Guido Verbeck was born on January, 23, 1830 in Zeist, Netherlands. He hoped to become an engineer, and traveled to the US at the age of twenty-two to work at a foundry in Wisconsin after completing his studies. After staying in Wisconsin for about a year, he moved on to Brooklyn, New York, and eventually Arkansas, where he worked as a civil engineer. In 1855, after experiencing the atrocities of slavery in the south and surviving a bout of cholera, Verbeck entered a seminary in Auburn, New York.
He graduated from the seminary in 1859, and moved to Nagasaki as a missionary for the Dutch Reformed Church. In 1862, three young men were sent to study English with him by Wasaka Murata, a member of the Saga domain. Starting in August 1864, Verbeck also taught foreign languages, politics, and science at the School for Western Studies. More than one hundred students attended his school, and in 1865, it was renamed Language School. He became a teacher at the Kaisei Gakko School in Tokyo in 1869, and by that point he was also a counselor of the Meiji government. He assisted in planning and eventually dispatching the Iwakura mission, a landmark diplomatic mission from Japan to the US and Europe.
In 1871 he helped bring William E. Griffis of Rutgers College to teach at the Fukui Domain Academy. That same year, Verbeck became an advisor of the new Japanese Ministry of Education, through which he inspired the Education Order of 1872 and the Conscription Ordinance of 1873. When the ban on Christianity was lifted in Japan in 1873, Verbeck continued with his missionary efforts. In the years prior to his death, he worked as a translator of English legal documents into Japanese, was appointed the first trustee of Meiji Gakuin University in 1886, translated Christian texts into Japanese, and was granted permanent residency in Japan. Verbeck died on March 10, 1898 in Tokyo, having left a significant impact on Japanese education and lifestyle.
Sources:
Beauchamp, Edward R (2019). Foreign Employees In Nineteenth Century Japan. pp. 123–25. ISBN 0429713258.
Earns, Lane R. “A MINER IN THE DEEP AND DARK PLACE: GUIDO VERBECK IN NAGASAKI, 1859-1869.” CROSSROADS:
A Journal of Nagasaki History and Culture, 2003, www.uwosh.edu/home_pages/faculty_staff/earns/verbeck.html.
Hills, Frederick Simon (1910). New York state men : biographic studies and character portraits. Argus Company. p. 110.
Retrieved November 18, 2016.
Hommes, James Mitchell (2014-07-11). “VERBECK OF JAPAN: GUIDO F. VERBECK AS PIONEER MISSIONARY, OYATOI
GAIKOKUJIN, AND “FOREIGN HERO”” (PDF). University of Pittsburgh: 439.
“Japanese Order for Missionary”. New York Times. March 15, 1905.