was a Japanese diplomat and businessman of the Meiji period

Meiji period

The , also known as the Meiji era, is a Japanese era which extended from September 1868 through July 1912. This period represents the first half of the Empire of Japan.- Meiji Restoration and the emperor :...

, and the first Japanese Consul General to New York

Japanese diplomatic missions

This is a list of diplomatic missions of Japan, excluding any honorary consulates. Japan had been sending ambassadors to the Tang Chinese court in Xian since 607 AD, as well as to the Koryo and Joseon Dynasty of early Korea but for centuries early modern Japan did not actively seek to expand its...

.

The son of a samurai

Samurai

is the term for the military nobility of pre-industrial Japan. According to translator William Scott Wilson: "In Chinese, the character 侍 was originally a verb meaning to wait upon or accompany a person in the upper ranks of society, and this is also true of the original term in Japanese, saburau...

 from Shōnai Domain, Takagi entered naval training school in 1859, and after that studied abroad in the United States. Following his studies, he remained in the United States, and served as diplomatic secretary beginning in 1871. He resigned from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, however, in 1880, and became director of a silk company in Yokohama

Yokohama

is the capital city of Kanagawa Prefecture and the second largest city in Japan by population after Tokyo and most populous municipality of Japan. It lies on Tokyo Bay, south of Tokyo, in the Kantō region of the main island of Honshu...

. His company was famous for its efforts to improve sericulture

Sericulture

Sericulture, or silk farming, is the rearing of silkworms for the production of raw silk.Although there are several commercial species of silkworms, Bombyx mori is the most widely used and intensively studied. According to Confucian texts, the discovery of silk production by B...

methods and techniques of the spinning industry.