Suematsu Kenchō
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Japanese politician and man of letters Suematsu Kencho (末松 謙澄 Suematsu Kenchō?, September 30, 1855 – October 5, 1920) was born in the hamlet of Maeda in Buzen Province, now part of Yukuhashi, Fukuoka Prefecture.
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[edit] Suematsu at Cambridge
Suematsu graduated with a law degree from Cambridge University (St. John's College, Cambridge) in the 1870s. He was active as a translator, historian, journalist, politician and statesman in the Meiji Era, 1868-1912. His reputation has suffered somewhat at the hands of the anti-elitist Ryotaro Shiba in his eight-volume Saka no ue no kumo, and hence Suematsu is little-known in Japan.
While at Cambridge Suematsu wrote the first English translation of Genji Monogatari. He was the third Japanese to graduate from Cambridge University.
[edit] Political activities
Suematsu was elected to the Diet of Japan in 1890. Suematsu served as Communications Minister (1898) and Home Minister in his father-in-law Ito Hirobumi's fourth cabinet, 1900-01. He had married Ito's second daughter Ikuko in 1889 when he was 35 and she was 22. As they were from clans which had fought in the 1860s (Kokura and Chōshū), he wittily described his marriage as "taking a hostage".
Suematsu was influential in the founding of Moji port in 1889, approaching Shibusawa Eiichi for finance. He also worked to improve the moral standards of Japanese theatre and founded a society for drama criticism .
In 1904-5 Suematsu was sent by the Japanese cabinet to Europe to counteract anti-Japanese propaganda of the Yellow Peril variety and argue Japan's case in the Russo-Japanese War, much as Harvard-educated Kaneko Kentaro was doing at the request of Ito Hirobumi at the same time in the USA.
[edit] Books and articles
- Suematsu Kencho: International Envoy to Wartime Europe, Ian Nish in 'On the Periphery of the Russo-Japanese War Part II', STICERD Discussion paper, LSE, No. IS/05/491, May 2005
- Japanese Students at Cambridge University in the Meiji Era, 1868-1912: Pioneers for the Modernization of Japan, by Noboru Koyama, translated by Ian Ruxton, (Lulu Press, September 2004, ISBN 1-4116-1256-6)
- "Suematsu Kencho, 1855-1920: Statesman, Bureaucrat, Diplomat, Journalist, Poet and Scholar," by Ian Ruxton, Chapter 6, Britain & Japan: Biographical Portraits, Volume 5, edited by Hugh Cortazzi, Global Oriental, 2005, ISBN 1-901903-48-6
[edit] See also
- Kikuchi Dairoku
- Inagaki Manjiro
- Cambridge University
- Anglo-Japanese relations
- Japanese students in Britain
[edit] External links
- Suematsu's memorial stone is at Yukuhashi city, Fukuoka prefecture. He was born there.
