Articles
and issues

Issue #1

O'Reilly (2024). The shorter their time abroad, the more famous they became: Explaining the paradox in how Japan’s earliest students abroad are remembered. 

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Abstract: In the mid-nineteenth century, feudal Japan sent two dozen of their best and brightest to study abroad in the United Kingdom. Some of those figures, upon their return to Japan, would later earn very prominent positions in the Meiji government or society, successfully translating their time abroad into a mantle of authority on the wider world. But there is something odd about this link between experiences abroad and such figures' prominence later in life: it appears that in general, those who spent the least time abroad in the UK in the 1860s tended to reach the greatest socio-political prominence once they returned to Japan. And of the four most famous “students” to be sent to the UK, two actually never enrolled in any sort of formal instruction at all. In that sense, the importance of these four to Meiji-era Japanese society seems unlikely to be born out of any of the tangible benefits of study abroad.

In this article, I focus not only on the actual accomplishments but also the posthumous reputations of the most famous four to be sent to the UK. These four were Itō Hirobumi, Inoue Kaoru, Mori Arinori and Godai Tomoatsu, and they have perhaps unsurprisingly been celebrated much more in Japan than in the land of their relatively brief sojourns abroad. I suggest reasons why Godai, in particular, has enjoyed a surge in popularity over 150 years after his return from the UK, and what makes him, even more than the more controversial figures of Mori or Itō, an appealing figure to twenty-first century audiences. By exploring how and why certain figures are chosen for apotheosis as national heroes, I aim to understand how these figures reflect contemporary society’s values, and how those values have changed over the intervening years.