Hara Takashi - Early Life

Early Life

Hara was born in a village of the feudal Morioka domain in Mutsu province, (present-day Iwate Prefecture). He was the son of a samurai-class family which had resisted the Meiji Restoration and the establishment of the very government which Hara himself would one day lead. Due to his association with a former enemy clan of the new Imperial Government, which was dominated by the feudal clans of Chōshū and Satsuma, Hara for long remained an outsider in the world of politics.

He left home at the age of 15 and went to Tokyo by boat. He failed the entrance examination of the prestigious Imperial Japanese Naval Academy, and instead joined the Marin Seminary, a French-established, free parochial school. It was here that he learned to speak French fluently. Soon after that he joined the law school of the Ministry of Justice (later University of Tokyo), but left without graduating to take responsibility for a student protest against the school’s room and board policy.

At the age of 17 he was baptized as a Roman Catholic, taking the name of ‘David’, and even though it was speculated that he became Christian for personal gain at the time, he remained a Christian in public life until the day he died. At the age of 19, Hara broke away from his family's samurai class (士族, shizoku?) and chose instead the classification of commoner (平民, heimin?). At various times later in his political career, offers were made to raise his rank, but Hara refused them every time on the basis that it would alienate himself from the common men and limit his ability to gain entrance to the House of Representatives.

In 1879, Hara worked as a newspaper reporter for three years. He quit his job in protest over efforts of his editors to make the newspaper a mouthpiece for the conservative Rikken Kaishintō political party of Ōkuma Shigenobu.