Gotō Kōji and Meiden School

Abstract

It is a little known fact that a private school, called the Aichi Institute of Technology (AIT) Meiden High School (“Meiden” is a Japanese acronym for “Nagoya electricity”) in Nagoya, Aichi prefecture, in central Japan, is the cradle of Ping-Pong Diplomacy. The school is famous in Japan not only for its education in electrical engineering but also for its strength in sports, such as baseball, fencing, and table tennis. The school alumni include “Ichiro” Suzuki of the Seattle Mariners (1973–), who keeps rewriting his Major League Baseball records, and the 1967 world table tennis champion in men’s singles, Hasegawa Nobuhiko (1947–2005, see chapter four). The prototype of this school, the Nagoya Institute of Electricity, was founded in July 1912 by Gotō Takasaburō (1866 –1925).¹