Japan's first prime minister started out torching a British legation
In 1862 a young radical named Itō helped set fire to the British legation in Edo, sworn to drive out foreigners. A year later he was secretly aboard a ship to London, breaking the shogunate's ban on foreign travel, to study at University College. The experience turned an anti-Western zealot into the architect of modern Japan's government.
He was born Hayashi Risuke on 16 October 1841 in a farming village in the Chōshū domain. While he was small, his father was adopted into a low-ranking samurai family named Itō, lifting the household to the bottom rung of warrior status. His eventual name, Hirobumi, means extensive learning and was drawn from the Analects of Confucius. As a teenager he studied at the private academy of the activist Yoshida Shōin, and after Yoshida was executed in 1859 he threw himself into the violent Revere the Emperor, Expel the Barbarians movement, even killing a scholar on the strength of a false report.
As one of the Chōshū Five he reached London on 4 November 1863 and lodged with the chemist Alexander Williamson. After about six months, reading in The Times that Western ships had shelled Shimonoseki, he hurried home to argue that expelling foreigners was impossible, then served as a negotiator after Chōshū's defeat. He came to dismiss the old anti-foreign fervour as purely emotional. For the rest of his life he read English publications and gave interviews to Western reporters without an interpreter.
After the Meiji Restoration he became the first governor of Hyōgo, home to the newly opened port of Kobe, and urged centralised rule, the end of class barriers and the study of world science. A tour of American finance in 1870 and 1871 led to Japan adopting the gold standard, and he helped design a national banking system. He sailed with the Iwakura Mission to the United States and Europe as a deputy ambassador.
In 1885 he replaced the old council of state with a cabinet and became Japan's first prime minister, later serving three more terms. He steered the drafting of the 1889 constitution, modelled on Prussia's, and founded a political party in 1900. After the war with Russia he became the first Resident-General of Korea in 1905. He resigned in June 1909 and was assassinated that October in Harbin by the Korean independence activist An Jung-geun.
Source: Itō Hirobumi
