Biography
Okazaki was born as the younger son in a samurai class family in Wakayama Domain, what is now Wakayama Prefecture. His father was a karō with revenues of 400 koku as a direct retainer of the Kiishū Tokugawa family, and he was the first cousin of Mutsu Munemitsu.
After the Meiji Restoration, at the invitation of Mutsu Munemitsu, Okazaki left Wakayama for Tokyo in 1873. When Mutsu was appointed as ambassador to the United States, Okazaki accompanied him as his secretary and enrolled in the University of Michigan, where he became acquainted with Minakata Kumagusu. Okazaki returned to Japan in 1890, and was elected to the lower house of the Diet of Japan in the Japanese general election, 1890. It marked the start of his political career, and he was subsequently to be reelected to the House of Representatives for ten consecutive times. In 1897, he became a member of the Liberal Party of Japan (Jiyūtō). After Mutsu’s death, he became associated with another of Mutsu’s protégés, Hoshi Toru, and supported the Ōkuma Shigenobu administration, and the formation of the Rikken Seiyūkai party.
In 1900, Okazaki was chosen to become Minister of Communications in the 4th Itō Hirobumi cabinet. For the next twenty years, he continued to play an active, behind-the-scenes role in Japanese party politics, reemerging into the spotlight as Minister of Agriculture and Commerce under the Katō Takaaki administration in 1925. In 1928, he was appointed to the House of Peers.
Read more about this topic: Okazaki Kunisuke
Famous quotes containing the word biography:
“In how few words, for instance, the Greeks would have told the story of Abelard and Heloise, making but a sentence of our classical dictionary.... We moderns, on the other hand, collect only the raw materials of biography and history, “memoirs to serve for a history,” which is but materials to serve for a mythology.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“As we approached the log house,... the projecting ends of the logs lapping over each other irregularly several feet at the corners gave it a very rich and picturesque look, far removed from the meanness of weather-boards. It was a very spacious, low building, about eighty feet long, with many large apartments ... a style of architecture not described by Vitruvius, I suspect, though possibly hinted at in the biography of Orpheus.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The death of Irving, which at any other time would have attracted universal attention, having occurred while these things were transpiring, went almost unobserved. I shall have to read of it in the biography of authors.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)