Numa Morikazu

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Numa Morikazu (沼間守一, Numa Morikazu^?); (2 December 1843 – 17 May 1890) was a government official and journalist in Meiji period Japan.

Born to a samurai family in Edo in 1843, he was involved in scholarship early on. He learned English from James Curtis Hepburn in Yokohama, and was later sent to study western military science at Nagasaki. He translated a text on English-style infantry warfare in 1866, and in 1867, he was commissioned as a hohei-gashira nami (歩兵頭並; roughly equivalent to a lieutenant) in the Shogunate's elite Denshūtai unit. Numa fought on the Tokugawa side in the Boshin War.

Following the Meiji Restoration, after a brief period in prison, he was released due to a favor he had once done for Itagaki Taisuke, and was hired by the new Meiji government as an infantry warfare instructor for the Tosa domain. He also taught English in Tōkyō. Among his students were Takamine Hideo and Shiba Shiro, the sons of former Aizu samurai who would later become famous in academia.

Numa entered the Finance Ministry in 1872, and later worked for the Justice Ministry, and elsewhere within the government. In 1873, together with Kono Togama and Itagaki Taisuke, he founded the Liberal Party. Following peasant unrest, Numa was sent to investigate the situation in Sakata Prefecture late in 1875.

Dissatisfied with government policies restricting freedom of speech, he retired from the Genroin in 1879 and decided to devote his energies to the Freedom and People's Rights Movement. He purchased a newspaper, the Yokohama Mainichi Shinbun. Reorganizing it into the Tōkyō-Yokohama Mainichi Shinbun, he used it as a mouthpiece for the liberal ideas he always supported, and used it to call for the establishment of a national assembly. In 1881, he joined the Rikken Kaishinto with Okuma Shigenobu. At the same time, from 1882 until his death, he was head of the Tōkyō Prefectural Assembly.

Numa passed away in 1890, at the age of 47.

[edit] References

• Jansen, Marius B. The Making of Modern Japan. Belknap Press; New Ed edition (October 15, 2002). ISBN 978-0-674-00991-2
• Sims, Richard. French Policy Towards the Bakufu and Meiji Japan 1854-1894. RoutledgeCurzon (1998). ISBN 978-1-873410-61-5
• Sims, Richard. Japanese Political History Since the Meiji Renovation 1868-2000. Palgrave Macmillan. ISBN 978-0-312-23915-2