ABSTRACT
Chapter one begins with the travels of Fukuzawa Yukichi (whose image is on the 10,000 yen bill today) to the United States in the 1860s. He made several trips to the United States and Europe in the 1860s and absorbed a great deal of information. But he was clear-eyed about the threat of western imperialism to Japan. Fukuawa Yukichi has been regarded as the most prominent intellectual and westernizer in the Japanese history. The first is correct but the second is more problematic. Fukuzawa, rather than a westernizer, might have been Japan’s first modern nationalist intellectual. His concerns were with liberating Japan from the old rank system of the Tokugawa. He wanted to see it replaced with individual and then national independence. He encouraged individual Japanese to be loyal to the nation, a form of civic nationalism. He tried to highlight rational civic discourse by founding newspapers and Keio University. He used some western ideas to promote his agenda but also invoked Confucian traditions. While Fukuzawa’s great success as an intellectual was part of the success of the Japanese in building modernity, the Chinese in the wake of the 1911 Revolution did not have a nation, at least not in the modern sense of the word. Young intellectuals attempted to modernize China but were thwarted by Empress Cixi in the Hundred Reforms of 1898. Threatened with execution after the reforms failed, Liang Qichao, second only to Kang Yuwei as a reforming intellectual, fled to Japan, spent several years there and observed Japan’s modernization firsthand. In Liang’s view, the Japanese excelled because they built a strong political state while also building a strong national identity. Liang saw Fukuzawa’s work as mentoring him and comparison of the two yields several similarities. While Liang wanted to liberate China from the worship of traditional Confucianism, he actually integrated neo-Confucian Wang Yangming thought into his budding modern philosophy by emphasizing civic virtue toward the nation, like Fukuzawa. Liang’s trips to the United States and Europe, like Fukuzawa’s, pushed him toward nationalism and away from western models as he observed the socio-economic inequities of the West. He became a public intellectual as did Fukuzawa, founding several newspapers and journals and writing furiously about China’s place in the modern world. His own activism in China’s republican government ended with the death of Yuan Shikai. Liang concluded his life studying Chinese thought and traditions and he cautioned young intellectuals against becoming too enamored of the West. Korean intellectual Yun Chi Ho also sought modernity, in this case for Korea. He fought the Korean monarchy alongside his Korean comrades, themselves allies of Fukuzawa, who sponsored their education and financially supported their efforts to make Korea into a republic.
