The Japanese Imperial Government which started in 1868 tried to introduce European political institutions rapidly. Young Japanese statesmen/and scholars went abroad to study European political systems and ideas. Among European and American books on politics, government or law which were translated into Japanese, those of English utilitarians were numerous, Bentham's “Theory of Legislation”, “Morals of Legislation”, “Fragment on Government”, Mill's “On Liberty”, “Representative Government”, “Utilitarianism”, “Political Economy” were translated between 1860's and 1880's.
This paper will focus on and analyse Azusa Ono (1852-1885), whose political ideas were strongly influenced by English utilitarians. He studied in New York and London and then became a Japanese bureaucrat. After he resigned his office, his activity as a leader of an opposite party was remarkable. He was also a prolific writer, and in his last book entitled “Kokken Hanron” (“General Theory of Constitution”) were reflected the political ideas of Bentham's “Constitutional Code”, James Mill's “Government” and J. S. Mill's “Representative Government” :
Ono insisted that constitutional government should be established in Japan, He admired the British type of parliamentary government, but he tried to modify it by applying Bentham and two Mills' plans for political reforms to it. Though Ono died four years before the opening of the first Japanese parliament, his plan of constitutional government was far more liberal and democratic than Japanese Imperial Constitution. He was one of the distinguished statesmen who gained the insight and perspective in accepting English utilitarian political ideas in early modern Japan.

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John B. Putnam, a 19-year-old American youth and son of the publisher George P. Putnam, was among the visitors to Japan in the first year of the trans-Pacific line set up in 1867. The lad came, saw, and in his letters reported home things he experienced. His father, the publisher, got interested in these letters and published them in a few issues of his Putnam's Magazine, making them a fine series of record of the early American interest in the trans-Pacific voyage and Japan. Extracts from the early part of this series are introduced in the present paper with some commentaries.

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I discovered several old Japanese tombs even in the North East of England. Some were tombs of Japanese students who died accidentally without seeing their homeland again.
Bysaku Fukao was one of the unfortunate. He fell from the dock at Middlesbrough and drowned at the age of 18, on 14th November 1873. He was engaged as an articled pupil with Dixon and Company, Shipbuilding firm and studied at Walworth House College, Darlington at the same time. He was buried in Darlington West Cemetry.
Katsu Iwamoto was another. His tomb was found in St. John's Church Cemetry in Newcastle. His name was listed in the “List of Students” of Durham University Calendar 1877-78. He was a naval cadet when he was ordered by the Ministry of Imperial Japanese Navy to study gun manufacturing. But unfortunately he contracted tuberculosis and died four months later at the age of 20, on 21st June 1877.
With these predecessors' great effort the modern industrial Japan was created.

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Andrew Foster was the third American teacher to teach English at the Toyama Middle School from 1892 to 1895. He had been working for the Japan Gazette in Yokohama before coming to Toyama and so he contributed an account of his journey to Toyama to this paper. His article - we can no longer see except for its Japanese translation - tells us something about his competence as a journalist and his way of thinking.
In Toyama, Foster seemed to be an able, kind and sincere teacher and colleague. Though every foreign teacher did not enjoy a good reputation as a teacher of English at that time, he was well spoken of. Among his colleagues, he found a good friend in Tsunetarou Nannichi, a teacher of Chinese classics. Later Nannichi passed Bunken (“the English teachers' certificate examination”) to climb the first step of the ladder of success as a teacher of English. He owed much of his command of English to Foster, because he learned English from Foster as a student and a colleague.
In September of 1895 Foster suddenly gave up teaching and left for Yokohama. Six months later he hanged himself, leaving his wife and three little children. During these six months, he worked for a trading firm in Yokohama, and his superior said he had not appeared quite right mentally for the last few weeks of his life. The Japan Weekly Mail reported that Andrew Foster, a citizen of the United States, aged about 40 years, died in Yokohama, while suffering from temporary insanity.
Nobody knows why he left Toyama or what drove him to suicide. All we can tell now is that this once-good teacher had been worried, so worried that he could no longer go on teaching. He was laid to rest with his wife and his youngest son in the foreigners cemetery in Yokohama.

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Theodora was born in 1870 at London, the eldest daugher of Saburo Ozaki and his English wife Bathia Catherine Morrison. Mr. Ozaki came back to Japan, leaving his wife and three daughters in London. He later divorced Bathia according to Japanese law, but she remained his wife under the laws of England. By mutual agreement, she sent her eldest daughter Theodora to Japan to be taken care of by her father.
In May of 1887, Theodora came to Japan at the age of sixteen. A few years later she became independent of her father, working as a private tutor and an English teacher at some girls' schools. In 1891 Mrs. Hugh Fraser, the wife of a British minister, sympathized with Theodora and asked her to came to the legation as her private secretary and companion.
Theodora spent several happy years with Mrs. Fraser, but the latter had to go back to her home in Italy due to her husband's death in 1894. Theodora followed her the next year and enjoyed many pleasant days with her and her family. She met there Francis Marion Crawford, the well-known novelist and the brother of Mrs. Fraser. He encouraged her to write a book of fairy tales she had told sometimes in the family circle.
After an absence of four years she returned to Japan at the beginning of 1899 to teach English at Keio Gijuku. Her first book “The Japanese Fairy Book” appeared in 1903 and achieved great success. She wrote three more books of old Japanese stories which also gained fine reputations.
In 1905 she married the famous politician Yukio Ozaki who was the Mayor of Tokyo at that time. Thereafter she lived a happy life with him until she died from an illness at London in 1932 during her visit with her husband and her two daughters.

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The Cabinet Library, which was founded in Tokyo in 1884 as the central government library, has kept as many as one hundred Webster's dictionaries which are supposed to have been imported before and after the Meiji Restoration and belonged to the government agencies such as the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Ministry of Home Affairs, the Ministry of Justice and the Ministry of Commerce and Agriculture. The close examination of these works would suggest to us how they were accepted and consulted in the Meiji Era. The library has about fifty unabridged Webster's English dictionaries, and eleven abridged dictionaries, which were usually called “Royal Octavo” in Japan. In addition, it keeps some ten small-sized dictionaries and fifteen Webster's dictionaries, large or small, published in London.

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[in Japanese]

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