Selected Essays by Fukuzawa Yukichi

On Government

Albert M. Craig, Teruko Craig

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781350192454
• eBook ISBN: 9781350096639
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 19th Century History
• Index: History

During the sweeping changes taking place in 19th century Japan, no thinker was more important than Fukuzawa Yukichi (1835-1901). Born into a low-ranking samurai family, he traveled to Nagasaki at age nineteen to study Dutch. In 1858, he was sent to Edo to teach Dutch to domain students. In his spare time he taught himself English using a Dutch-English dictionary. Two years later, he was appointed a translator of diplomatic documents at the shogunal office of foreign affairs. In 1862, he founded a school that is now Keio University. Eager to introduce Western history and ideas to the Japanese, he wrote a series of books, including the bestselling Conditions in the West (1866). In the late 1870s, he turned his attention to the prospects for parliamentary government in Japan. The central government was firmly in place and elective prefectural assemblies were about to be established. He wrote essays on the workings of such a system, drawing on his earlier travels abroad and his reading of de Tocqueville, John Stuart Mill, Walter Bagehot, and others. A realist and optimist, Fukuzawa assured his readers of the eventual success of parliamentary government in Japan. This book provides the first-English language translation of five essays that bear directly on the development of his thought and its legacy in Japanese culture.

Part One

General Introduction

1

The Progress of Civilization and the Stages of Government

Japan might have advanced from a form of feudal monarchy to a more centralized form of monarchy, but it had yet to achieve civilization and was not yet ready to become a parliamentary state. This was Fukuzawa’s judgment during the first eleven years following the Meiji Restoration. He had many reasons: the people’s educational level was low, the imprint of the feudal past was still strong, and the necessary institutions for an elective system were not in place. He accepted the general proposition that representative government accorded with the basics of human nature; Western history had demonstrated this to be true. He described Western parliamentary systems in exemplary terms in both his translations and original writings, and he wanted such a system for Japan. He also associated the strong military power of the Western nations with their parliamentary systems, but felt that Japan was still unprepared for such a system. A turning point came in 1876, when he came out in favor of local assemblies, and in 1879, he advocated a national assembly.

Why did Fukuzawa change his mind? As history, eleven years is brief. Had Japanese society, still constrained by traditional practices, really changed sufficiently to adopt so Western an institution as a parliament?

Fukuzawa viewed the changes in his own society in terms of history. Early on he had been schooled in Chinese history. He had then studied Western history, both of Europe and the United States. He had learned from the latter that Western scholars had two ways of casting their own history: one focused on civilization, the other on government.

The progress of civilization

Put simply, a “civilization” consists of the totality of systems, ideas, institutions, and feelings of a people. Civilization is what society is to the sociologist, or culture to the anthropologist. Fukuzawa compared civilization to an ocean into which various rivers flow, or a drama in which the several actors fulfill their designated roles. European historians of the nineteenth century saw the development of human civilization as a panorama stretching from the earliest stage of primitive savagery to barbarism, continuing through a half-civilized stage, and finally, to civilization and enlightenment. It is not surprising that Fukuzawa should have picked up the Western idea of civilization and applied it to Japan, since most of the books he translated used the concept of civilization as their framework.

In his An Outline of Theories of Civilization, Fukuzawa stresses the point that civilization should not be sought in externals, such as stone buildings or iron bridges; what matters is the spirit (seishin) that animates a people. He explains that “spirit” is formless and difficult to describe.

When it [civilization] is nourished, it grows to embrace the myriad things of the earth; if repressed or restrained, its external manifestations will also vanish. It is in constant motion, advancing or retreating, waxing or waning. It may seem a will-o’-the-wisp or an apparition, but if we look at its real manifestations within present-day Asia and Europe, we can clearly see it is not illusory.

He continues:

Let us now call this “the spirit of a people” (ikkoku jinmin no kifū). In respect to time, we call it “the trend of the times” (jisei). In reference to persons, it may be called “human sentiments” (jinshin). In regard to the nation as a whole, it may be called “a nation’s ways” (kokuzoku) or “national opinion” (kokuron). These things are what is meant by the spirit of civilization. And it is this spirit that differentiates the manners and customs of Asia and Europe. Hence the spirit of a civilization can also be described as the sentiments and customs of a people.¹

To understand how a civilization changes and progresses, Fukuzawa drew on books by the popular American geographers Samuel Augustus Mitchell and Sarah Cornell, the British writers John Hill Burton and Thomas Buckle, and the French historian François Guizot (in English translation). In An Outline of Theories of Civilization, he twice translated a simple sketch of civilization’s progress from Mitchell’s high school geography text, New School Geography. The theories presented by these authors vary in emphasis and detail, but they can all be traced back to the ideas of Adam Smith and other early thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment, or, in the case of Guizot, to the writings of A. J. R. Turgot in France.

