ABSTRACT
In JANUARY 1880, Mori Arinori arrived in London as the third resident minister from Japan to be appointed to the Court of St James. Still only 32 years of age, he brought with him a reputation as an outspoken champion of radical social reform. Enlisted by the new government after the Meiji Restoration, he had quickly gained notoriety in 1869 for his infamous proposal to remove the samurai’s traditional right to bear his swords. Then, in his time as Japan’s first minister to the United States from 1870 to 1873, he had advocated religious freedom and even suggested adopting English as the official language. On his return from Washington he had gone on to found the Meirokusha, Japan’s first modern intellectual society, which spread progressive ideas through the distribution of its Meiroku Journal. This was the man whom the indefatigable Victorian traveller Isabella Bird described as an ‘advanced liberal’ when she met him on a visit to Tokyo in 1878. 1
