Background
Takeaki Enomoto was born on 5 October 1836 in Edo, he was the second son of an official in the service of the shogunate. His common name was Kamajiro, and his literary name Ryosen.
榎本 武揚
Takeaki Enomoto was born on 5 October 1836 in Edo, he was the second son of an official in the service of the shogunate. His common name was Kamajiro, and his literary name Ryosen.
In 1856 he became a naval trainee under the sponsorship of the shogunate in Edo and in Nagasaki received instruction from Dutch naval officials. He specialized in mechanics and also studied chemistry under a medical official named Poinpe van Meerdervoort.
In 1858 he returned to Edo and was appointed a teacher in the naval training school there. When the shogunate placed an order for the construction of a warship with the Dutch, Enomoto was sent to Holland to supervise the construction and continue his studies. He left for Holland in 1862, reaching there the following year. He witnessed the hostilities then taking place between Denmark and Prussia and in Holland studied ship construction and operation, gunnery, and international maritime law. When the ship, named the Kaiyu Maru, was completed, he sailed it to Japan, reaching home in 1867.
In 1868 he was appointed vice-chief of the Navy, but although the shogunate collapsed and Edo Castle was opened to the imperial forces, Enomoto refused to hand over the warships. Instead, in the Kaiyu Maru and with six other shogunate warships following, he slipped away from the moorings off Shinagawa in Edo Bay and made his way north, passing through Sendai Bay, until he reached Ezochi, as Hokkaido was known at the time. There he went ashore and took up a position in the Goryokaku, a fortress in the city of Hakodate, where he proclaimed the formation of his own government and resisted the government forces. He was eventually persuaded to surrender the following year by Kuroda Kiyotaka, a staff officer of the government forces. Through Kuroda’s efforts, he was spared the death penalty and instead was imprisoned in Tokyo and pardoned in 1872.
Following his release, he was employed by the Agency for the Colonization of Hokkaido, headed by Kuroda, and was put in charge of mining surveys in the area. He, however, disagreed with the American advisor named Capron over the proper way to develop Hokkaido. In 1874 he was given the rank of vice admiral in the navy and was sent to Russia as envoy extraordinary and minister plenipotentiary.
In 1879 he became chief assistant to the foreign minister, and in 1880-81 served as navy minister. In 1882 he was made envoy extraordinary and minister plenipotentiary stationed in China and assisted the ambassador plenipotentiary Ito Hirobumi in concluding the Tientsin Treaty of 1885 between China and Japan.
The same year, when the first cabinet was formed under Ito Hirobumi, Enomoto was made minister of communications, being the only former shogunate official to be represented in the cabinet. He remained in the same position in the Kuroda cabinet that followed, but in 1889, when Minister of Education Mori Arinori was assassinated, Enomoto was shifted to that position. In 1890 he became an advisor to the Privy Council. In 1891, when Foreign Minister Aoki Shuzo resigned because of the attack on the Russian Crown Prince Nikolai (Otsu Incident), Enomoto replaced him as foreign minister in the Matsukata cabinet.
In 1894 he became minister of agriculture and commerce in the second Ito Hirobumi cabinet, but he later resigned when he accepted responsibility for the poisonings caused by pollution from the Ashio Copper Mine. In addition to his official duties, he also acted as head of various organizations. Thus he was vice-president and later president of the Tokyo Geographical Society, which he proposed and founded in 1874. In 1892 he organized a Resettlement Society, which had plans for helping Japanese to emigrate to Mexico, devoting his own time to its direction, but the society’s plans ended in failure in 1898.