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"During the sweeping changes taking place in 19th century Japan, no thinker was more important than Fukuzawa Yukichi (1835-1901). Born into a low-ranking samurai family, he traveled to Nagasaki at age nineteen to study Dutch. In 1858, he was sent to Edo to teach Dutch to domain students. In his spare time he taught himself English using a Dutch-English dictionary. Two years later, he was appointed a translator of diplomatic documents at the shogunal office of foreign affairs. In 1862, he founded a school that is now Keio University. Eager to introduce Western history and ideas to the Japanese, he wrote a series of books, including the bestselling Conditions in the West (1866). In the late 1870s, he turned his attention to the prospects for parliamentary government in Japan. The central government was firmly in place and elective prefectural assemblies were about to be established. He wrote essays on the workings of such a system, drawing on his earlier travels abroad and his reading of de Tocqueville, John Stuart Mill, Walter Bagehot, and others. A realist and optimist, Fukuzawa assured his readers of the eventual success of parliamentary government in Japan. This book provides the first-English language translation of five essays that bear directly on the development of his thought and its legacy in Japanese culture."--Bloomsbury Publishing

Preliminary Material /Gail Lee Bernstein , Andrew Gordon and Kate Wildman Nakai --Gail Lee Bernstein, Andrew Gordon, and Kate Wildman Nakai /Gail Lee Bernstein , Andrew Gordon and Kate Wildman Nakai --Conventional Knowledge in Early Modern Japan /Mary Elizabeth Berry --Local Autonomy in Early Meiji Japan: Competing Conceptions /Kyu Hyun Kim --Tanaka Shōzō's Vision of an Alternative Constitutional Modernity for Japan /Timothy S. George --A Land of Milk and Honey: Rural Revitalization in the 1930s /Kerry Smith --Chisui: Creating a Sacred Domain in Early Modern and Modern Japan /Patricia Sippel --Taming the Iron Horse: Western Locomotive Makers and Technology Transfer in Japan, 1870–1914 /Steven J. Ericson --Women's Rights and the Japanese State, 1880–1925 /Barbara Molony --Men's Place in the Women's Kingdom: New Middle-Class Fatherhood in Taishō Japan /Harald Fuess --Social Networks Among the Daughters of a Japanese Family /Gail Lee Bernstein --Rethinking Japanese-Chinese Cultural Relations in the 1930s /See Heng Teow --Mocking Misery: Grass-Roots Satire in Defeated Japan /John W. Dower --Index /Gail Lee Bernstein , Andrew Gordon and Kate Wildman Nakai --Harvard East Asian Monographs /Gail Lee Bernstein , Andrew Gordon and Kate Wildman Nakai.