Historical Dictionary of United States-Japan ... - Bakumatsu Films

Treaties Bureau in 1981 and to director-general of the North American
Affairs Bureau in 1984. He then served as ambassador to Malaysia in
1985 and became deputy minister of foreign affairs in 1989. Finally, he
became ambassador to the United States in 1992. Although Japan contributed
$13 billion to the U.S.-led coalition forces during the Gulf
War, many American people, as well as U.S. officials, criticized Japan
for not dispatching Japan’s Self-Defense Forces to the War. Ambassador
Kuriyama made every effort to diffuse their anger and sought to
solidify the U.S.–Japan alliance by every means he could find.
KUSAKABE, TARO (1845–1870). One of the first Japanese students
in America, Kusakabe studied at Rutgers College in New
Brunswick, New Jersey. He was the first Japanese to be elected to the
Phi Beta Kappa honor society, and graduated from Rutgers in 1870.
Sadly, his graduation was posthumous as he died from tuberculosis
three weeks before the graduation ceremony.
KYOTO. Imperial capital city of Japan from 794 to 1868. During the
1850s and 1860s, Kyoto became a mecca for anti-Tokugawa samurai
who claimed the emperor should be “restored” to his rightful place as
sovereign leader of Japan. After the Meiji Restoration of 1868,
Tokyo (formerly known as Edo) became the political capital city of
Japan. Kyoto is in many ways a modern city, but it had a nearly 1,100year
reign as Japan’s imperial capital, and is full of major Buddhist
temples, Shinto Shrines, and other traditional institutions that attract
tourists from all over Japan and the world. At the end of World War
II, Kyoto had been considered as a target for an atomic bomb but this
was passed over at the insistence of Secretary of War Henry Stimson.
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LANMAN, CHARLES • 161
LANMAN, CHARLES (1819–1895). A prolific writer on many subjects
during the second half of the 19th century, Charles Lanman also served
as secretary to the Japanese legation in Washington, D.C., for many
years during the 1870s and 1880s. One of his works on Japan was The
Japanese in America, published in 1872, and he assisted Arinori
Mori, Japan’s first resident diplomat in Washington in researching and