Yukichi Fukuzawa Was The First Advocated Women's Right In Japan

The photograph referenced for the ten-thousand yen note portrait

Yukichi Fukuzawa was one of the founders of the new Japan

During a trip to the United States in 1867 on the eve of Japan’s modern revolution (the Meiji Restoration of 1868), the Japanese translator and later reformer and educator Fukuzawa Yukichi (1835-1901) purchased a geography textbook that clarified Western views on the relationship between civilization and the status of women: “Half-civilized nations . . . treat their women as slaves. China, Japan, Turkey, and Persia are the principal countries of this class.”

As a result of the intrusion of the western imperial powers into East Asia (Japan, China, Korea) in the mid-nineteenth century, this message was spread, and men and women across East Asia grappled with the notion that a country’s level of civilization was reflected in the status of its women. As the quotation suggests, in the eyes of westerners, the status of East Asian women was quite low.

This western-derived notion constituted part of the global circulation of ideas that accompanied modern imperialism and the rise of modern nation-states. Western visitors drew on the writings of Charles Fourier (1772-1837) and others and used the “low” status of women among other “barbaric” Japanese practices to justify the previously-mentioned series of unequal treaties.

Fukuzawa Yukichi (1835-1901) was a prominent educator, writer, and propagator of Western knowledge during the Meiji Period (1868-1912), founder of Keio Gijuku (a private college, later Keio University), of Japan’s first daily newspaper Jiji Shinpō, and introduced the art of public speaking in Japan. His collected works, written over a period of thirty years, fill 22 large volumes and cover a variety of subjects ranging from philosophy to women’s rights.

While embracing Western ideas, Fukuzawa never blindly advocated all things Western: he was not a Christian, supported the emperor system in Japan, thus had no desire to turn Japan into a republic; he criticized Western colonialism and inequality and argued for the adoption of Western-style freedom, science, and technology in order to build national strength. He was extremely pleased over Japan’s victory in the Sino-Japanese War in 1894/95 which he described as “a triumph of Japanese civilization” and a sign that Japan was “too strong to lose its independence to the West”.

Fukuzawa never accepted any government post, remaining a private citizen all his life. He disliked the arrogance of the bureaucracy and called it a “foolish game to bully those below while being bullied by those above”. By the time of his death, he was a national figure, with former pupils in all walks of life, and revered as one of the founders of the new Japan.

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