The Mitsukuri family had distinguished themselves as scholars, and were at the centre of Japan's educational system in the Meiji era.

[1] After attending the Bansho Shirabesho, the Shogunal institute for western studies, he was sent to Great Britain, in 1866, at age 11, the youngest of a group of Japanese sent by the Tokugawa shogunate to the University College School, on the advice of the then British foreign minister Edward Stanley, 15th Earl of Derby.

In 1909 he lectured in London on Japanese Education[3] and 1910 at New York on New Japan: Its Intellectual and Moral Development.

Kikuchi was made a baron under the kazoku peerage system in 1902 and was the eighth president of the Gakushūin Peers' School.

Kikuchi's children became well-known scientists, and his grandson Minobe Ryōkichi became governor of Tokyo.