Iwakura Mission

• 1. Introduction

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  The Iwakura Mission set sail from Yokohama on the 23rd of December 1871, carrying more than a hundred Japanese leaders, officials, and students toward an unknown West. Their voyage would last nearly two years, crossing the United States, the United Kingdom, and most of continental Europe before looping home through Egypt, Ceylon, Singapore, and Shanghai. Among those aboard was a six-year-old girl named Tsuda Umeko, who would eventually found a university. Among them too was a young student named Kaneko Kentaro, who would one day befriend a future American president. What brought such a delegation together, and what did they find that changed Japan forever?

• 2. Origins and Ambitions

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  Guido Verbeck, a Dutch missionary and engineer working in Japan, first proposed the mission, drawing in part on the model of the Grand Embassy of Peter I. His idea landed on fertile ground. Japan had recently restored imperial rule under the Emperor Meiji, and the new government faced a set of interlocking problems that a single diplomatic voyage might begin to address.

  The mission carried three distinct mandates. The first was recognition: the Meiji emperor's dynasty, newly reinstated, needed acknowledgment from the dominant world powers. The second was negotiation: Japan labored under unequal treaties that limited its sovereignty, and the mission would attempt to open preliminary discussions about revising them. The third mandate was study. The delegation was to examine Western political, economic, legal, and educational systems in systematic detail, gathering a blueprint for Japan's own transformation.

  This approach set Japan apart from other nations encountering Western expansion in the same era. Where China responded with military resistance, Japan dispatched scholars and statesmen to understand the foundations of Western power from the inside. The Iwakura Mission was not the first such Japanese delegation abroad; the Shogunate had previously sent embassies to the United States in 1860 and to Europe in 1862 and 1863. But no prior mission matched this one in scale or ambition.

• 3. People on Board

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  The mission took its name from Iwakura Tomomi, who led it as extraordinary and plenipotentiary ambassador. Three of his four vice-ambassadors, Okubo Toshimichi, Kido Takayoshi, and Ito Hirobumi, held positions as ministers in the Japanese government. Their presence on a foreign voyage, away from their posts for almost two years, signals how seriously the government took the undertaking.

  Kume Kunitake traveled as private secretary to Iwakura Tomomi and served as the mission's official diarist. His account of the journey was published in 1878 in five volumes under the title Tokumei Zenken Taishi Bei-O Kairan Jikki, providing a detailed record of what the delegation observed across America and rapidly industrializing Western Europe.

  Beyond the forty-eight administrators and scholars, roughly fifty-three students and attendants joined the outward leg from Yokohama. Several were left behind in foreign countries to complete their education. Tsuda Umeko, just six years old at departure, remained in the United States; she returned to Japan in 1882 and founded the Joshi Eigaku Juku, now Tsuda University, in 1900. Nakae Chomin stayed in France to study the French legal system under the radical republican Emile Acollas. He later became a journalist and translator who introduced thinkers like Jean-Jacques Rousseau to Japanese readers. Makino Nobuaki, another student member, later wrote in his memoirs that dispatching the mission to America and Europe ranked among the most important events that built the foundation of the Japanese state after the Restoration.

• 4. Across America

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  The ship carrying the delegation arrived in San Francisco on the 15th of January 1872. The party then traveled by train through Salt Lake City and Chicago, reaching Washington, D.C. on the 29th of February. Their stay in the United States stretched longer than planned, partly because an attempt to open treaty negotiations required two members to return to Japan to collect proper letters of representation.

  While the treaty negotiations ultimately failed, the mission's other work proceeded energetically. Members toured schools, universities, and industrial sites in Boston, New York, and Washington, D.C., with a particular interest in educational policy. The experience of observing American institutions up close gave the delegation a detailed picture of how a rapidly industrializing democracy organized its public life.

  Kaneko Kentaro was among the students left behind when the main party sailed for Britain in August 1872. He would remain in the United States long enough to meet Theodore Roosevelt in 1890. That friendship bore consequences well beyond either man's student years: Roosevelt later mediated the end of the Russo-Japanese War, producing the Treaty of Portsmouth.

• 5. Industrial Britain

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  On the 17th of August 1872 the mission arrived at Liverpool aboard the Cunard steamer Olympus. The party traveled to London via Manchester, spending much of late August and early September visiting political, academic, and military institutions. They inspected the British Museum, rode the newly constructed London Underground, and attended musical concerts at the Royal Albert Hall.

