Fukuzawa Yukichi
(1835–1901), Japanese intellectual. Of all the intellectuals associated with Japan's late-nineteenth-century transformation, none has earned more scholarly and popular attention than Fukuzawa Yukichi, a man whose name evokes the ideology of "civilization and enlightenment" that engulfed the country during the 1870s. Fukuzawa was born in the city of Osaka but raised in a samurai family of modest standing in the small domain of Nakatsu in Kyushu. Schooled in the Confucian classics, Fukuzawa, at age nineteen, ventured out in pursuit of "Western learning" first in Nagasaki, then Osaka, and finally Edo (Tokyo). The move to Edo in 1858 was precipitated by the request of the local domain officials that Fukuzawa open his own Dutch (soon to become English) academy. Over the next decade, this school, which eventually evolved into Japan's leading private institution for higher learning (Keio University), served as the institutional foothold for Fukuzawa's career as the nation's preeminent pedagogue of Anglo-American culture and thought. Fukuzawa's credentials were further enhanced when he joined missions to the United States and Europe during the 1860s that were sponsored by the Tokugawa bakufu (shogunate). From 1866, when he published the first volume of his famous Conditions in the West, until his death in 1901, Fukuzawa's writings on education, economics, government, and social etiquette circulated more widely than those of any other contemporary writer. Fukuzawa Yukichi's legacy, however, remains a subject of controversy. Fukuzawa was a man of striking ambivalence: an egalitarian liberal and iconoclast in some respects, but also a conservative bureaucrat with distinctly aristocratic pretensions. Among scholars of "Western learning," he stood at the progressive forefront in his call for individual freedom and independence, the universal pursuit of utilitarian learning, and the equality, at least in regard to property rights, of wives and husbands within the family. Still, for all of his celebrated disdain for "feudal" privilege and custom, Fukuzawa was himself a bakufu employee between 1860 and 1867 and, for the most part, remained an enduring defender of the old regime during its Restoration struggles between 1858 and 1868. Nevertheless, within the context of his times, Fukuzawa stands out as an innovative educator who helped to navigate the nation through its historical transition from the Tokugawa period (1600/1603–1868) to the Meiji period (1868–1912).
Further Reading
Blacker, Carmen. (1964) The Japanese Enlightenment: A Study of the Writings of Fukuzawa Yukichi. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press.
Craig, Albert. (1968) "Fukuzawa Yukichi: The Philosophical Foundations of Meiji Nationalism." In Political Development in Modern Japan, edited by Robert E. Ward. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Hane, Mikiso. (1984) "Fukuzawa Yukichi and Women's Rights." In Japan in Transition, edited by Hilary Conroy. Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press.
Kinmonth, Earl. (1978) "Fukuzawa Yukichi Reconsidered: Gakumon no susume (The Encouragement of Learning and Its Audience)." Journal of Asian Studies 37,4 (August): 677–696.
Kiyooka Eiichi, trans. (1969) The Autobiography of Fukuzawa Yukichi. New York: Columbia University Press.
Pyle, Kenneth. (1989) "Meiji Conservatism." In The Cambridge History of Japan. Vol. 5. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
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