was a Japanese philosopher. He studied law and economics in the Netherlands. He became a political advisor to Tokugawa Yoshinobu before and after the Meiji Restoration. He served as a bureaucrat in the Ministry of War, the Ministry of Education, the Ministry of Popular Affairs, and the Ministry of the Imperial Household under the Meiji government. He was involved in the drafting of the Military Precepts and the Imperial Rescript to Soldiers and Sailors. With Mori Arinori and others, he formed the Meirokusha and worked to introduce Western philosophy. Early life Nishi was born in Tsuwano Domain of Iwami Province (present day Tsuwano town, Shimane Prefecture) as the son of a samurai physician who practiced Chinese medicine. In 1853, after studying Confucianism at his domain school and in Osaka, Nishi was sent to Edo to study rangaku, with the goal of becoming an interpreter for conducting business with the outside world via Dutch traders based at Dejima in Nagasaki. His duties also included the translation of European books into Japanese for review by a select group of government officials within the Tokugawa bakufu. In 1854 Nishi, as well as several fellow Japanese intellectuals of the time, denounced the Japanese feudal system and their samurai status in favor of a pursuit of Western studies, as these intellectuals believed that the Japanese feudal system was incompatible with Western studies. Nishi was then appointed by the government as a Yōgakusha or specialist scholar of Western learning. Aside from Nishi, the Yōgakusha included Fukuzawa Yukichi, Mori Arinori, and Nakamura Masanao, who were all schooled in kangaku, a kind of traditional Chinese learning. Later, in 1857, Nishi was appointed a professor at the Bansho Shirabesho. With increasing foreign pressure on Japan to end its national isolation policy, in 1862 the Shogunate decided to send Nishi and Tsuda Mamichi to the Netherlands to learn western concepts of political science, constitutional law, and economics. They departed in 1863 with a Dutch physician Dr. J. L. C. Pompe van Meerdervoort, who had set up the first teaching hospital for western medicine in Nagasaki. The two Japanese students were put in the care of Professor Simon Vissering, who taught Political Economy, Statistics and Diplomatic History at the University of Leyden. They developed a genuine friendship with Vissering who was conscious of the long-standing friendship between Japan and the Netherlands. He felt that the students' desire for knowledge would make