Fuzawa Yukichi Essay

Fukuzawa Yukichi was born on January 10th, 1835 in Osaka, Japan. He comes from a family of lower-level samurai. Due to the fact that Fukuzawa Yukichi was from a lower-level samurai family, his father (who did hold an unfavorable job) did not want him to learn basic math, or any forms of calculations, because even though they were lower-level samurai, they were still samurai and work/skills like math were beneath them and their status. It can be said that, his father’s distaste for “the tool of merchants” (4), could have been an extra push for Fukuzawa Yukichi to embrace the new things like Western culture. Fukuzawa’s lower-level samurai education also left much to be desired for him, especially when compared to the education that children of higher-level samurai got to have. It gave him a hunger to be educated, and soon enough he would become just
He wanted a lot for his country, from looking at countries from the West, he thought that Japan could benefit from “group consensus”, so long as it was from educated groups, he recognized the need to have a national assembly.
Fukuzawa has left his mark on Japan through many different facets, he was a man of great skill and intelligence, and it made him very influential to not just the Japanese government and all its officials, but to Japanese society and all the people who would read his books, his newspaper, his words in the Meiji Six Society.
“All Japanese have heard of Fukuzawa, and most revere him as a primary figure in Japanese history.” (136) This quote from the text on Fukuzawa’s life, Fukuzawa Yukichi: From Samurai to Capitalist by Helen M. Hopper, is basically the sum of the entire book and of Fukuzawa because he was indeed a central part of Japanese history. Throughout his adulthood, Fukuzawa Yukichi has helped shaped Japan and helped bring it to a more modern