Meguro School History
Opened: 1946
Closed: 1952
The Meguro School, one of the Tokyo American Schools, opened in Tokyo at the site of the pre-war American School in Japan on September 30,1946. Its first principal was Major Herbert S. Ingraham. Major Ingraham found the building empty and was ordered to open the school within six weeks.
The school was converted during the war to a training academy for student officials from Japanese island possessions. When the war ended, upset at losing their promotions, the ex-officials did some damage to the school furniture and the school was stripped of radiators and urinals.
However, the American School’s first post-war students found old but attractive ivy-covered buildings. Textbooks arrived by ship. A sizeable collection of books locked in the school’s basement in 1941 by Russel L. Durgin, president of board of trustees of the previous school, was already on hand.
Harold Rogers, a teacher at the school in 1947, attested to the fact that Meguro School offered a fine curriculum. He stated that there was a misconception about many of the early schools’ academic diversity: the courses offered at Maguro included French, chemistry, Latin, and trigonometry.
Unmarried teachers were billeted in several refurbished office buildings, a few steps from the Tokyo Central Station. In the first years of the school, the city of Tokyo was still in ruins with only a few downtown buildings usable. Most Japanese busses, trucks and rare taxis ran on charcoal-burning gas. According to teachers, the bus from the billeting to the school frequently broke down.
The school closed in 1952.