For one thing, this was not the first Japanese mission to visit Belgium. A few years earlier, in 1865, part
of a Satsuma mission to Great Britain had visited Belgium extensively, held talks with government
representatives, and even signed a contract for the establishment of a Satsuma-Belgian joint venture
company. In 1867 the high-profile Bakufu mission to the Paris Exposition led by Tokugawa Akitake had
also paid a goodwill visit to Belgium on its tour of the treaty powers.
Leaving aside the Satsuma mission which did not have an official character, the purpose of both the
Bakufu and the Iwakura missions was to promote goodwill and international recognition, to study the
material and spiritual civilization of the West as well as its military aspects, with an eye to furthering the
modernization of Japan. A subsidiary objective appears to have been the control of the Japanese students
studying abroad.