In his lectures and writings, Smith held that all peoples were originally in the “savage” state. They gathered and hunted and often engaged in warfare with other savage tribes. Some savages then domesticated animals and advanced to the state of “barbarism.” Following their flocks, they gained a more dependable source of food. Then came the discovery of agriculture, and the development of a “half-civilized” state, with cities, commerce, and literacy. From this intermediate stage, certain Western nations advanced further, developing machine industry and science, reaching higher levels of literacy, and eventually adopting representative government to attain a “civilized” stage. Nineteenth-century writers later added a further “enlightened” stage to describe the advanced state of their own civilization.

The stages were seen as applicable to all peoples of the world. Fukuzawa accepted this view and applied the schema to Japan. He recognized Japan’s cultural borrowing from China in ancient times and maintained that it had been half-civilized from that time through the Tokugawa years. That is to say, prior to the Meiji Restoration, Japan had cities, commerce, a degree of literacy, and agriculture, but lacked the science, machine technology, and parliamentary institutions found in the advanced nations of the West.

In his early three-volume Conditions in the West, Fukuzawa made clear that it had taken Western nations hundreds of years to advance from one stage to the next. He wanted Japan to change along similar lines, though he never specified an exact timetable. In the event, Japan’s advance turned out to be far more rapid than he had imagined possible. This was partly because its historical situation was so markedly different. The West had been the pathfinder; it had found its way forward by trial and error, and in recent centuries had never encountered a civilization more advanced than its own. In contrast, Japan, suddenly exposed to the most advanced nations of the West, was able to deliberately pick and choose. That it was already half-civilized when it encountered the West made the swift transition possible.

In An Outline of Theories of Civilization, Fukuzawa described the psychological impact of Japan’s encounter with the West. The sudden encounter caused “violent upheavals” in men’s minds, the repercussions so complex as to “almost defy imagination.” “Contemporary Japanese culture is undergoing a transformation in essence, like the transformation of fire into water.” Going from one state to the other, “it is just as if a person had led two lives in a single body, or as if a single person possessed two bodies.”²

The shock of exposure to a very different civilization, which Fukuzawa, who had studied the West, experienced more keenly than most of his compatriots, prepared the Japanese for the overthrow of Tokugawa rule and the series of revolutionary actions taken by the new post-Restoration government. Though initially taken aback by the turn of events, Fukuzawa came to approve of the pace of change. For Japan to survive as an independent nation, he increasingly felt that a swift transition was necessary.

Feudal government, West and East

A government is merely one component of a civilization—there is no double helix—and since it is a smaller topic than civilization, it is easier to address.

As noted, Fukuzawa translated histories of the Netherlands and England in the first volume of Conditions in the West, and histories of Russia and France in the third. For sources he used entries in encyclopedias and gazetteers or national history textbooks. In doing so, he discerned a common pattern: an advance from medieval “feudalism” to some form of monarchy, and then (Russia excepted) to “representative government.” He also treated the United States in the first volume, but he found its history “irregular”: it had not experienced feudalism or monarchy, but had piggybacked the history of England.³

Fukuzawa never attempted a point-to-point correlation between the stage of a nation’s civilization and its form of government. He recognized that a nation’s government could sometimes be ahead or behind other dimensions of its civilization. He nevertheless assumed a rough correlation: as a nation’s civilization advanced, it would progress from feudalism to monarchy, and then, after entering the stage of civilization and enlightenment, it would advance further to adopt some form of representative government.

Such a view was standard in the West during most of the nineteenth century. Fukuzawa’s adoption of the schema would have been unexceptional save for one crucial fact: he judged that Japan’s society during the Tokugawa era—the society in which he was born and spent half of his life—was feudal; that is to say, it was roughly similar to the societies of medieval or late medieval Europe. Based on this similarity, he surmised that the future course of Japan’s development would more or less replicate the European pattern: it would first advance to centralized rule, and then, in time, to some form of representative government. This grasp of a parallel inner dynamic working within Japan shaped his political thought from the 1870s through the 1880s.

Thus, if we can clarify Fukuzawa’s notion of feudalism and his understanding of the transition to monarchy, the intellectual foundation of his later writings in which he recommended an advance to constitutional government will become clear. In short, a careful consideration of the schema of government will provide a context for the essays in this book.

