Kaneko Kentaro, born 4 February 1853 in Sawara, Chikuzen Province, present-day Fukuoka, and who died 16 May 1942 in Hayama, Kanagawa, was a Japanese statesman, diplomat and legal scholar who attended the Shuyukan school of Fukuoka Domain from age nine, was selected at nineteen to join the Iwakura Mission to the United States, and enrolled at Harvard University in 1876, studying under the future United States Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr and earning his law degree in 1878. He served as a secretary in the Genroin from 1880, a member of the Office for Investigation of Institutions from 1884, first secretary of the House of Peers from 1890, Minister of Agriculture and Commerce in 1898, Minister of Justice from 1900 to 1901, and a Privy Council member from 1906 until his death. He worked closely with Prime Minister Ito Hirobumi and his fellow drafters Inoue Kowashi and Ito Miyoji on Japan's Meiji Constitution, promulgated by the Emperor in 1889, and Harvard awarded him an honorary doctorate in 1899 in recognition of this constitutional work.
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