Ōkubo Toshimichi

Ōkubo Toshimichi in the costume of a samurai

Ōkubo toshimichi ( Jap. 大久保利通 , ōkubo toshimichi * 26. September 1830 , † 14. May 1878 in Kagoshima , Satsuma (now Kagoshima Prefecture )) was one of the leaders of the time of the Meiji Restoration , in Japan the Led revolution against the shogunate in 1868 .

Life

Ōkubo Toshimichi was born in Satsuma Province (now Kagoshima Prefecture ) as the oldest of five children. He attended the same school as Saigō Takamori, who was three years his senior, and made friends with him. At the age of 15 he was appointed administrator for Satsuma Province. However, he was embroiled in an intrigue that resulted in his father being exiled and released from office. He was pardoned by the daimyo Shimazu Nariakira and was able to resume his old post. During this time, Ōkubo Toshimichi kept close contact with Saigō Takamori.

On October 13, 1867, the daimyo of the fiefs Satsuma , Chōshū and Tosa came to the decision to eliminate the shogunate. The troops of these three provinces were able to defeat the shogunate supporters on January 3, 1868 in the Battle of Toba Fushimi , which marked the beginning of the Boshin War . This marked the beginning of the age of modern Japan.

Ōkubo Toshimichi as Japanese Minister of the Interior

In 1871 Ōkubo Toshimichi was one of the participants in the Iwakura Mission , which was tasked with studying the forms of government in Europe and the United States . After his return he got into a dispute with Saigō Takamori over whether Japan should annex Korea immediately before the West would recognize the potential of this country or not ( Seikanron ). Ōkubo Toshimichi was against this campaign . When the decision was in his favor, Saigō Takamori resigned from the government and returned to Kagoshima . In 1874 Ōkubo advocated a military expedition to Taiwan . As Interior Minister, he became a key figure in the Japanese government. In the constitutional dispute he sought a compromise between supporters of a liberal British-oriented constitution and supporters of the authoritarian Prussian constitution .

In 1877 he led the suppression of the Satsuma rebellion and thus became Saigō Takamori's main enemy. By his defeat and suicide, he had drawn the personal hostility of the followers of Saigō Takamori. Barely a year after the death of his opponent, he was murdered by Shimada Ichirō in 1878 on the way to Tokyo .

His son Ōkubo Toshikata ran the Yokohama Specie Bank from 1936 to 1943.

literature

• Sidney Devere Brown: Okubo Toshimichi and the First Home Ministry Bureaucracy . In: Bernard S. Silberman, HD Harootunian et al. (Ed.): Modern Japanese leadership. Transition and change . Papers delivered at the Conference on Nineteenth-Century Japanese Elites, held at the University of Arizona on December 21-23, 1963. University of Arizona Press, Tucson AZ 1966, pp. 195-232.
• Sidney Devere Brown: Okubo Toshimichi. His political and economic policies in early Meiji Japan . In: The journal of Asian studies . 21, 2, 1962, ISSN  0021-9118 , pp. 183-197.
• Masakazu Iwata: Ōkubo Toshimichi, the Bismarck of Japan . University of California Press, Berkeley CA et al. 1964.

Web links

Commons : Okubo Toshimichi  - album with pictures, videos and audio files

• Exhibition of the Japanese parliamentary library with portraits and short biographies of important Japanese personalities of the modern age (English, biographies only in Japanese)