ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that a widespread adjustment to the new conditions of the British union in later eighteenth-century urban Scotland – generally known as the Scottish Enlightenment – is strongly echoed in Japan’s adjustment to new global conditions a century later. It reconsiders the direct influence of John Hill Burton on Fukuzawa Yukichi, an influence often simply seen as ‘western’, but in its universalising ideas of morals, language, and historical development, really a ‘Britishing’. It considers how the journal Meiroku Zasshi can be understood as a kind of digest of Scottish Enlightenment thinking, and finally recalls the strange case of the Edinburgh proto-modernist Robert Louis Stevenson’s reading of Restorationist Japan as a mirror to reconsider Enlightenment.
