Mori Arinori

Mori was born in the Satsuma Domain (modern Kagoshima Prefecture) from a samurai family, and educated in the Kaisenjo School for Western Learning run by the Satsuma domain. In 1865, he was sent as a student to University College London in Great Britain, where he studied western techniques in mathematics, physics, and naval surveying. He returned to Japan just after the start of the Meiji Restoration and took on a number of governmental positions within the new Meiji government.

Mori was the first Japanese ambassador to the United States, from 1871 to 1873. During his stay in the United States, he became very interested in western methods of education and western social institutions. On his return to Japan, he organized the Meirokusha, Japan's first modern intellectual society.

Mori was a member of the Meiji Enlightenment movement, and advocated freedom of religion, secular education, equal rights for women (except for voting), international law, and most drastically, the abandonment of the Japanese language in favor of English.

In 1875, he established the Shoho Koshujo (Japan's first commercial college), the predecessor of Hitotsubashi University. Thereafter, he successively served as ambassador to Qing dynasty China, Senior Vice Minister of Foreign Affairs, ambassador to Great Britain, member of Sanjiin (legislative advisory council) and Education Ministry official.

He was recruited by Itō Hirobumi to join the first cabinet as Minister of Education and continued in the same post under the Kuroda administration from 1886 to 1889. During this period, he enacted the "Mori Reforms" of Japan's education system, which included six years of compulsory, co-educational schooling, and the creation of high schools for training of a select elite. Under his leadership, the central ministry took greater control over school curriculum and emphasized Neo-Confucian morality and national loyalty in the lower schools while allowing some intellectual freedom in higher education.