seize political initiative. He tried to gather daimyō under the name of the Court but failed. When the Emperor Kōmei died the next year, there was a rumor Iwakura had plotted to murder the emperor with poison, but he escaped arrest. After the Kinmon incident, he returned to normal life, and his innocence was proved. On October 15th, 1867, the shogunate, Tokugawa Yoshinobu returned his power to the imperial court. Yoshinobu worried about the external crisis and recognized the importance of national unity. In this situation, Ōkubo planned the coup that abolished the shogunate and sekkan systems. On December 8th, Iwakura participated in the kogosho meeting and talked about the disposal of Yoshinobu. During this meeting, Yamauchi Yōdō shouted, claiming that they should let Yoshinobu participate in this meeting and criticized a coup. It is a famous episode that Iwakura scolded Yamauchi because his attitude was rude, but this episode is a fiction. In fact, Iwakura could not easily convince Yamauchi, and their discussion was continued for the long term. Finally, Iwakura and Ōkubo convinced those who opposed the disposal of Yoshinobu. With Ōkubo Toshimichi and Saigō Takamori, on January 3, 1868, he engineered the seizure of the Kyoto Imperial Palace by forces loyal to Satsuma and Chōshū, thus initiating the Meiji Restoration. He commissioned Imperial banners with the sun and moon on a red field, which helped ensure that the encounters of the Meiji Restoration were generally bloodless affairs. Meiji bureaucrat After the establishment of the Meiji government, Iwakura played an important role due to the influence and trust he had with Emperor Meiji. He put forward the emperor's directly ruled government. He was largely responsible for the promulgation of the Five Charter Oath of 1868, and the subject abolition of the han system. Also, he established Dajō-kan. Moreover, he planned to move the emperor from Kyoto to Tokyo to make a new political environment. Some court nobles in Kyoto criticized these reforms, but he promoted these restorations with Sanjō despite their opposition. Soon after his appointment as Minister of the Right in 1871, he led the two-year around-the-world journey known as the Iwakura mission, visiting the United States and several countries in Europe with the purpose of renegotiating the unequal treaties and gathering information to help effect the modernization of Japan. American newspapers reported that a visit by Iwakura was as important as a visit by the Prime