Career
First visited Japan as a tourist and when returning home after a brief sojourn of a few months in¬vited a Japanese friend Kenjiro Saito to return home with him. When Shibata, Lord of Hiuga, came to France to buy arms, etc., he offered his services but was re¬fused in 1865.
Later, however, he is friended Niino and Saisuke Godai, elder men of the Satsuma family, who happened to be in France at that time and was able to establish a firm in Brussels and Paris for the purpose of supplying arms, machinery, and technicians to the Japanese Government in 1866.
Soon after he was asked to take charge of the exhibition of Satsuma products at the World Exhibition in 1867.
The following year he arrived in Japan and was posted at Kagoshima as a military adviser. Three years later he was sent back to Paris by the new Meiji Government to be their agent in the Japa¬nese Mission together with Koan Maeda. In between, he wrote several articles and essays for newspapers, etc., on various aspects of ITe in Japan.
