Isawa Shūji

Isawa Shūji (30 June 1851 to 3 May 1917) was a Japanese educator of the Meiji period, born to an impoverished samurai family in Shinano Province. He became one of the principal builders of Japan's modern school system, helping to establish the Tokyo Normal School, now the University of Tsukuba, the Tokyo School for the Deaf, and the Tokyo School of Music, now the Tokyo University of the Arts. Isawa also developed Japan's first school music curriculum, work that shaped how music was taught nationally, and he is remembered as the first person recorded to use a non-English language on the telephone.