Munemitsu Mutsu

Munemitsu Mutsu was born in Wakayama in 1844 and joined Sakamoto Ryoma’s Kaientai before the Meiji Restoration. He entered the new government’s foreign affairs administration, governed Hyogo and Kanagawa, and worked in taxation. His political career was interrupted by the Tosa Risshisha conspiracy case: dismissed in 1878, he spent five years in prison. Travel in Europe and America preceded his return to diplomacy and appointment to Washington in 1888. ¹

Washington gave Mutsu a negotiating role beyond relations with the United States. On November 30, 1888, he and Mexican minister Matias Romero signed a treaty that admitted Mexicans to Japan’s interior under Japanese law and jurisdiction. Mutsu had urged Tokyo to send instructions by telegraph, fearing that delay would lose the opportunity. This agreement became Japan’s first equal treaty with a country outside Asia and supplied a precedent for ending foreign judicial privileges. ^{2, 3}

Mutsu also helped decide how an American reward should benefit the people who rescued survivors of the bark Cashmere off Tanegashima in 1885. Congress appropriated $5,000. In consultations reported by Secretary of State Thomas F. Bayard in January 1889, Mutsu endorsed an educational fund and proposed keeping the entire appropriation for that purpose, rather than distributing part as personal rewards outside the island. President Grover Cleveland approved support for a school accessible to the rescuing villages. ⁴

Back in Japan, Mutsu served as agriculture and commerce minister and entered the first elected House of Representatives. As foreign minister from 1892 to 1896, he pursued treaty revision and a forceful policy toward Qing China. The Anglo-Japanese commercial treaty of 1894 provided for ending British consular jurisdiction in Japan. ^{1, 5, 8}

Mutsu and Prime Minister Ito Hirobumi signed the Treaty of Shimonoseki in April 1895. It required China to recognize Korean independence, cede Taiwan, the Pescadores, and the Liaodong Peninsula, and pay a large indemnity; Russian, French, and German intervention subsequently forced Japan to relinquish Liaodong. Mutsu set out his account of the war’s diplomacy in Kenkenroku, a work prepared with access to confidential records and withheld from public release for decades. He died in 1897. ^{5, 6, 7, 9}