The Board of Councillors Meeting at Jukukan-kyoku (Keio Corporate Administration) Conference Hall 3

Image: A Board of Councillors meeting during the era of President Saku Sato in Conference Hall 3. The ashtrays and electric fans reflect the era. (July 20, 1970)

When speaking of large conference rooms on the Mita hilltop, one thinks of Conference Hall 3 on the third floor of the Jukukan-kyoku (Keio Corporate Administration) and the Large Conference Hall on the second floor of the Old University Library. Both are atmospheric rooms; the latter served as the Main Reading Room until the new library was built. I still have a faint memory of the feel of the hard wooden chairs I used there when I was an undergraduate.

For a long time after the war, the first thing that came to mind when "conference room" was mentioned at Mita was Conference Hall 3. For faculty meetings and research seminars, it became customary to use the conference rooms in the New Graduate Building after it was completed in 1969. What remains in my memory regarding Conference Hall 3 is the time around 1959 when the first labor union was formed at the Juku, and collective bargaining with the Juku authorities began to be held in that room. In many cases, these were so-called mass bargaining sessions that lasted late into the night. I participated in them as a union member. At that time, many old systems and practices from the pre-war era remained at Keio, particularly regarding employment. For example, there was the "fushu (unpaid assistant) system" and the "mochi-dai (rice cake money)" that those assistants received at the end of the year. Furthermore, the staff responsible for the maintenance and cleaning of the school buildings and grounds were called "jukuboku." These matters, along with wage issues, were taken up as agenda items in the bargaining sessions and were eventually reformed. At the time, we took great pleasure in saying things like, "This is Keio's 'modernization' revolution."

From 1977, the roles were reversed, and I was the one being challenged in collective bargaining with the union. This was because I served as the Vice-President in charge of accounting and labor relations under President Tadao Ishikawa until 1981. Consequently, Conference Hall 3 became a nostalgic space for me, not only for collective bargaining but also as the venue for the Board of Councillors meetings. If you were to ask which was more difficult for me, it would be the latter. In this case, many of the councillors were individuals with extensive experience in corporate management. Explaining the financial status of the Gijuku to them accurately and without causing misunderstanding—based on the "Accounting Standards for School Corporations," which has a significantly different structure from corporate accounting—was a job that required no small amount of care. After finishing that first report and the meeting adjourned, I felt a sense of relief when Ichiro Okuma, who was attending as the Dean of the Faculty of Economics, told me, "It was so-so."

From 1983 onward, those Board of Councillors meetings began to be held in the Large Conference Hall of the Old University Library.