356

The Making of Modern Japan

shu , three Hizen, and one Satsuma; members included three nobles, ve Cho other slots went to former bakufu men with experience in modern administration. At middle and lower levels membership was not rmly xed, as some joined and others left the embassy during its long stay abroad. Many leaders in the Meiji period wanted to travel. The future intellectual and politi kubo to get himself included as a min laid siege to O cal leader Nakae Cho kubo, student bound for France; and many government leaders, including O saw to it that their sons were attached. More remarkable still, ve women, the youngest only seven, were sent to be educated in the United States.30 Ito shu group sent to England a decade earlier, and in Hirobumi, one of the Cho the United States Japanese minister Mori Arinori, a charter member of the Satsuma group abroad in that same era, were the only seasoned travelers in the group. A famous painting depicts the ambassadors departure from Yokohama for San Francisco in 1871. At the same time that they studied and observed they also served as evidence of Japans determination to modernize, and throughout their travels they were state guests, accompanied by the diplomatic representatives stationed in Japan and wined and dined by civic, industrial, and governmental leaders. The San Francisco Daily Evening Bulletin, for instance, hailed the ambassadors as representatives of what is today, all the circumstances of her previous condition considered, the most progressive nation on the globe. The Western world was in an expansive, condent mood in the 1870s. World fairs and industrial expositions provided settings for competition in achievement. Peace had been restored in the United States and in Europe, and industrial and rail development was reaching unprecedented heights. Pride in accomplishment went together with expectations of future commercial gain to make for receptions designed to inform and impress the Japanese visitors. They held to an exhausting schedule. The embassy scribe, Kume Kunitake, carefully recorded the details of their visits in fact-studded narrative that alternated description with observations about its signicance for Japan.31 The progress of the embassy can be followed in Kidos daily diary notations and in the voluminous correspondence he maintained. Nothing impressed him more than education in the United States. Nothing has more urgency for us than schools, he wrote, and unless we establish an unshakable national foundation we will not be able to elevate our countrys prestige in a thousand years . . . Our people are no different from the Americans or Europeans of today; it is all a matter of education or lack of education.32 Minister to Washington Mori, for his part, did spadework for the embassy by inviting leading American educators to submit their views on how Japan