Among his acclaimed collections, the 20th-century Japanese artist Hirayama Ikuo produced a series of paintings depicting the monk Xuanzang (602–664) and fellow Buddhist pilgrims, with their camels carrying precious cargoes of Mahayana sutras, as they crossed the searing sands, high mountain-passes, and deep valleys from India to China. The story of these arduous “west-east” journeys along the Silk Road, and of the following decades of translation of the teachings of the Dharma into Chinese—in due course affecting a significant penetration into the East Asian cultural matrix—remains as a preeminent example of efficacious “globalization” in premodern history The influence of this cross-cultural passage was to have a far-reaching impact on the internal latticing of Japanese cultural history, and, through Japan, extends to our ever complexifying world-civilization today.
Without too much of a stretch of the historical imagination, the career of Fukuzawa Yukichi (1835–1901) can be considered to have contributed to the dynamics of inter-civilizational encounters analogous to that of Xuanzang. His three storm-tossed voyages before the Meiji Restoration to the United States and to Europe—and subsequent self-appointed mission of producing informative writings to a Japanese people cut off by thousands of miles of uncharted oceans to the West and hemmed in by hundred of years of national seclusion at home—now symbolize another potentially momentous set of globalizing initiations. In retrospect we see that he flourished at a tipping point. Moreover, he accomplished what arguably remains peerless in comparison with any contemporary Asian or Western writer of the 19th and even possibly of the 20th centuries: his career profile consists of the twin credentials of being a prescient Japanese nationalist and the first, substantively speaking, international historian and East-West philosopher.
Fukuzawa even achieved a degree of self-consciousness of his historically maieutic role. As a leader among the pioneers of Westernization in the early years of the Meiji Period, he expressed an uncanny sense of “the trend of the times.” With that sensitivity he succeeded in writing the philosophical script for the multi-layered modernization of Japan in the late 19th century. But again, adapting the phrase of Ralph Waldo Emerson, we are entitled to call Fukuzawa a Representative Man, whose descriptive, theoretical, and journalistic writings prognosticated exemplary transformations of the cultural symbolics of a range of the world’s civilizations in their modernizing phases.
Chief among Fukuzawa’s representative writings is Gakumon no susume (An Encouragement of Learning), a collection of 17 pamphlets he published during the crucial early Meiji Period years of 1872–76. Fukuzawa wrote this best-selling work at a popular level, and there is every reason to believe its charming simplicity and clarity of message remains universally attractive today. It takes time to appreciate the world-formative character of the great classics; in a hundred and fifty years Fukuzawa’s An Encouragement of Learning is even now gaining its place among the permanent legacies of Asian intellectual history. Like one of the high mountains passed by Xuanzang and his fellow Buddhist monks, it looms larger as it recedes in the distance.
The present translation is a thorough revision of an earlier co-translation published by Sophia University Press in 1969. While doing research in Japan in 1968–69 on the philosophy of Nishida Kitaro, my Wheel of Fortune turned in the form of a cherished Japanese language instructor, Ms. Hirano Umeyo, having just retired to the Kyoto area from her years of teaching at Columbia University. We discovered that we shared a curiosity for Fukuzawa, whose handsome photo appeared on the 10,000 yen note of Japanese currency; and this led to a back-and-forth project of translating his Gakumon no susume.† Adding to the pleasure and instruction of this activity, about the same time I had another serendipitous turn of fortune in sharing an appetite for Fukuzawa with a fellow Columbia University scholar sojourning in Kyoto, G. C. Hurst, III. In due course our collegial conversations generated a similar “side project” of translating Fukuzawa’s companion work, Bunmeiron no gairyaku (An Outline of a Theory of Civilization, 1875). This co-translation was eventually published by Sophia University Press in 1973; and it happily reappeared in an updated revision by Keio University Press in 2008. Each of these original “Kyoto” translations received a significant boost from the expertise of Edmund R. Skrzypczak, then editor of Monumenta Nipponica and Sophia University Press, and his staff member, Mr. Sawada Tetsuya.‡
The original “Kyoto” co-translations of almost forty years ago of Fukuzawa’s principal philosophical works have thus been reborn in these present two “Tokyo” redactions. They are the result of several years of gracious encouragement from Mr. Sakagami Hiroshi, Chairman of Keio University Press, and of sustained interaction with his brilliant staff, principally among whom were Ms. Katahara Ryoko, who took over the revision of Gakumon no susume, and Ms. Nagano Fumika, who first edited the revision of Bunmeiron. Following the meticulous editorial pattern established by Ms. Nagano, Ms. Katahara, with her own care and competence, ensured the precision of this revised translation of Gakumon, while improving the overall value of the volume through the addition of apt historical footnotes, chronologies, primary and secondary source bibliographies, and an expanded index. Professor Helen Ballhatchet of Keio University also contributed her historian’s expertise to our staff discussions of the text.
In this regard, our translation committee was also blessed to have had the gracious participation of the renowned Fukuzawa scholar, Professor Emeritus Nishikawa Shunsaku of Keio University; and the present volume has the added value of featuring his authoritative Introduction. As he informs us, his Introduction is itself a revision of an original UNESCO paper which he updated after he very recently discovered new materials in Fukuzawa’s papers. Professor Nishikawa’s informative Introduction is of interest for having been originally written to introduce Fukuzawa in general, not especially focused upon An Encouragement of Learning, but therefore framing the latter work in broader context and perspective.
In preparing this version of the translation I was privileged to have it reviewed by Professor Albert M. Craig, who kindly provided his comments and advice. I should also like to express my appreciation for the contribution of Professor Komuro Masamichi of Keio University for checking the chronologies appended to the translation.
It has been a personal pleasure to have shared in bringing this revised translation of Fukuzawa’s most famous work to an international readership. An Encouragement of Learning sparkles with Fukuzawa’s brilliance that comes from his fresh experiences and keen powers of observation. With his remarkable gift for wit and satire, it radiates with his sense of real problems, priorities, and solutions. It is the legacy of an East Asian Representative Man, who was at once philosopher, educator, and moralist, uniquely alive to the pulse of his times and keenly aware of the positive potentialities of world-historical change. He dealt in the currency of the will to learn rather than the will to believe. Even now we are his students, receiving his encouragement to learn.
David A. Dilworth
Philosophy Department
State University of New York at Stony Brook
