Hermann Roesler: Dokumente zu seinem Leben und Werk (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Hermann Roesler: Dokumente zu seinem Leben und Werk Sven Saaler Hermann Roesler: Dokumente zu seinem Leben und Werk. Edited and with an introduction by Anna Bartels-Ishikawa. Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 2007. 191 pages. Hardcover €56.00. Many facets of Japan's modernization during the late nineteenth century continue to be traced to influences from Germany. Advisers from Germany have been recognized for their contributions to such fields as medicine and the military, and, in addition, have been considered particularly influential in the making of modern Japanese law. One of these advisers who came from Germany to Japan during the Meiji period was Hermann Roesler. After graduating from the University of Erlangen and teaching law at Rostock University for several years, Roesler was invited to come to Japan and work for the government. He arrived in Japan in 1878 and lived and worked there until 1893. He advised the Foreign Ministry on the revision of the unequal treaties that the Western powers had imposed on Japan from the 1850s; supervised the drafting of Japan's commercial code; and, after 1884, advised Itō Hirobumi on the drafting of the Meiji Constitution, which was eventually promulgated in 1889 and contained several clauses recommended to Itō by Roesler, including an article guaranteeing freedom of religion. Roesler also represented Japan during negotiations with China in 1885 and in the same year attended a conference in Antwerp on the codification of international commercial law. Important and time-consuming tasks, one might think, but life in Japan obviously had its less onerous aspects, too: after leaving for work every day at 8:00 A.M., he usually returned home for lunch with his family at 12:30 and smoked half a cigar between 1:00 and 2:30 P.M.—confirming his own remark that "a real work-load is not imposed on me" (p. 139; also quoted p. 60). While German advisers in Meiji Japan are considered to have contributed greatly to the development of close Japanese-German ties and even to a "Golden Age of Japanese-German relations," in the closing decades of the nineteenth century Roesler himself poured cold water on the notion of Japanese admiration for Germany and a "Golden Age" in bilateral relations, claiming that only a small number of high-ranking politicians and military officers had a positive image of Germany, while the Japanese [End Page 198] press and the general population alike harbored strong anti-German sentiment. According to Roesler, these anti-German attitudes had sprung from the refusal of the German government to consider a revision of the unequal treaties with Japan. Although Minister Resident Karl von Eisendecher (in Japan 1875 to 1882) favored the rapid overhaul of the treaty between the two nations, negotiations failed because there was little enthusiasm for revision among the other Western powers as well as in the German Foreign Office in Berlin.1 Hermann Roesler: Dokumente zu seinem Leben und Werk consists of an eighty-page introduction by the editor, Anna Bartels-Ishikawa, followed by transcriptions of a body of materials relating to Roesler kept in the archives of the S.J. House at Sophia University. The volume has successfully fulfilled its main objective of making these materials accessible to a wider audience. The documents presented consist of letters sent by Roesler to his family and transcriptions of letters written by his sister, mother, and daughter (pp. 98–124); the (previously unpublished) recollections of Roesler's daughter Elisabeth, written in 1938–1939 (pp. 124–63); a number of family photographs (pp. 163–82); and the scrapbook of Roesler's sister Lina (pp. 183–85). The Roesler Archive in the S.J. House was created during the 1930s upon the initiative of Josef Keller, S.J., who was interested in Roesler's role as a promoter of religious freedom in Meiji Japan. Keller intended to write a biography of Roesler and asked the latter's daughter Elisabeth, living in Bozen (Italy) at that time, for assistance. The recollections of her father that Elisabeth Roesler wrote in response are a part of the Roesler Archive today and a part of the volume under review. The daughter also provided Keller with the photographs included...