Calligrapher: Hiroshi Itou
Meiji Era (19C)
Hirobumi Itō (1841-1909) was a politician of note in the late Edo and Meiji periods, who went by the pen name of ‘Shunpo’. He studied at the Choshu clan’s private school, Shōkasonjuku Academy, and was also part of the movement to expel the Emperor and overthrow the Shogunate at the end of the Edo period. Following the Meiji Restoration (a political event that restored practical imperial rule to Japan in 1868 under Emperor Meiji), he was Deputy Ambassador to the Iwakura Mission, the first Prime Minister, and also Prime Minister of the fifth, seventh and tenth generations. In 1909, he was assassinated in Harbin, China, by the Korean independence activist An Jung-geun. The basis for this writing is an ancient poem from China: ‘司馬君実独楽園’ (‘Shiba-Kun Jitsu Dokuraku En’), with five stanzas and eight characters, authored by Su Shi, a poet of the Northern Song Dynasty in China. In it, the ‘Dokurakuen’ garden is the setting in which a celebration of the retired life of Shibakou, a Confucian scholar of the Northern Song dynasty, unfolds.