Mori Arinori
Viscount Mori Arinori (森 有礼) (August 23, 1847 – February 12, 1889) was a Meiji period Japanese statesman, diplomat, and founder of Japan's modern educational system.In 1865, he was sent as a student to University College London in Great Britain, where he studied western techniques in mathematics, physics, and naval surveying.Mori was a member of the Meiji Enlightenment movement, and advocated freedom of religion, secular education, equal rights for women (except for voting), international law, and most drastically, the abandonment of the Japanese language in favor of English.He was recruited by Itō Hirobumi to join the first cabinet as Minister of Education and continued in the same post under the Kuroda administration from 1886 to 1889.[4] Mori appears as a minor character in the alternate history novel The Difference Engine, by William Gibson and Bruce Sterling, as an enthusiast of modernity and a protégé of Laurence Oliphant and in the speculative fiction novel ‘The Lost Future of Pepperharrow’ by Natasha Pulley.