He was born in Tsukiji, Edo, the eldest son of a plasterer, and named Hamakichi. When his father went bankrupt and disappeared, his two older sisters were sent into service, and his mother took Hamakichi and remarried the Chinese-medicine doctor Hoshi Taijun. Thus he came to bear the Hoshi name. His boyhood was spent in poverty.
Apprenticed to a doctor in Yokohama, he used that connection to begin studying at the shogunate's English school. He later entered Maejima Hisoka's school and, through him, joined the Kaiseijo, the shogunate's school of Western learning, as an English assistant. But when the Boshin War began he lost his post and earned his daily living translating English newspapers.
While teaching English in various places, he was noticed by Mutsu Munemitsu, and when Mutsu became governor of Kanagawa, he was brought in as a teacher at an English school in Yokohama. Mutsu would be his lifelong patron. Tokutomi Sohō later wrote that the tiger-like Hoshi was almost like a cat before Mutsu.
Promoted by Mutsu into the Finance Ministry, he was made head of Yokohama customs while still young. But a dispute with the British minister over how to render the title of the British queen cost him his post. Soon the government ordered him to study in Britain, and he sailed from Yokohama for London.
He studied at the Middle Temple, one of London's Inns of Court, and was among the earliest Japanese to qualify as a barrister. He is said to have read and reread Bentham, the advocate of utilitarianism. It is also said that an argument with his privileged fellow student Baba Tatsui ended in a scuffle.
Returning home, he became the first advocate attached to the Ministry of Justice, the forerunner of today's lawyers. His first big case, defending Gotō Shōjirō in the Takashima coal mine affair, made his name at once and built his fortune. His legal knowledge and English would push him into the world of politics.
He joined the Liberal Party of Itagaki Taisuke and others and took part in running its newspaper. While other leaders wavered, he worked consistently to keep the party going and rebuild it. Opposing the government, he was sometimes jailed, as when he was arrested in Niigata on the charge that a speech insulted officials.
With Nakae Chōmin and others, he urged opponents of the government to set aside small differences and unite, advancing the Daido Danketsu Movement. He also joined petition campaigns demanding diplomatic and tax reforms, for which he was driven out of Tokyo and then jailed for violating the publishing regulations.
He toured Canada, the United States, Britain and Germany, appealing for the significance of Japan's people's rights movement, but no one paid attention. Painfully aware that Japan was not on Westerners' radar, he changed his views, deciding that raising taxes and building up arms to strengthen the nation were also necessary, and returned home.
Elected from Tochigi in the second general election, he was chosen Speaker of the House of Representatives. The next year he was expelled over his alleged involvement in a scandal concerning an exchange, but he is known for repeatedly ignoring resolutions calling for his resignation as speaker and continuing to attend. He was a politician both forceful and tenacious.
After the First Sino-Japanese War he served as legal adviser to the Korean government and then became minister to the United States. Two years later, when a party cabinet was formed by Ōkuma Shigenobu and Itagaki Taisuke, he hurried home and led a split of the party to create a new political current. His moves to grasp power were fierce.
With Itō Hirobumi he founded the Rikken Seiyūkai and first became a minister, as Minister of Communications in the fourth Itō cabinet. He is credited with building the prototype of Japanese party politics, in which the party takes up and fulfills local demands such as ports and railways to widen its support. But he soon resigned amid suspicions.
At the Tokyo city office he was attacked by a man who hated him, and lost his life at the age of fifty-one. He had been fiercely criticized for moving politics with money, yet his successor as minister, Hara Takashi, called him a man clean in money matters. It is said that all he left behind at his death was debt.
Maejima HisokaItagaki TaisukeŌkuma ShigenobuGoto ShojiroItō HirobumiMutsu MunemitsuNakae ChōminHara Takashi
Erwin BälzNogi MaresukeTakaki KanehiroLafcadio Hearn (Koizumi Yakumo)Ogino GinkoIsawa ShūjiTakamura KōunKodama Gentarō
People of the Meiji period ・ People by period
Based on facts found in textbooks and biographies. Uncertain points are marked as such.