page_title: Fukuzawa Yukichi
section_title: Early life
hierarchical_section_title: Fukuzawa Yukichi / Early life
caption_attribution_description: 福沢諭吉。Fukuzawa Yukichi.諭吉が渡米した時に、サンフランシスコにあったウィリアム・シュー写真館で撮影された写真。彩色された湿板写真。写真のタイトルは「写真館の少女とともに」
context_page_description: Fukuzawa Yukichi was a Japanese author, writer, teacher, translator, entrepreneur, journalist, and leader who founded Keio University, Jiji-Shinpō and the Institute for Study of Infectious Diseases.
  Fukuzawa was an early Japanese advocate for reform. Fukuzawa's ideas about the organization of government and the structure of social institutions made a lasting impression on a rapidly changing Japan during the Meiji period.
  Fukuzawa is regarded as one of the founders of modern Japan.
context_section_description: 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.
  Fukuzawa spent the beginning of his walk of life just trying to survive the backbreaking yet dull life of a lower-level samurai in Japan during the Tokugawa period. Although Fukuzawa did travel to Nagasaki, his stay was brief as he quickly began to outshine his host in Nagasaki, Okudaira Iki. Okudaira planned to get rid of Fukuzawa by writing a letter saying that Fukuzawa's mother was ill.  Seeing through the fake letter Fukuzawa planned to travel to Edo and continue his studies there because he knew he would not be able to in his home domain, Nakatsu, but upon his return to Osaka, his brother persuaded him to stay and enroll at the Tekijuku school run by physician and rangaku scholar Ogata Kōan. Fukuzawa studied at Tekijuku for three years and became fully proficient in the Dutch language. In 1858, he was appointed official Dutch teacher of his family's domain, Nakatsu, and was sent to Edo to teach the family's vassals there.
  The following year, Japan opened up three of its ports to American and European ships, and Fukuzawa, intrigued with Western civilization, traveled to Kanagawa to see them. When he arrived, he discovered that virtually all of the European merchants there were speaking English rather than Dutch.  He then began to study English, but at that time, English-Japanese interpreters were rare and dictionaries nonexistent, so his studies were slow.
  In 1859, the Tokugawa shogunate sent the first diplomatic mission to the United States. Fukuzawa volunteered his services to Admiral Kimura Yoshitake. Kimura's ship, the Kanrin Maru, arrived in San Francisco, California, in 1860. The delegation stayed in the city for a month, during which time Fukuzawa had himself photographed with an American girl, and also found a Webster's Dictionary, from which he began serious study of the English language.
caption: Fukuzawa Yukichi (posing with the photographer's twelve year old daughter: Theodora Alice Shew) in San Francisco, 1860.
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