreign woman, and don’t become like Kumagusu.” In the end, though, Shunichi rejected his father’s lifestyle and returned to Japan without a degree. He took a job as an assistant lecturer at the Kyoto Imperial Zoology School, but before a year was up, he quit and became an unaffiliated, amateur researcher. It just so happened that he ended up very much like Kumagusu.