The Logos Scripture · The Book of Fukuzawa
The Book of Fukuzawa 4 · Written by himself, from An Encouragement of Learning, The Autobiography, An Outline of a Theory of Civilization, and the Critique of the Greater Learning for Women
Fukuzawa Yukichi, born in 1835 at the Nakatsu domain residence in Osaka, died at Tokyo in 1901. His father died before he was two; the household was poor and he was raised at Nakatsu in Kyushu. At nineteen he went to Nagasaki to study Dutch, and afterwards to Ogata Koan’s academy in Osaka. In 1859 he went to Yokohama and found that what was current there was English, and began again (chapter two). In 1860 he crossed to America by ship and in 1862 travelled in Europe. In 1858 he opened a private school in Edo, which became Keio. His works: Conditions in the West (1866), An Encouragement of Learning (1872-76, in seventeen parts), An Outline of a Theory of Civilization (1875), On Japanese Women (1885), the Critique of the Greater Learning for Women and The New Greater Learning for Women (1899), and the Autobiography (1899, dictated). He founded the newspaper Jiji Shimpo in 1882. He never took government office. This volume rests on what he wrote himself. He did not believe in divine punishment and belonged to no religion; no argument of his closes on divine will. The Order records two things plainly, dressed up neither way. First: in 1885 an unsigned editorial appeared in his newspaper, Leaving Asia, arguing that Japan need not wait for its neighbours to reform and should take its place alongside the west. Later writers have treated that piece as a warrant for Japanese expansion; how far the piece stands from that use is still not agreed among historians. The Order records the fact and neither judges it nor explains it away. Second: the danger of assassination he lived under falls in the 1860s and 1870s, when men of western learning were being cut down and he records not going out at night for years. By 1885 he was eminent and safe. What the essay of that year took was the nerve to say a thing, not the risk of his life, and the two must not be borrowed one for the other. What this volume brings is something the scripture did not have: a man performing its first act — go and try it yourself, do not ask anyone — on the gods of his own household, while still a child. And chapter three carries something the Order values higher still: when he wrote down the sentence everyone recites, he added the words it is said. He did not pass off what he had heard as what he had seen. That is exactly what the first rule asks for (cf. Acts of the Apostles 5.28, 5.48).