  The delegation then dispersed into smaller groups across Britain. In Glasgow, as guests of Lord Blantyre, they stayed at Erskine House and toured shipbuilding and steel fabrication facilities along the River Clyde. In Newcastle upon Tyne, arriving on the 21st of October, they stayed at the Royal Station Hotel and met the industrialist Sir William Armstrong. The Newcastle Daily Chronicle noted on the 23rd of October 1872 that the gentlemen were attired in ordinary morning costume and, except for their complexion and the oriental cast of their features, could scarcely be distinguished from their English companions.

  At the Elswick Engine and Ordnance Works, accompanied by Captain Andrew Noble and George Rendell, the delegation examined hydraulic engines, boring and turning departments, and the construction of Armstrong and Gatling guns. They descended into Gosforth Colliery. They visited iron-ore mines in Cleveland and the Bolckow and Vaughan Iron Works in Middlesbrough. The Newcastle and Gateshead Chamber of Commerce arranged a river trip along the Tyne, taking in the High Level Bridge and several chemical and industrial works.

  In Yorkshire, accompanied by the British Envoy to Japan, Sir Harry Smith Parkes, the party toured the textile mills at Salts Mill in Saltaire and Dean Clough Mill in Halifax, and also inspected the model villages, schools, almshouses, and hospitals that Sir Titus Salt and Sir John Crossley had built for their workers. A visit to Chatsworth House on the 30th of October preceded stops at Burton-upon-Trent, Birmingham, Worcester, Stoke on Trent, and Chester.

  On the 5th of December 1872 the delegation was received at an official audience with Queen Victoria at Windsor Castle. A further audience with the Prince of Wales followed at Sandringham on the 9th of December, and the party left for France on the 16th.

• 6. Europe and the Long Way Home

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  France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Prussia, Denmark, Sweden, Austria, Italy, and Switzerland all received delegations during the first half of 1873. Nakae Chomin had already remained in France from an earlier point in the tour to study the French legal system, an immersion that would shape Japanese engagement with European republican thought for decades.

  The return voyage traced a path through Egypt, Aden, Ceylon, Singapore, Saigon, Hong Kong, and Shanghai, though stops at these locations were much briefer than the extended stays in Europe and America. The mission finally reached Yokohama on the 13th of September 1873, nearly two years after sailing out.

  Of the three original goals, only one was partly met. The aim of gaining recognition for the Meiji dynasty succeeded in the sense that the delegation met heads of state, including Queen Victoria and leading European monarchs. The treaty revision goal failed entirely, prolonging the trip by almost four months and drawing criticism that the delegates had overstepped their mandate by attempting to negotiate beyond their authority. The third goal, comprehensive study, left perhaps the deepest mark. The experience of touring Western industrial, educational, and political institutions gave the returning statesmen a detailed, firsthand basis for the modernization drives they would lead on their return.

• 7. Memory and Commemoration

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  Kume Kunitake's five-volume record, published in 1878, became the primary documentary source through which later generations understood what the mission had seen and how it had thought. His role as official diarist meant that the mission left behind not only its policy consequences but a sustained written account of Japanese observers engaging with the industrial West at a particular moment.

  In 1997 a special celebration marked the 125th anniversary of the mission's visit to the northwest of England. Led by the Centre for Japanese Studies at the University of Manchester in collaboration with the Osaka Chamber of Commerce, a delegation of over seventy leading industrialists visited the Manchester region. A civic banquet at Manchester Town Hall replicated the 1872 reception, attended by the Lord Mayor, who received ambassadors alongside a citation from the Japanese Foreign Minister. A civic plaque commemorating the anniversary was inaugurated at the site of the original Manchester Town Hall.

  On the 24th of April 2023, senior business leaders and political figures from the United Kingdom and Japan gathered at Japan House London on Kensington High Street to mark the 150th anniversary of the mission at a symposium organized by the Institute of Directors' Japan Business Group in partnership with the Embassy of Japan and multiple trade and business organizations. Among the speakers was His Excellency Hajime Hayashi, Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary of Japan to the United Kingdom, whose title echoed almost exactly the role that Iwakura Tomomi had held when he first arrived at Liverpool aboard the Olympus a century and a half earlier.