page_title: Saionji Kinmochi
section_title: Saionji's first sojourn overseas career
hierarchical_section_title: Saionji Kinmochi / Saionji's first sojourn overseas career
caption_attribution_description: Young Kinmochi Saionji (西園寺公望, 1849-1940) studying in Paris.
context_page_description: Prince Saionji Kinmochi was a Japanese politician, statesman and twice Prime Minister of Japan. He was elevated from marquis to prince in 1920. As the last surviving member of Japan's genrō, he was the nation's most influential statesman from the mid-1920s to the early 1930s.
context_section_description: After the Meiji Restoration, Saionji resigned. With the support of Ōmura Masujirō he studied French in Tokyo. He left Japan on the SS Costa Rica with a group of thirty other Japanese students sailing to San Francisco. He traveled on to Washington, D.C. where he met Ulysses Grant, President of the United States of America. He then crossed the Atlantic, spent 13 days in London sightseeing, before finally arriving in Paris on 27 May 1871. Paris was in the turmoil of the Commune, and Paris was not safe for Saionji – indeed his tutor was shot when they stumbled upon a street battle. Saionji went to Switzerland and Nice, before settling in Marseilles where he learned French with the accent of that city. He made his way to Paris following the suppression of the Commune. He studied law at the University of Paris and became involved with Émile Acollas, who had set up the Acollas Law School for foreign students studying law in Paris. These were the early years of the Third Republic, a time of high idealism in France. Saionji arrived in France with highly reactionary views but he was influenced by Acollas (a former member of the League of Peace and Freedom) and became the most liberal of Japanese major political figures of his generation. When the Iwakura Mission visited Paris in 1872, Iwakura was quite worried about the radicalism of Saionji and other Japanese students. He made many acquaintances in France, including Franz Liszt, the Goncourt brothers, and fellow Sorbonne student Georges Clemenceau.
  On his return to Japan, he founded the Ritsumeikan University in 1869 and Meiji Law School, which later evolved into Meiji University in 1880.
  In 1882, Itō Hirobumi visited Europe in order to research the constitutional systems of each major European country, and he asked Saionji to accompany him, as they knew each other very well. After the trip, he was appointed ambassador to Austria-Hungary, and later to Germany and Belgium.
caption: Studying in Paris, 1871–80
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