It can be fun to pick random people in Japan’s history and examine them. Like Ranald MacDonald, the first English teacher in Japan, a bank employee who became obsessed with Japan’s policy of national isolation, so in 1848 he caught a ride on a whaling ship and entered the country pretending to be a shipwrecked sailor. He was caught and imprisoned in Nagasaki where he taught English to government officials for several months before being sent home. Another interesting foreigner who played a role in Japan’s history is Jules Brunet, a French military officer sent to Japan by Napoleon III to help modernize the army of the Shogun at the end of the Edo Period. When the “revere the emperor, expel the foreign barbarians” movement succeeded in symbolically “restoring” the Japanese emperor to power in 1868, a conflict called the Boshin War broke out, and Jules was right in the thick of the fighting. The pro-Shogun forces eventually fled to Hokkaido where, at Jules’ suggestion, they declared a Western-style independent republic complete with elections and a president, though things came to an end a year later with the Emperor’s forces invaded. While I love the age of Internet- and Amazon-enabled convenience we live in now, if I could go back in time to see the Japan that Jules Brunet saw, I’d do it in a heartbeat.
Jules Brunet participated in several battles that formed modern Japan.