Feudalism is, of course, an abstraction. The German feudal system differed from that of France; the French system, from that of England. One can debate how many points of similarity are required to call all of these systems “feudal.” If we add Japan’s past to the list of feudal histories, the range becomes even greater. Given the differences in culture, this is inevitable. But what concerns us here is that during the decade after the Restoration, Fukuzawa looked at the similarities and saw both medieval Europe and Tokugawa Japan as feudal, as somewhat dissimilar members of the same category. Only two decades later would he alter this judgment.

Fukuzawa’s understanding of feudalism had two layers. The first was Chinese. As a youth, Fukuzawa had read the Chinese classics—Zuo zhuan, Shiji, Hanshu, and others—as part of his schooling. In these books, he came across the term fengjian (read hōken in Japanese), which Chinese historians used to describe the decentralized system of rule during the Zhou dynasty (1122–221 BC). (The complementary term used to describe the centralized, bureaucratic rule of most succeeding dynasties was junxian [read gunken in Japanese]. Fukuzawa avoided this term because China, despite its centralized government, was then a weak Asian nation.)

Tokugawa historians, educated in Chinese learning, had applied the term hōken to their own partially decentralized society. Just as early Zhou kings had assigned lands to their vassal-lords, so had Tokugawa Ieyasu, the first Tokugawa shogun, assigned fiefs to his vassal-daimyo. They, in turn, had given fiefs or stipends to their samurai vassals. Some Tokugawa historians pointed out the shortcomings of hōken society, which had led to its demise in China. Most, however, argued that Ieyasu had in some measure recreated in Japan an ideal society, similar to the early Zhou society so praised by the Confucian sages.⁴

The second layer was Western. In 1866, when Fukuzawa began translating Western texts for the first volume of Conditions in the West, he used books he had purchased in London in 1862 or obtained from the library at the Gaikokugata. The major challenge he faced in translating these texts was to find equivalents or approximations for the terms he encountered. He first encountered the term feudal in a brief history of the Netherlands in Lippincott’s Pronouncing Gazetteer. The passage reads: “Soon after this [establishment of an empire by Charlemagne], the whole country was parceled out into small principalities, in accordance with the feudal spirit of the age.”⁵ To translate the last phrase, Fukuzawa plucked the term hōken from his Chinese and Japanese readings and used it for the Western term feudal. “The feudal spirit of the age” became jidai no hōken no fū.⁶

In applying the Sino-Japanese term hōken to a medieval European society, Fukuzawa was not solely maintaining that European society had been decentralized. He was also claiming, as we shall see, that medieval Europe had a great number of institutions and practices that closely resembled those of Japan. This was the discovery that would guide his judgments for more than a decade. In short, post-medieval Europe could serve as the model for the future development of Japan.

By using approximately equivalent Japanese terms, Fukuzawa was able to translate a wide range of Western feudal terms with considerable accuracy. On the whole, they are apt. It is the sheer number of such terms—I ask for the reader’s patience—that convinces us of the feudal (or at least semi-feudal) character of Tokugawa society.

To start with, shokō was a term Fukuzawa often used in Conditions in the West. In Tokugawa times, the term referred to “the collectivity of daimyo” or the “various lords.” A Dictionary, Geographical, Statistical, and Historical of the Various Countries, Places, and Principal Natural Objects in the World, by John Ramsey McCulloch, one of Fukuzawa’s sources for English history, states that the Anglo-Saxons divided the land between the various lords. Fukuzawa translates the phrase various lords as “great lords” or daishokō. Elsewhere in Conditions in the West, Fukuzawa uses shokō almost interchangeably with nobles (kizoku) and great nobles (daikizoku), terms also used by Tokugawa historians but less frequently.

In the same passage, McCulloch writes of the division of “land.” For land, Fukuzawa uses ryōchi. In Tokugawa Japan, ryōchi usually referred to daimyo domains or, possibly, to the fiefs of higher-ranking samurai. That is to say, Fukuzawa understood that the term land in the McCulloch passage meant fiefs, and so in translating it, he used the more precise Japanese term ryōchi. Seroku (hereditary stipends or fiefs) was another frequently used Tokugawa term. McCulloch states that after the Norman conquest, “a new order began and the land was divided into 60,000 knights’ fees or estates (seroku).” The notion of hereditary estates is essential to any definition of feuda...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents 
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Part 1: General Introduction
• Part 2: Fukuzawa’s Essays in Translation
• Notes
• Index
• Imprint