Saionji Kinmochi - Saionji's First Sojourn Overseas Career

Saionji's First Sojourn Overseas Career

After the Meiji Restoration, Saionji resigned. With the support of Ōmura Masujirō he studied French in Tokyo. He left Japan on SS Costa Rica with a group of thirty other Japanese students sailing to San Francisco. He travelled on to Washington where he met Ulysses Grant, President of the United States of America. He then crossed the Atlantic spending 13 days in London sightseeing, before finally arriving in Paris on 27 May 1871. Paris was in the turmoil of the Commune, and Paris was not safe for Saionji - indeed his tutor was shot when they stumbled upon a street battle. Saionji went to Switzerland and Nice, before settling in Marseilles where he learnt French with the accent of that city. He made his way to Paris following the suppression of the Commune. He studied law at the Sorbonne and became involved with Emile Acollas, who had set up the Acollas Law School for foreign students studying law in Paris. These were the early years of the Third Republic, a time of high idealism in France. Saionji arrived in France with highly reactionary views but he was influenced by Acollas (a former member of the League of Peace and Freedom) and became the most liberal of Japanese major political figures of his generation. When the Iwakura Mission visited Paris in 1872, Iwakura was quite worried about the radicalism of Saionji and other Japanese students. He made many acquaintances in France, including Franz Liszt, the Goncourt brothers, and fellow Sorbonne student Georges Clemenceau.

On his return to Japan, he founded the Ritsumeikan University in 1869 and Meiji Law School, which later evolved into Meiji University in 1880.

In 1882, Itō Hirobumi visited Europe in order to research the constitutional systems of each major European country, and he asked Saionji to accompany him, as they knew each other very well. After the trip, he was appointed ambassador to Austria-Hungary, and later to Germany and Belgium.