Hermann Roesler and the Making of the Meiji State. Johannes Siemes

      Introduction

      Among the foreign advisers of the Meiji government Hermann Roesler was the most influential. He was the only one who played a role in the innermost circle of the government leaders in the decisive years of the formation of the Meiji state and who had an immediate share in the most secret deliberations for the drafting of the constitution. It is very strange, therefore, that this man, who of all the foreigners who influenced the making of modern Japan, played the greatest role, is still so little known. For nearly half a century the part he played in the forming of the Meiji state was a well-kept state secret. The first among Japanese historians who seems to have had some understanding of his importance was Yoshino Sakuzō,¹ the great political thinker of the Taishō democracy and the founder of the modern constitutional history of Japan. After having come by chance into possession of some very revealing documents on constitutional questions written by Roesler in the critical years of 1881-82, he became convinced that Roesler was a key figure in the Meiji government and he labored to trace the effect of his work in Japan. Then from 1933 on the private papers of Prince Itō were published and for the first time the figure of Roesler came into full light. Relying on the Itō papers and other documents of Itō's collaborators which were also made accessible at about the same time, Suzuki Yasuzō, in an article in Monumenta Nipponica in 1941-42, gave the first comprehensive account of Roesler's work in Japan.² The study of Suzuki, published as it was in Japan in the opening days of the Pacific War, seems to have gone unnoticed outside of Japan. Foreign scholars writing on the making of the Meiji Constitution continued to pass on only fragmentary and highly inaccurate information about Roesler.³ Since that first study a good number of additional documents shedding light on Roesler's work have been discovered, so that today a much more complete presentation of his collaboration in the making of modern Japan is possible than Suzuki was able to give.

      Roesler is considered by most Japanese historians as a strong antiliberal reactionary whose ideal was the Prussian system of state. On the other hand, Itō Hirobumi writes in 1882 from Berlin, after having

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