Sone Arasuke

Sone Arasuke

Shishaku Sone Arasuke ( Japanese 曾 禰 荒 助 ; born February 20, 1849 in Chōshū-han , Nagato Province ; †  September 13, 1910 ) was a Japanese diplomat and politician .

Life

Born in February 1849, Sone Arasuke was adopted into a samurai family of Chōshū-han, today's Yamaguchi Prefecture . He fought in the Boshin War on the side of the troops loyal to the emperor. After the Meiji Restoration , Sone was sent to France to study and served in the Army Ministry on his return . He later served in various cabinet offices such as that for law or newspapers. In 1890 he became the chief secretary of the lower house in the first Japanese parliament . In the lower house election in 1892 he was elected to one of the seats and served as deputy speaker of parliament . In the following year he became the Japanese ambassador to France, where he negotiated the repeal of the so-called unequal treaties .

After returning to Japan, he served as a minister in a number of cabinets. So as Minister of Justice in the third Ito cabinet , Minister of Trade and Agriculture in the second Yamagata cabinet and Minister of Finance in the first Katsura cabinet and other posts.

During the Russo-Japanese War , together with Takahashi Korekiyo and other diplomats , he secured foreign loans for Japan that were needed to finance the war. In 1900 Tennō Meiji Sone nominated for a seat in the House of Lords and in 1902 he was raised to the rank of Danshaku according to the Japanese nobility system of Kazoku . In 1906 he received a seat on the Privy Council and in the following year he was raised to the title of Shishaku.

From 1907 Sone was deputy general resident of Korea and from June 1909 to May 1910 acting general resident. He died on September 13, 1910 at the age of 61.

A stone monument stands in his honor on Enoshima Island in Kanagawa Prefecture .

literature

• William G. Beasley: Japanese Imperialism 1894-1945. Oxford University Press, Oxford / New York 1987, ISBN 0-19-822168-1 .
• Peter Duus: The Abacus and the Sword. The Japanese Penetration of Korea, 1895-1912. In: Twentieth-Century Japan - the Emergence of a World Power. University of California Press, Berkeley 1998, ISBN 0-520-21361-0 .
• Donald Keene: Emperor of Japan: Meiji and his world, 1852-1912. Columbia University Press, 2005, ISBN 0-231-12341-8 .
• Richard Sims: French Policy Towards the Bakufu and Meiji Japan 1854-1894. Routledge Curzon, 1998, ISBN 1-873410-61-1 .

Web links

Commons : Sone Arasuke  - collection of images, videos and audio files

• National Parliamentary Library : Brief biography of Sones in the Japanese Parliamentary Library . (Engl.) Accessed on 15 June 2012..

Japanese name: As is common in Japan, the family name comes before the first name in this article . So Sone is the family name, Arasuke the first name.