Background
Hori Tatsunosuke was born in 1823.
堀達之助
Hori Tatsunosuke was born in 1823.
When Commodore Perry’s American fleet revisited Japan (1854), he was commissioned to interpret for Daigaku-no-kami (head of the Shogunate College) Hayashi, who received the American visitor, on behalf oi the Shogunate Government. After Shimoda port (Shizuoka Prefecture) was opened, he was appointed official interpreter for the Shimoda Magistrate's Office. While in that post in 1855, he arbitrarily confiscated a written request for trade with Japan filed by a German national. He was jailed for that action. Pardoned later, he was appointed chief compiler of dictionaries at the Shogunate’s Foreign Documents Institute (1859). In January, 1862, he published a translation of a Dutch newspaper published in Batavia. Later he compiled an English-Japanese dictionary on the basis of an English-Dutch dictionary. Published in 1862, Hori's dictionary was received enthusiastically. Its price rose soon ten times the original because of the great demand. He became professor at the Kaiseisho, predecessor of Tokyo University.
