Mori Arinori

On February 11, 1889, as all Tokyo prepared to celebrate the promulgation of the Meiji Constitution, an assassin's blade brought to an end the life of Mori Arinori, Japanese minister of education. Mori had been a symbol to Japanese and Westerners alike of his country's rapid, yet often painful, strides toward modernization. He was a maverick among the modernizing leaders of Meiji Japan as evidenced by even a few of his many pioneering accomplishments: as first diplomatic envoy to America, as founder of Japan's first modern philosophical society and her first commercial college, as the first to marry in the Western fashion, and as the first education minister under the new cabinet system.