Early Life
Takahashi was born in Edo (modern-day Tokyo), while Japan was still under the Tokugawa shogunate. He was the illegitimate son of a court painter in residence at Edo Castle, and adopted as the son of Takahashi Kakuji, a low-ranking ashigaru samurai in the service of the Date daimyo of Sendai Domain. He studied English language and American culture in a private school run by the missionary James Hepburn (the forerunner of Meiji Gakuin University), and went abroad with a son of Katsu Kaishū to study in London. Arriving in England in 1866, he found employment as a manservant. In 1867, he moved from England to Oakland, California in the United States, and found employment as a menial laborer.
Read more about this topic: Takahashi Korekiyo
Famous quotes related to early life:
“Many a woman shudders ... at the terrible eclipse of those intellectual powers which in early life seemed prophetic of usefulness and happiness, hence the army of martyrs among our married and unmarried women who, not having cultivated a taste for science, art or literature, form a corps of nervous patients who make fortunes for agreeable physicians ...”
—Sarah M. Grimke (1792–1873)