Fukuzawa Yukichi · Politics
The hardest chapter in Fukuzawa’s thought: the 1885 editorial <em>Datsu-A Ron</em> (‘On Leaving Asia’), in which he urged Japan to abandon its ‘backward’ Asian neighbours and cast its lot with the civilized West - taught here honestly, as both an idea and a lasting stain.
On 16 March 1885, an unsigned editorial appeared in Jiji Shinpo, the newspaper Fukuzawa had founded, under the title Datsu-A Ron - ‘On Leaving Asia.’ Long attributed to Fukuzawa, it made a hard and fateful argument. Japan, it said, had successfully modernized and joined the ranks of civilized nations; but its neighbours, China and Korea, remained mired in what the editorial called backwardness and superstition, unable or unwilling to reform. Waiting for them was hopeless and dangerous, for the West judged Japan by the company it kept, and association with these ‘backward’ neighbours dragged Japan’s reputation down. The conclusion was blunt: Japan should mentally quit the ranks of Asia altogether, cast its lot with the civilized nations of the West, and deal with China and Korea not with special Asian fellow-feeling but exactly as the Western powers dealt with them. This is the darkest turn in Fukuzawa’s thought, and it must be met head-on.
Fukuzawa’s turn had a bitter immediate cause. Through the early 1880s he had actively supported Korean reformers who hoped to modernize their country along Japanese lines; he had encouraged them, hosted them, invested real hope in them. In late 1884 their attempted coup, the Gapsin reform, collapsed within days, its leaders killed or driven into exile, the reform faction crushed with Chinese backing. Fukuzawa was embittered by the failure and concluded that Japan’s neighbours could not or would not reform in time. Datsu-A Ron was written in the rawness of that disillusionment, and against a wider backdrop of Social Darwinist ideas then sweeping the world - the notion that nations and races struggle for survival, the strong rising and the weak going under - and of a real, well-founded fear that a Japan associated with a weak Asia might itself fall prey to Western imperialism. The context is essential to understanding the editorial. It is not, however, an excuse: many of Fukuzawa’s contemporaries drew humane conclusions from the same pressures, and the hardening was a choice.
There is a strong temptation, among admirers of Fukuzawa, to explain Datsu-A Ron away - to question the attribution, to plead the context, to insist the real Fukuzawa was the liberal of the 1870s. And there is an opposite temptation, among his critics, to let this one editorial define the whole man, reducing a complex thinker to a proto-imperialist. Honest teaching refuses both. The attribution, while not absolutely certain, is widely accepted by scholars; the argument fits the hardening nationalism of Fukuzawa’s later years; and the sentiments are genuinely his responsibility, not to be wished away. At the same time, this is one editorial among a vast body of work, written in a particular moment of disillusionment, and the same author gave Japan its ringing declaration of human equality, its ideal of independent citizenship, and its case for practical learning. The task is to hold the whole figure in view: the liberal emancipator and the nationalist who urged his country to abandon its neighbours were the same man, and the darker idea grew from the same civilization-ladder as the brighter ones. To teach Fukuzawa well is to teach this too, without flinching and without caricature.
This is the opening of the lesson. The rest — the dialogue, the primary source, and the recall — is in the app.
You learned that in 1885 Fukuzawa’s anonymous editorial Datsu-A Ron urged Japan to ‘leave Asia’ - to give up on reforming its neighbours, align with the civilized West, and deal with China and Korea as the Western powers did. Explain the argument, its roots in his theory of civilization, and why it is judged so harshl…
Leads to Okakura Kakuzo.
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