Metropolitan Museum of Art, Online Collections

By Ian Austin

When members of the Iwakura Embassy of Japan’ s Meiji regime visited Washington, DC, from February 29 through August 6, 1872, they found President Ulysses S. Grant at the height of his political power. Through executive action and a Republican-dominated Congress, he was delivering on his promises of Hamiltonian national sovereignty and economic prosperity. The Meiji men found in President Grant a leader executing effective national( war) debt management, carrying out its commitment to US currency stabilization and driving federally funded internal improvements designed to advance national sovereignty and industrialization.

The nature of American democracy did not hold a primary interest to the Iwakura Embassy. Rather, their interest in Grant sprang from his position as a leader whose

1873 portrait of Meiji emperor Mutsuhito. legitimacy had been secured through a bloody civil war. Having themselves seized power in 1868 as a result of a civil war known as the Boshin Rebellion, most of the Embassy representatives— who were all born samurai and retained their martial beliefs— had come from the political periphery of Japanese power to topple the long-standing Tokugawa regime( 1603 – 1867). Through a process known as the Meiji Restoration, they elevated a young man named Mutsuhito to the imperial seat. He remained emperor of Japan until his death in 1912.

Prior to their arrival in Washington, the Iwakura Embassy group, led by Iwakura Tomobe, had undertaken extensive studies on how to deliver national modernity to their underdeveloped Asian nation. They had toppled the Tokugawa for its inability to counter the Western powers’ imposition of the unequal treaty system and its later failure to aid the Choshu and Satsuma hans( domains) in the face of Western naval power. They recognized that the 108-member Iwakura Embassy was responsible for delivering the empirical nation-building knowledge required to deliver sovereignty and prosperity; failure to translate that knowledge into results would spell an end to its legitimacy as the new ruler of Japan.

The geographic and political isolation of the Choshu and Satsuma— with Choshu at the southwestern end of Honshu and Satsuma at the southwestern end of the Kyushu Island— made them distant from the political center of Kyoto, where the Tokugawa were based. This led to an“ outsider” mentality amongst those who would form the Meiji regime, and thereby the majority of the Iwakura Embassy. Prior to the 1868 Restoration, the men of Satsuma and Chosun had long executed— against the explicit orders of the center— engagement with the Western powers( Dutch trading merchants) and regional peoples( Taiwanese and Chinese). These young, energetic“ outsiders” would fight with both the sword and the pen to govern under the Meiji Imperial seat to create a modern Japan.

34 FINANCIAL HISTORY | Fall 2026 | www. MoAF. org