Dear fellow Wharton alumni in Japan,

On behalf of the board of directors, we sincerely welcome all of you to the Wharton Club of Japan (the “Club”).

The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania is the world’s first collegiate business school, which was the brainchild of Joseph Wharton, a Philadelphia entrepreneur, who wrote a letter urging the University of Pennsylvania to create a school to prepare young men to grasp and take control of the complex economy that was unfolding.

To our amazement, one of the first five graduates of the Wharton School in 1884 was Shiro Shiba, a displaced and defeated Japanese samurai from Aizu who, at the age of 32, became a member of the Wharton’s first graduating class. Shiba later returned to Japan for a career in the Japanese parliament.