Ian Austin
The Iwakura Embassy Departure Memorial at Yokohama Port Historic District. The central image depicts Iwakura Tomobe and two of his four deputies as they departed Japan to embark on the Iwakura Embassy’ s visit to the United States.
The General Grant Memorial in Tokyo, Japan. Shibusawa Eiichi, who was Meiji Japan’ s most famous businessman and commenced his career in the Ministry of Finance, co-funded the construction of this memorial.
Ian Austin them well aware of both the scale of the revolution America had enacted since 1861 and the scale of the contextually defined revolution that laid before them to secure a sovereign future for their own country.
Like Hamilton in 1789, Lincoln in 1861 and Grant in 1869, in 1872 Iwakura and his four deputies possessed an unwavering self-belief in their capacity to deliver the transformative changes needed for their nation. They believed that, over time, these changes would result in the end of its unequal treaty status and Japan would emerge as a sovereign international power. Since 1868, the Meiji regime had already executed a centralization of state powers and had begun an economic development revolution( in the form of internal improvements) like the ones advocated by Hamilton in his 1790s Reports to the Congress, which were carried out by Lincoln and advanced by Grant, Boutwell and Fish. Above all else, Hamilton, Lincoln and Grant provided the empirical template for the shared political revolutionary force driving the Iwakura Embassy and the Meiji regime: nationalism. They were intent on securing their nation’ s unity, sovereignty and prosperity, in the face of both ongoing domestic division and foreign incursion.
The Iwakura Embassy group departed from Boston to Liverpool in August 1872, but the influence Grant and his execution of Hamiltonian statecraft had on the Meiji revolution was far from complete.
On June 21, 1879, Grant, his wife Julia and a small entourage arrived in Nagasaki
before making their way to Yokohama- Tokyo for the longest national stop on their global two-year journey. The visit was both a personal and diplomatic engagement for Grant, who had committed to mediating a territorial dispute between China and Japan. Nothing was left to chance in relation to the Grants’ time in Japan, with Iwakura( by then the most senior member of the government) executing their threemonth stay as an extension of Meiji state policy. Iwakura’ s objective was to place 27-year-old Emperor Mutsuhito in direct dialog with the American statesman to obtain first-hand knowledge of how to build the nation.
In his conversations with Mutsuhito, Grant held that foreign loans came with the significant risk of an even further loss of Japan’ s national sovereignty at the hands of London and the other European powers. This dialogue was particularly relevant and was initiated by Iwakura because the Meiji regime in 1879 found itself in the same financial predicament that Grant had faced in March 1869. Japan was encumbered by an unprecedented level of( civil war) debt as a result of the Satsuma Rebellion of 1877; it needed to repay this debt but also required state funding for the internal improvements essential for national industrialization.
Prior to Grant’ s visit, the Meiji regime had split into two distinct factions— those who advocated for foreign loans from London and continental European sources and those who believed the risk of foreign loans was too great for the nation’ s sovereignty. In early 1879, Okuma Shigenobu, the unifier of the currency and founder of the Japanese national mint, submitted a fourpoint proposal to remedy the growing financial strains upon the regime, including the use of substantial foreign loans( 50 million yen to be repaid over 25 years).
Okuma advocated for foreign loans alongside one of the four Iwakura Embassy deputies, Ito Hirobumi, based on their empirical experiences abroad in continental Europe and America. Iwakura let the proposal sit unanswered throughout Grant’ s visit to Japan precisely because he did not want their distinguished foreign guests to become embroiled in domestic political affairs. In his opposition to Okuma’ s foreign loan proposal, Iwakura had an important political ally— Privy Council member and influential conservative Danshaku Motoda Nagazane.
Once Iwakura secured this powerful nobleman as his ally and armed himself with Grant’ s direct remarks to Emperor Mutsuhito, there was only one possible outcome. Mutsuhito would not break from his closest adviser, Iwakura. He would also cite the words of warning from Grant on foreign loans during their shared dialogue, which confirmed his own thoughts on the matter. The remaining question was how to assure that the imperial veto of Okuma’ s foreign proposal did not permanently split the regime into political factions. This was the same concern President George Washington had held in relation to the
36 FINANCIAL HISTORY | Fall 2026 | www. MoAF. org