Guido Verbeck
Guido Herman Fridolin Verbeck (or
Verbeek) was born on
January 28,
1830 in the Dutch city of
Zeist. He died in Tokyo in 1898. At Zeist he grew up speaking Dutch, German, French and English. As a young man, he studied at the Polytechnic Institute of
Utrecht in hopes of becoming an engineer.
At the age of twenty-two, upon the invitation of his sister and brother-in-law, Verbeck traveled to the
United States to work at a foundry. The factory, located outside of Green Bay,
Wisconsin, had been developed by a
Moravian missionary to build machinery for steamboats. Verbeck stayed in Wisconsin for almost a year, during which time he changed the spelling of his name from "Verbeek" to "Verbeck" in the hope that Americans could better pronounce it.
Verbeck came to
Nagasaki in 1859, in the aftermath of Commodore
Matthew Calbraith Perry's opening of the country in 1853 and 1854, as a
Christian missionary for the
Dutch Reformed Church. He taught languages, politics, and science at the Yougakusho (School for Western Studies) in Nagasaki, and his pupils included
Okuma Shigenobu and
Ito Hirobumi.
Although best known for work that he later accomplished in
Tokyo, he advocated the use of the German language for Japanese medical studies, encouraged the dispatching of the first Japanese diplomatic mission to the United States and Europe (the
Iwakura mission), supported the establishment of the prefectural system, and inspired the Education Order of 1872 and the Conscription Ordinance of 1873.
His son
Gustave emigrated to the United States and gained some fame as a
cartoonist.
Verbeck was buried in 1898 in the foreign section of the
Aoyama Reien cemetery in central Tokyo, which is now under threat from the city's bureaucracy.
*
A Miner in the Deep and Dark Places:'Guido Verbeck in Nagasaki, 1859-1869 by Lane R. Earns - the source of much of the above.
