Background
Hisoka Maejima was born on 24 January 1835 in Niigata. He was the second son of Ueno Sukeuemon, a samurai of the domain of Takada in Echigo Province; his childhood name was Fusagoro.
前島 密
Hisoka Maejima was born on 24 January 1835 in Niigata. He was the second son of Ueno Sukeuemon, a samurai of the domain of Takada in Echigo Province; his childhood name was Fusagoro.
In 1847 he went to Edo, where he studied medicine and Western style gunnery. In 1857 he entered the warship training school established by the shogunate and the following year received instruction in navigation and matters pertaining to commercial vessels from Takeda Ayasaburo in Hakodate.
At the command of the Hakodate government office, he undertook a survey of the waters off the Japanese coast. In 1861 he proceeded to the island of Tsushima, but reached it only after the Russian warship that had been occupying it had withdrawn. While studying in Nagasaki, he made up his mind to travel abroad and went to Edo with that purpose in mind, but his plans did not go as he had hoped and he returned to Nagasaki. There he opened a school in company with Uryu Tora and gave instruction in English. Later he was invited by the domain of Satsuma to teach English at Kagoshima. In 1866 he was adopted as heir to a shogunate official named Maejima. He changed his given name to Raisuke and, as a retainer to the shogunate, was assigned to do translation work for the Kaiseijo, the school for Western studies established by the shogunate in Edo, and for the Hyogo government office in Kobe.
At the time of the Meiji Restoration in 1868, he submitted a letter to Okubo Toshimichi, a prominent leader of the Restoration who favored moving the capital from Kyoto to Osaka, arguing that the capital should rather be moved to Edo. He held various posts in the domain of Suruga, to which the former shogun, Tokugawa Yoshinobu, had been assigned. In 1870, he took up a post in the newly formed government in Tokyo, handling tax matters in the ministries of the interior and finance; at the same time he acted as virtual director of the office in charge of transportation and communication. In 1870 he made a trip to Europe in order to study postal systems. On his return to Japan in 1871, he became chief of transportation.
In 1878 he became a member of the Genroin and in 1880 chief assistant in the Ministry of the Interior and superintendent of transportation. With the government shake-up in 1881, however, both he and his close friend Okuina Shigenobu found themselves removed from office, and they set about planning the formation of a political party known as the Rikken Kaishinto (Progressive Party).
During the years 1886 to 1890, Maejima acted as president of Tokyo Semmon Gakko, the forerunner of Waseda University. From 1888 to 1891 he also served as vice-minister of communications, presiding over the establishment of telephones as a government monopoly. In the business world, he served as president of various companies such as Kansai Tetsudo, Hokue- tsu Tetsudo, and Nisshin Scimei Hoken, and he also acted as director of the Japan Seamen’s Relief Association. In 1904 he was selected to become a member of the Upper House of the Diet.
In 1900 he was appointed by the Ministry of Education to serve as chairman of the committee for the investigation of the Japanese language.
He played a key role in setting up a modern postal system in Japan, an accomplishment that earned him the epithet “father of the post office.”
He is also famous for advocating the abolition of the use of Chinese characters in the writing of Japanese. As eai ly as the closing years of the Edo period, he recommended to the shogun Tokugawa Yoshinobu that Chinese characters be dropped from use in the Japanese writing system and in 1869 he repeated the recommendation to the newly formed Meiji government.
