“The great event of the term was, of course, the visit of Mrs. Safford and Mrs. Robert Harris [sister of the Rev. Samuel Duncan, for whom the school was named]. Mrs. Harris is a benefactor not only in material and financial affairs, but also in spiritual matters … She left us with a most appropriate motto, which has been written in Japanese on the wall of our chapel, and will afterwards be inscribed in both Japanese and English on a kakemono to hang of the wall of the chapel in our recitation building: ‘Not slothful in business; fervent in spirit; serve the Lord.'”

– Eighty-Seventh Annual Report, Baptist Missionary Magazine, January, 1901

Duncan Academy, Tokyo, c. 1910.

See also:
Kochi Jogakkai [Kochi Girls’ School], Kochi, c. 1920.
Futaba-kai School, Tokyo, c. 1910.
Bible Training School, Tokyo, c. 1905.
Sarah Curtis Home, Tokyo, c. 1910.

Duncan Academy (aka Tokyo Gakuin) was a school for boys first established in 1895 at Tsukiji, in the Foreign Settlement, by the American Baptist Missionary Union. It would move to Ichigaya in 1898, and later became part of Kanto Gakuin University. (Its girl-school counterpart was the Sarah Curtis Home.)

The academy’s first principal, Ernest Clement, would later teach at the First Higher School in Tokyo (now part of Tokyo University) and he would be awarded the Fifth Order of the Rising Sun in 1927.