Mori Arinori
(1847–1889), Meiji government official, reformer. A prominent Meiji government official and outspoken reformer, Mori Arinori (also Mori Yurei) remains as controversial among today's historians as he was in his own day. Born in Kagoshima to a Satsuma samurai family on 23 August 1847, Mori spent nearly a quarter of his life as a resident in the West. His time in the West was divided into three periods: 1865–1868, when he studied in Europe and sojourned in America (where he became associated with Thomas Lake Harris's religious community, Brotherhood of the New Life); 1871–1873 as chargé d'affaires in Washington, DC; and 1880–1884 as minister to Great Britain. During this period, his reputation as a Nihon no unda seiyojin (a Westerner born of Japan) was spawned by his precocious proposal in 1869 to abolish sword-wearing, which briefly forced him out of the government; by his proposal in 1873 to adopt the English language in place of Japanese; by the Meiji Six Society (Meirokusha), which he helped organize in 1873 to promote Western-inspired "civilization and enlightenment" through monthly lecture meetings and a published journal; and by his first marriage to Hirose Tsuneko, daughter of a Shizuoka samurai family, in a Western-style civil ceremony in 1875.
After sixteen years in the Foreign Ministry, Mori was appointed minister of education in 1885. Some historians and critics view Mori's reorganization of the school system, his expansion of the Ministry of Education's role in producing and inspecting textbooks, and his introduction of military drill (heishiki taiso) into the curriculum as catalysts for a host of educational problems in twentieth-century Japan: elitism, credentialism, bureaucratism, militarism, and cultural nationalism.
Mori's reputation as a cultural iconoclast may have contributed to his untimely death by a knife-wielding assassin on 11 February 1889, who alleged that Mori had desecrated the sacred Grand Shrine of Ise during an official visit there in December 1887.
Further Reading
Hall, Ivan Parker. (1973) Mori Arinori. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Lincicome, Mark Elwood. (1995) Principle, Praxis, and the Politics of Educational Reform in Meiji Japan. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press.
Marshall, Byron K. (1994) Learning to Be Modern: Japanese Political Discourse on Education. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.
Swale, Alistair. (2000) The Political Thought of Mori Arinori: A Study in Meiji Conservatism. Richmond, U.K.: Japan Library.
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