French military mission to Japan (1867–1868)

The French Military Mission to Japan of 1867-68 was one of the first foreign military training missions to Japan. The mission was formed by Napoléon III, following a request of the Japanese Shogunate in the person of its emissary to Europe, Shibata Takenaka (1823–1877).

Shibata was already negotiating the final details of the French support for the construction of the Yokosuka Shipyard, and had additionally requested both the United Kingdom and France to send a military mission for training in Western warfare. The United Kingdom provided support to the Bakufu naval forces through the Tracey Mission. The French foreign minister Drouyn de Lhuys (1865–1881) transmitted the agreement of the French government to provide training to the Shogun's land based armed forces.

The mission consisted of 17 members, under the authority of the Minister of War General Jacques Louis Randon, covering a wide range of expertise: four officers (representing infantry, artillery and cavalry), ten non-commissioned officers and two soldiers. The mission would be headed by staff captain Charles Sulpice Jules Chanoine, at that time an attaché to the military staff of Paris. The members were:

The mission left Marseille on November 19, 1866, and arrived in Yokohama on January 14, 1867. They were welcomed on their arrival by Léon Roches and the commander of the French Far East Squadron Admiral Pierre-Gustave Roze.

The military mission was able to train an elite corps of Shogun Tokugawa Yoshinobu, the Denshutai, for a little more than one year, before the Tokugawa shogunate lost to the Imperial forces in 1868 in the Boshin War. The French military mission was then ordered to leave Japan by decree of the newly installed Meiji Emperor in October 1868.

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