Sanetomi Sanjō was a Japanese Imperial court noble and statesman at the time of the Meiji Restoration. He held many high-ranking offices in the Meiji government.
Background
Sanetomi Sanjō was born on 13 March 1837. He was a son of a family that was counted among the Gosekke, or five families whose members were entitled to appointment to the post of regent. His mother was the daughter of Yama- nouchi Toyokazu, lord of the domain of Tosa. He was raised on a farm in the outskirts of Kyoto and as a child went by the name Yoshimaro.
Education
He studied the Japanese classics under Tanimori Yoshiomi and in 1854 became a chamberlain.
Career
In 1862 he was appointed imperial envoy and, with Anegakoj i Kintomo as vice-envoy, he journeyed to Edo under the protection of the lord of Tosa and his troops to deliver to the fourteenth shogun Tokugawa Iemochi a command from the emperor urging him to carry out the expulsion of the foreigners.
In 1863 he was appointed to a newly established post as commissioner of state affairs at court, where he played a leading role among the younger court nobles who were pressing for restoration of power to the emperor and expulsion of the foreigners. He maintained covert contacts with the samurai of the domain of Chôshü who were supporters of the sonno-joi movement, working to realize the aims of the movement.
In 1863, however, a coup d’état at court brought into power the opposing kobu-gattai move-ment, centering about the clans of Aizu and Satsuma, which favored cooperation between the shogunate and the imperial court. As a result, the Chôshü samurai and other supporters of the sonno-joi movement were expelled from Kyoto, and seven antishogunate court nobles, including Sanetomi, Sawa Nobuyoshi, and Higashikuze Michitomi, were obliged to flee to Chôshü (present-day Yamaguchi Prefecture). They were accompanied on this journey by a samurai of Tosa named Hijikata Hisamoto (later minister of the imperial household), who won the trust of Sanetomi and the others, and the party in time reached Mitajiri in Suô.
In 1864 the shogunate launched a punitive expedition to punish Chôshü for its unruly activities, and when Chôshü meekly acknowledged its fault, Sanetomi and four other court nobles were moved from Chôshü to Dazaifu in Kyushu, where they lived in seclusion.
With the Meiji Restoration in 1868, Sanetomi returned to Kyoto, w'here he was restored to his former court rank and position and was assigned high posts in court administration. He was appointed inspector of the Kantô region, and after Edo Castle had been handed over to the imperial forces, he supervised the transfer of governmental power in the eastern provinces. When Edo was renamed Tokyo and a military garrison established there, he was made commander of it.
After the reorganization of the governmental system in 1869, he became minister of the right and in 1871 advanced to the highest position in the government, that of dajodaijin (premier). Except for a brief period in 1873 when he was replaced by Iwakura Tomomi because of illness brought on by controversy over the dispatch of an envoy to Korea, he remained in the post of premier until it was abolished in 1885 and the cabinet system set up. The same year, he became home minister in the Itô Hirobumi cabinet. After the Kuroda Kiyotaka cabinet fell in 1889, he acted for a time as both prime minister and home minister until a new cabinet was formed by Yamagata Aritomo.
On his death in 1891 he was given a state funeral.
Politics
Sanetomi, determined to carry on his father’s principles, became a supporter of the sonno-joi movement, which called for restoration of power to the emperor and expulsion of the foreigners.
Connections
In 1858-59, when the high shogunate official Ii Naosuke carried out his purge of the courtiers, daimyo, and samurai who opposed his policies, Sanetomi’s father, Sanjo Sanetsumu, resigned his position at court and entered the Buddhist clergy. He died in 1859, despairing at the course that events were taking.