Foreigner for hire Pompe who claimed unpaid salary, end of Edo period to early Meiji period

Foreigner for hire Pompe who claimed unpaid salary, end of Edo period to early Meiji period

The issue of Pompe's claim for unpaid salary is a very concrete illustration of the contradictions of the institutional breakdown during the transition from the end of the Edo period to the Meiji period. Pompe van Meerdervoort was one of the foreigners invited by the shogunate to engage in medical education in Nagasaki, and was a person who laid the foundation of modern medicine in Japan. Later, he was given a position with the legation in Russia, but one of the issues that arose was the treatment of his salary, which had been promised but not paid during the shogunate period.

For the Meiji government, this claim was not simply a financial issue. The salary was promised by the shogunate, an administration that had already ceased to exist, and it was legally and politically very unclear whether the new government should take over that obligation. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs, while understanding that Pompe was indeed a man who had contributed to Japan, was unable to make a decision in the face of such an unprecedented issue, and had to make a series of inter-ministerial adjustments, including making inquiries to the Ministry of Education to confirm the existence of the contract and its jurisdiction.

This process illustrates that the administrative structure in the first year of the Meiji era did not yet have uniform principles. Neither the Ministry of Foreign Affairs nor the Ministry of Education had a complete grasp of the contractual documents and practices of the Bakufu era, and there were no clear standards regarding the extent to which the new government should assume responsibility for the old system. As a result, the issue remained in limbo for a long time, and no clear conclusions were recorded.

This case is symbolic in that the establishment of a modern state does not immediately guarantee institutional continuity. Although Japan continued to exist externally as a single state, in its internal reality, there were many areas where legal continuity was severed by a change of government. Pompe's claim was the friction that arose in the gaps, and it was also the scene of a head-on collision between the ethical question of how to treat accomplished foreigners and the financial reality of the situation.

This exchange over unpaid salaries was one of the inevitable tests of the Meiji government's process of forming a modern conception of contract and administrative responsibility. Pompe's claim is a question that pressed how Japan would sort out its continuity as a nation and its rupture as a regime, and it quietly highlights the instability that the transition from the end of the Edo period to the Meiji era was fraught with.