The British Model: Inoue Kowashi and the Ideal Monarchical SystemGeorge Akita and Yoshihiro Hirose

Excerpt

In the fall of 1983, Professor Gabe Masao 我部政男, then at Ryūkyū Daigaku and now at Yamanashi Gakuin Daigaku, told me that Ozaki　Harumori 尾崎春盛, grandson of Ozaki Saburō 尾崎三良, possessed primary documents dating from the Meiji and Taishō periods. Professor Gabe had known of this collection as the compiler and editor of Chihō Junsatsushi Fukumeisho, which contains reports on conditions in the provinces written by government officials (including Ozaki Saburō), whom Yamagata Aritomo 山形有朋, director of the Sanji-in of the Dajōkan, had dispatched throughout Japan. This information interested me because at the time I was working on Yamagata, and as the documents might include letters written by Yamagata to Ozaki, I asked for an introduction to Ozaki Harumori.

The collection contained diaries kept by Ozaki during 1875-1876 and 1879-1903, and these proved to be a rich source of information on the political and personal activities of high-level bureaucrats such as Ozaki and his cohorts, political incidents and developments, and frank appraisals of Meiji leaders. Ozaki did not much like Yamagata, and this antipathy may explain why the 887 letters in the collection include only two written by Yamagata. The greatest number of letters written to Ozaki by any one individual was 199 and these were from Inoue Kowashi 井上毅, one of the drafters of the Meiji Constitution. Inoue and Ozaki were personal friends and colleagues in the Meiji administration sometime before 1875, and this relationship accounts for thelarge number of letters, all of which I have transcribed and Hirose Yoshihiro has checked.