Fukuzawa Yukichi: Life and Major Works

Born in 1835 in the Osaka residence of the Nakatsu domain, the son of a low-ranking samurai. At nineteen he traveled to Nagasaki to study Dutch learning, and went on to study Western scholarship further under Ogata Kōan at his academy in Osaka. In Edo he opened a school of Dutch studies (later Keio University) and, accompanying three shogunate missions to observe the West firsthand, recorded his experience of Western civilization in "Conditions in the West." After the Meiji Restoration he held no government post, devoting himself instead to the educational work of Keio and to journalism through the newspaper "Jiji Shinpō." In "An Encouragement of Learning," famous for its opening line "Heaven does not create one person above or below another," he preached the independence of the individual and the importance of practical learning, exerting enormous influence on Japan's modernization in the Meiji era. He also supported Kitasato Shibasaburō in founding an institute for infectious disease research, among other contributions to medicine, and died in 1901 of a cerebral hemorrhage at the age of 66. His portrait was long featured on the ten-thousand-yen banknote.