The Exiled Rebel

Tatsui Baba (or Baba Tatsui; 1850-1888) was a Japanese liberal intellectual who advocated his country's independence from Britain, the education of its women, and the cultivation of its language. The son of a middle-ranking samurai, he studied Engineering and then Law in London as a young man.

Tatsui and four other young men of the Tosa clan traveled to England via the United States in 1870, when he was twenty. It was part of of an effort by the wealthy, powerful clans and the government to westernize Japan by educating their most promising sons abroad.

In London he opposed the use of English as the official language of Japan because "the wealthier classes of the people can be free from the daily occupation to which the poorer classes are constantly subjected, and consequently the former can devote more time for learning the language than the latter. If affairs of state, and all affairs of social intercourse are to be transacted through the English language, the lower classes will be shut out from the important questions which concern the whole nation. ....the consequence being that there will be an entire separation between the higher class and the lower, and no common sympathies between them; and thus they will be prevented from acting as one, and so the advantages of unity will be entirely lost."

He cried out against the Treaty of 1858, which gave those Englishmen accused of crimes against Japanese citizens the right to be tried in British consular courts, which too often forgave them.

His experience turned him into a dissident leader, and by the time he returned in the 1880s his criticism of the government was strong. "No despotic government exists for long," he said in a public lecture. The result was losing his right to free speech for six months.

He was arrested in 1885 on suspicion of trying to obtain explosives and detained for six months. Upon release he left Japan for the last time and settled in Philadelphia, where his health soon failed. Finally he died alone in the University of Pennsylvania's hospital.

Tatsui Baba is buried in Woodlands Cemetery, his grave marked by this handsome obelisk and a little grove of bamboo. I do not know the meaning of the Japanese characters but the bottom of the plinth reads,

Tatsui Baba
Died Nov. 1, 1888
Aged 38 Years

Read more about him at: HERE and HERE.