After leaving Takato Castle grounds, where we participated in a traditional Japanese tea ceremony, we visited someplace very special - the home of Shuji Isawa, a Bridgewater State University exchange alumni (the very first) who traveled there to study higher education and translate Western contemporary scholarship into Japanese. Upon returning to Japan, Shuji Isawa finished translating English academic texts into Japanese, including several books on geology, mathematics and Darwin’s theory of evolution, amongst several others. He was later officially recognized by the Japanese ministry for his efforts, and became a national intellectual hero. The stone you see in the top panel is a memorial to the life long work of Shuji Isawa, and represents the gratitude of the people of Japan for launching the land of the Rising Sun into a new era of academic learning and intellectual thought, blending the traditional Japanese learning of poetry, philosophy, art and history with contemporary sciences and advanced mathematics. Shuji Isawa was the second Japanese national to travel abroad to the United States and return with great intellectual property for the betterment of Japan; he was also a student of the first - Jo Manjiro. Both Japanese students spent extensive time in one U.S. state - Massachusetts; 📖📝✒️ 🇯🇵