Guido Herman Fridolin Verbeck (or Verbeek) was born on January 28, 1830 in the Dutch city of Zeist. He died in Tokyo in 1898. At Zeist he grew up speaking Dutch, German, French and English. As a young man, he studied at the Polytechnic Institute of Utrecht in hopes of becoming an engineer. January 28 is the 28th day of the year in the Gregorian Calendar. ... 1830 was a common year starting on Friday (see link for calendar). ... Zeist is a municipality and a town in the central Netherlands, located east of the city of Utrecht. ... Utrecht is a municipality and the capital city of the Dutch province of Utrecht. ...

At the age of twenty-two, upon the invitation of his sister and brother-in-law, Verbeck traveled to the United States to work at a foundry. The factory, located outside of Green Bay, Wisconsin, had been developed by a Moravian missionary to build machinery for steamboats. Verbeck stayed in Wisconsin for almost a year, during which time he changed the spelling of his name to "Verbeck" in the hope that Americans could better pronounce it. One of the periods of glaciation was also termed the Wisconsin glaciation. ... A Moravian is a Protestant belonging to a religious movement that originated in Moravia, Czech Republic. ...

Verbeck came to Nagasaki in 1859, in the aftermath of Commodore Matthew Calbraith Perry's opening of the country in 1853 and 1854, as a Christian missionary for the Dutch Reformed Church. He taught languages, politics, and science at the Yougakusho (School for Western Studies) in Nagasaki, and his pupils included Okuma Shigenobu and Ito Hirobumi. Megane-bashi, the Eyeglasses Bridge Nagasaki (長崎市; -shi) is the capital and the largest city of Nagasaki Prefecture located at the south-western coast of Kyushu, Japan. ... Matthew Calbraith Perry (April 10, 1794 - March 4, 1858) was the Commodore of the U.S. Navy who forced the opening of Japan to the West with the Convention of Kanagawa in 1854, under the threat of military force. ... This article is about the religious people known as Christians. ... A missionary is a propagator of religion, often an evangelist or other representative of a religious community who works among those outside of that community. ... The Dutch Reformed Church or Netherlands Reformed Church (in Dutch: Nederlandse Hervormde Kerk (NHK)) is a denomination of Christian Protestantism based on the teachings of John Calvin. ... Okuma Shigenobu (大隈重信 Okuma Shigenobu 16 February 1838–10 January 1922) was a Japanese politician and the 8th (June 30, 1898–November 8, 1898) and 17th (April 16, 1914–October 9, 1916) Prime Minister of Japan. ... Born in Hagi, Yamaguchi, Count Itō Hirobumi (伊藤 博文 Itō Hirobumi 1841–1909, also called Hirofumi/Hakubun) was a Japanese politician and the countrys first Prime Minister (and the 5th, 7th and 10th). ...

Although best known for work that he later accomplished in Tokyo, he advocated the use of the German language for Japanese medical studies, encouraged the dispatching of the first Japanese diplomatic mission to the United States and Europe (the Iwakura mission), supported the establishment of the prefectural system, and inspired the Education Order of 1872 and the Conscription Ordinance of 1873. Tokyo (東京; Tōkyō  listen, literally eastern capital), is located in the Kanto region on the island of Honshu in Japan. ... The Iwakura Mission or Iwakura Embassy was a diplomatic journey around the world, initiated by the oligarchs of the Meiji era. ...

His son Gustave emigrated to the United States and gained some fame as a cartoonist. Gustave Verbeek (sometimes spelled Gustave Verbeck) was a newspaper cartoonist in the early 1900s. ... Comics (sometimes spelled comix, also called sequential art) is an art form that features a series of static images in fixed sequence, usually to tell a story. ...

Verbeck was buried in 1898 in the foreign section of the Aoyama Reien cemetery in central Tokyo, which is now under threat from the city's bureaucracy. The foreign cemeteries (gaijin bochi) in Japan are chiefly located in Tokyo and at the former treaty ports of Nagasaki, Kobe, Yokohama, and Hakodate. ...

External Sources

• A Miner in the Deep and Dark Places:'Guido Verbeck in Nagasaki, 1859-1869 (http://www.uwosh.edu/home_pages/faculty_staff/earns/verbeck.html) by Lane R. Earns - the source of much of the above.