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61 4 The Gakusei The First National Plan for Education, 1872 Educational historians traditionally attribute the beginning of modern education in Japan to the Gakusei, the First National Plan for Education, issued on August 8, 1872.1 Implemented from April 1873, five years after the Meiji Restoration, the Gakusei is the most significant historical document in the annals of Japanese education .2 The one Japanese who more than any other laid the foundation for, and set the general purposes of, the First National Plan for Education was the towering intellectual Fukuzawa Yukichi. He thus deserves recognition as a pioneer of modern Japanese education, a characterization not infrequently attributed to him. Although not an officer of the Ministry of Education bureau that designed the Gakusei, which fell under the responsibility of Mitsukuri Rinshō, Fukuzawa’s influence on early modern Japanese education nevertheless was unsurpassed, extending far beyond his private Keio Gijuku school. Fukuzawa was born in 1834 in a comparatively low-ranking samurai family in a feudal domain of the southern island of Kyushu. It was not destined to become one of the four major clans that led the overthrow of the Tokugawa regime in 1868 ushering in the Meiji Restoration. His circumstances as a child in a lower-ranking samurai family proved to be of great significance. Although a member of the elite samurai governing class by birth, he detested the rigid social order within the samurai world that locked him into an unyielding ranking system. He particularly resented the rigid custom that compelled him to treat other samurai children his age from higherranking families, regardless of their ability, with deference in play, language, and study. Early on he became determined to break from the bonds of feudal tradition to become an independent human being. From early childhood, independence and freedom became an obsession in his life and in his prolific writings. His love of, and natural ability with, foreign languages led him through the traditional study of the Chinese language and classics as a samurai youth. This was followed by an intensive study of the Dutch language during the later years of the Tokugawa era, when the Dutch were recognized as the sole connection to the outside world. He spent the year 1854 in southern Japan at Nagasaki, the center of Dutch studies. From there the peripatetic Fukuzawa spent three years in Osaka where he furthered his studies in the Dutch language and Dutch science. Clan officials then ordered him to Edo (Tokyo) to teach Dutch to clan officials stationed in the capital. He walked the three-hundred-mile stretch to get there on the famed Tōkaidō Road.3 62 The First Decade of Modern Education When the American Black Ships entered Tokyo waters in 1853–1854, Fukuzawa traveled to the open port shortly thereafter. In one of the most famous moments in modern Japanese history related in standard histories, he painfully encountered the inexorable trends of the day. To my chagrin, when I tried to speak with them [foreigners], no one seemed to understand me at all. Nor was I able to understand anything spoken by a single one of all the foreigners I met. Neither could I read anything on the signboards over the shops. . . . There was not a single recognizable word in any of the inscriptions or in any speech. . . . I realized that a man would have to be able to read and converse in English to be recognized as a scholar in Western subjects in the coming time. . . . On the very next day after returning from Yokohama, I took up a new aim in life and determined to begin the study of English.4 Following the signing of a treaty with the United States that opened several ports to foreigners in 1859, the Tokugawa government sent its first diplomatic delegation to America the following year. Through influential acquaintances Fukuzawa managed to secure an appointment on the mission. At the age of twenty-five he found himself in San Francisco in March 1860.5 He spent the next fifty-two days in the San Francisco area witnessing some of the most advanced technological achievements available in the United States in 1860. For example, the use of steam to power engines was a marvel to behold. Fukuzawa was able to observe the American home of a local merchant, Charles Walcott Brooks, who was hired by the Japanese government as a west coast representative.6 Fukuzawa later used him Figure 7. Fukuzawa Yukichi. From Benjamin Duke, Ten...

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