James R. Wasson
American army officer (1855–1913)
James Robert Wasson (11 January 1847 – 1923) was a U.S. Army officer hired by the Meiji government of the Empire of Japan as a foreign advisor and later as officer in the fledgling Imperial Japanese Army. He is noted as the first non-Japanese to be honored with the Order of the Rising Sun.
Biography
Wasson was born in Ohio on January 11, 1847, and moved to Hartford, Iowa, in 1854. In 1864, during the American Civil War, he joined the Union Army by enlisting in the 34th Iowa Infantry Regiment, serving until being mustered out with the unit in August 1865. Two years later he became a cadet at the United States Military Academy at West Point. One of his classmates he befriended was Frederick D. Grant, son of President U.S. Grant, forming connections to both. Wasson graduated in 1871, ranking first in his class.
With President Grant's influence, Wasson went to Japan as a secretary of the American diplomatic legation. In the next year he, briefly returning to the United States, resigned his commission. Back in Japan he initially was a teacher and surveyor for a school of the Hokkaido Colonization Office, during which time he introduced and taught methods of triangulation to survey large areas.
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This entry incorporates text from “James R. Wasson” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.