Makers of Japan

by J. Morris

XVI
FUKUSAWA YUKICHI

No list purporting to be that of the Makers of Modern Japan would be complete were the name of Fukusawa Yukichi, the pioneer of Western education in his own land, to be omitted. His claims to remembrance are manifold and irrefutable, not the least of them being his right to be esteemed the founder of the leading Japanese journal, the Jiji Shimpo, of Tokio. But his fame will rest chiefly on his achievement in establishing the Kei-o-gi-juku College, wherein a large percentage of the leading men of the Japan of to-day graduated, and by not a few of whom he is revered as having been in no small degree the architect of their fortunes.

Mr Fukusawa,—as he preferred to remain despite the offer of a peerage in his later years,—was born in Osaka, on the 12th of December 1834, that being the year which corresponds to the fifth of the Tempo era, and while yet an infant was taken to his father’s native province of Buzen, in Kiushiu, the family residence being in the town of Nakatsu, a port on the north-east coast of that island. The elder Fukusawa had been staying at Osaka for a time in the service of his feudal chieftain the lord of Buzen. Yukichi dwelt at home, pursuing the customary studies of youths of his age, but with a decided bent towards foreign literature, until in the first year of the Genji period (1854), he went to Nagasaki, and there began the study of Dutch. Prior to this he had been conspicuous as a hard-working scholar in Chinese, which to the Japanese was then, and is still, what Greek and Latin are to us. Yukichi was a whole year at Nagasaki, and then he removed to Osaka, and became a pupil of the celebrated doctor of medicine Ogata Ko-an, under whose guidance he continued the study of the Dutch tongue, and in 1858, the fifth year of the An-sei era, he went to Yedo, and began to impart to a few beginners the knowledge he had thus far acquired of the foreign language. It must be remembered that during Japan’s long seclusion from the rest of the world there were always a few Dutchmen dwelling at Nagasaki, and that Dutch was, as a consequence of that isolation, the only foreign tongue spoken down to the advent of Commodore Perry in 1853. Although by 1858 people of other nations had begun to make their appearance in the country, English was as yet almost an unknown tongue, and Dutch was still the only medium of communication with the Occident.

FUKUSAWA YUKICHI

In Yedo Mr Fukusawa occupied quarters in a mansion at Teppodzu which belonged to his feudal chieftain the lord Okudaira of Buzen, and it was while the scholars were immersed in their study of Dutch works that the opening of Yokohama to foreign trade brought about a change in their ideas, and led their tutor to enlarge the field of his own researches. For by the year 1859 the treaties with five foreign powers had been concluded, and the first steps were taken by Japan to fully acquaint herself with what had been the progress of other nations during the period of her voluntary severance of all communication with them. Yukichi was only twenty-five years old when he paid his first visit to an open port and saw something of the British people of whose characteristics he had read a great deal but had had previously no personal experience. He had at that time no knowledge whatever of English as a language, but he set himself diligently to work, and with the aid of a dictionary compiled in English and Dutch he sought, by private study, to master the difficulties of a tongue which he perceived would afford him the key to learning of the kind that his ambitions prompted him to seek. It was impossible at that time for him to procure an English teacher, or in all probability it would have been his choice to obtain his information direct rather than by the roundabout fashion in which he was compelled to acquire it—by Dutch intervention, as it were,—and, as it was, the burden of the task of procuring a competent knowledge of so complex a language as ours was rendered vastly more onerous by the nature of the method that he was driven to adopt in his studies. It is due to the memory of this eminent scholar to declare that he surmounted all the obstacles in his path and became the first of Japanese teachers of the Western tongue.

But in the meantime, towards the close of 1859, he sailed for the United States of America, in the suite of Kimura, the lord of the province of Settsu, who was despatched on a mission to America by the Government of the Shogun. The party voyaged in the little man-of-war Kan-riu-maru, commanded by Katsu, the feudal lord of Awa, and Yukichi was in the United States for some months. The following year he returned to his own land, and his first act was to publish in book form a translation of a work which he had brought with him from the other side of the Pacific. This was the beginning of a long series of similar educational works from his pen for which Japan is deeply indebted to him.

In the year 1861 Mr Fukusawa voyaged to Europe on a British man-of-war, being entrusted at that time with a government mission to make literary researches, and he travelled through England, Holland, Prussia, Russia, and Portugal. On his return to Japan in the ensuing year he translated and published many of the English and other books which he had brought back with him, thereby adding immeasurably to the store of information then possessed by his countrymen on the subject of foreign lands and peoples. After occupying himself in this useful work more or less until 1867 he was despatched in that, the third year of the Kei-o era, to the United States, taking his passage this time in an American mail-boat for San Francisco. His object accomplished, he returned to Yedo just at the beginning of the Meiji period, and established in 1868 the College with which his name will for ever be associated.

The Kei-o Gi-juku school was first set up in the temple of Shinsenza, in the Shiba quarter of the capital, but in the fourth of Meiji (1871), it was transferred to more spacious and convenient premises at Mita, still in the Shiba district, the curriculum including law, mathematics, and political economy. Not less than 14,000 students claim to have passed through this college, and at the present time fully 2500 are entered on its books.