Mori Arinori

Viscount Mori Arinori (森 有礼) (August 23, 1847 – February 12, 1889) was a

Mori was the first Japanese ambassador to the United States, from 1871 to 1873. During his stay in the United States, he became very interested in western methods of education and western social institutions. On his return to Japan, he organized the Meirokusha, Japan's first modern intellectual society.

Mori was a member of the Meiji Enlightenment movement, and advocated freedom of religion, secular education, equal rights for women (except for voting), international law, and most drastically, the abandonment of the Japanese language in favor of English.

In 1875, he established the Shoho Koshujo (Japan's first commercial college), the predecessor of Hitotsubashi University. Thereafter, he successively served as ambassador to Qing dynasty China, Senior Vice Minister of Foreign Affairs, ambassador to Great Britain, member of Sanjiin (legislative advisory council) and Education Ministry official.

He was recruited by

He has been denounced by post-World War II liberals as a reactionary who was responsible for Japanese elitist and statist educational system, while he was equally condemned by his contemporaries as a radical who imposed unwanted westernization on Japanese society at the expense of Japanese culture and tradition. For example, he advocated the use of English. He was also a known Christian.^[2]

Mori was stabbed by an

Selected portions of his writings may be found in W.R. Braisted's book Meiroku Zasshi: Journal of the Japanese Enlightenment which were originally published in a magazine entitled Meiroku zasshi.^[4]

In popular culture

Mori appears as a minor character in the alternate history novel The Difference Engine, by William Gibson and Bruce Sterling, as an enthusiast of modernity and a protégé of Laurence Oliphant and in the speculative fiction novel ‘The Lost Future of Pepperharrow’ by Natasha Pulley.

See also