Mitsukuri Rinshō

Who They Were

Mitsukuri Rinshō (箕作麟祥) was a Japanese statesman, jurist and translator who lived from 19 September 1846 to 29 November 1897. He was born in Edo, the city that would be renamed Tokyo, and died in Kōjimachi-ku, a district of the same city. He held the title of baron and sat in the House of Peers, the upper chamber of Japan's imperial parliament.

His working life was spent at the centre of the Meiji state's effort to rebuild Japanese law on Western lines. He served the Ministry of Justice, the Ministry of Education, and the Daijō-kan (太政官, daijō-kan, the pre-modern Council of State that ran the government until 1885). He was also a founder and faculty member of two institutions that became Hosei University, and a member of the Meirokusha (明六社, meiroku-sha), the intellectual society of the 1870s that pushed for reform and popular enlightenment.

Life and Career

Mitsukuri Rinshō was born in the second year of the Kōka era (弘化, kōka), in the final decades of the Edo period. His father was Mitsukuri Shōgo, a scholar of Western learning, and the household belonged to the small class of Japanese intellectuals who studied Dutch and, later, other European languages under the Tokugawa shogunate.

That background shaped his career. He worked for the Gaikoku bugyō (外国奉行, gaikoku bugyō, the shogunate's commissioners for foreign affairs) and for the Bansho Shirabesho (蕃書調所, bansho shirabesho, the shogunate's institute for the study of foreign books), the two institutions through which the shogunate managed its dealings with the outside world and trained translators. When the shogunate fell in 1868 and the Meiji government took power, men with those skills were in immediate demand.

Under the new government Mitsukuri became one of the principal translators of European legal codes. He worked for the Ministry of Justice and the Ministry of Education, and he helped establish the Tokyo School of Law, one of the predecessors of Hosei University, where he also taught. In his later years he was appointed a member of the House of Peers, and he was elected to the Tokyo Academy, the learned body for scholarship. He died on 29 November 1897.

Why They Matter

Japan in the 1870s and 1880s was trying to do something no non-Western state had done: replace its own legal order with a system of codes recognisable to European powers, partly so that the unequal treaties imposed on Japan could be renegotiated. That project required people who could read French and German law and render it into Japanese — and, harder still, invent Japanese vocabulary for concepts the language did not yet have.

Mitsukuri Rinshō was one of the small group who did that work. As a translator and legal counselor at the Ministry of Justice, he helped carry European legal texts into Japanese, and the terminology coined in that process entered the language permanently. Words that Japanese speakers now use without a second thought for rights, obligations and legal persons trace back to this generation of translators.

His institutional footprint was equally durable. Through the Tokyo School of Law and his teaching, he helped train the first cohorts of Japanese lawyers formed under the new system. Through the Meirokusha, he belonged to the circle that argued publicly for reform, education and the adoption of Western learning. And through the House of Peers, he ended his career inside the very constitutional structure he had helped to build.

The Name in Japanese

The full name is written 箕作麟祥.

• Kana reading: みつくり りんしょう
• Romaji: Mitsukuri Rinshō

The family name comes first, as is standard in Japanese. Breaking it down character by character:

箕作 (みつくり, Mitsukuri) — the surname, two characters:

• 箕 (み, mi) — a winnowing basket, the shallow woven scoop used to toss grain and let the chaff blow away. It is a rare character in modern Japanese, kept alive mainly in names.
• 作 (つくり, tsukuri) — to make, to produce, to work. It appears in everyday words such as 作る (つくる, tsukuru, "to make") and 作品 (さくひん, sakuhin, "a work" or "a piece").

麟祥 (りんしょう, Rinshō) — the given name, two characters:

• 麟 (りん, rin) — the qilin, a mythical beast of Chinese tradition, often described as a horned creature with the body of a deer and the tail of an ox that appears only in times of good government. In Japanese it is also written 麒麟 (きりん, kirin), which is the modern word for "giraffe". The character carries strong connotations of rarity and auspiciousness.
• 祥 (しょう, shō) — good fortune, auspiciousness, a favourable omen. It appears in words such as 吉祥 (きっしょう, kisshō, "good luck") and 発祥 (はっしょう, hasshō, "origin" or "birthplace").

So the given name reads as something like "auspicious qilin" — a name built from two characters that both signal good fortune, with the mythical beast lending it weight and rarity. Note that 麟 is not the everyday character for the animal; that is 麒麟, and the two are related but distinct in use.

Legacy

Mitsukuri Rinshō died in 1897, before the civil code he had helped prepare was fully in force, but the vocabulary and institutions he worked on outlasted him. The legal Japanese that courts, ministries and law faculties use today was assembled in his lifetime by translators like him, and much of it has not needed replacing since.

His name survives in two places especially. One is Hosei University, which traces its origins to the Tokyo School of Law where he taught and helped lay the foundations. The other is the language itself: every Japanese speaker who uses a modern legal or political term is, often unknowingly, using a word that someone in Mitsukuri's position had to invent because no Japanese equivalent existed.