Fukuzawa Yukichi
| Fukuzawa Yukichi | |
|---|---|
Fukuzawa Yukichi
Muséum national d'histoire naturelle in Paris, 1862. |
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| Born |
January 10, 1835 Nakatsu, Oita, Japan |
| Died | February 3, 1901 (aged 66) Tokyo, Japan |
| Other names | Shi-I (子圍), Sanjyū-ikkoku-jin (三十一谷人) |
Fukuzawa Yukichi (福澤 諭吉?, January 10, 1835 – February 3, 1901) was a Japanese author, writer, teacher, translator, entrepreneur and journalist who founded Keio University, the newspaper Jiji-Shinpō and the Institute for Study of Infectious Diseases. He was an early Japanese civil rights activist and liberal ideologist. His ideas about government and social institutions made a lasting impression on a rapidly changing Japan during the Meiji Era. He is regarded as one of the founders of modern Japan. He is called a Japanese Voltaire.
Fukuzawa Yukichi was born into an impoverished low-ranking samurai family of the Okudaira Clan of Nakatsu (now Ōita, Kyushu) in 1835. His family lived in Osaka, the main trading center for Japan at the time. His family was poor following the early death of his father, who was also a Confucian scholar. At the age of 5 he started Han learning, and by the time he turned 14 had studied major writings such as the Analects, Tao Te Ching, Zuo Zhuan and Zhuangzi. Fukuzawa was greatly influenced by his lifelong teacher, Shōzan Shiraishi, who was a scholar of Confucianism and Han learning. When he turned 19 in 1854, shortly after Commodore Matthew C. Perry's arrival in Japan, Fukuzawa's brother (the family patriarch) asked Yukichi to travel to Nagasaki, where the Dutch colony at Dejima was located, in order to enter a school of Dutch studies (rangaku). He instructed Yukichi to learn Dutch so that he might study European cannon designs and gunnery.
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