Fukuzawa Yukichi · Politics
The opening declaration of <em>An Encouragement of Learning</em> - that by birth all people are equal, since Heaven sets no one above or below anyone else - and Fukuzawa’s twist: that the vast real inequalities among people spring not from Heaven but from learning.
In 1872, just four years after the Meiji Restoration swept away the shogunate, Fukuzawa Yukichi published the first slim pamphlet of what became An Encouragement of Learning (Gakumon no susume). It opened with one of the most famous sentences ever written in Japanese: ‘It is said that Heaven does not create one person above another, nor one person below another.’ To readers raised under a rigid caste order - samurai above farmer, farmer above merchant, every station fixed at birth - this was electrifying. Only years earlier a commoner could be cut down for insolence to a samurai; now Fukuzawa announced that no one comes into the world as anyone’s natural superior or inferior. All are born, he said, with the same claim to dignity and freedom. The little book sold in the hundreds of thousands and helped teach an entire generation to think of itself not as subjects born to obey but as human beings born equal.
The old order answered the question ‘who deserves respect?’ with a single word: birth. Your worth, your work, your place, even your clothes were decided by the family you were born into. Fukuzawa replaced that answer with another: achievement, and specifically the achievement of learning. A person of real knowledge and useful skill, he argued, earns a high station whatever their origins; a person who will not learn sinks, whatever their pedigree. This was a quietly revolutionary reordering of society’s moral logic. It told the farmer’s son that the path upward was open, and it told the samurai’s son that his sword and his lineage guaranteed him nothing. Dignity was no longer inherited; it was to be won by the mind. In a country that had just abolished the legal privileges of the warrior class, Fukuzawa gave the new equality its philosophy: rank by merit, not by blood.
Fukuzawa did not preach equality for its own sake, as an abstract truth to admire. He preached it because a nation of equals who respect themselves is strong, and a nation of servile subjects is weak. Under the old order, most people had been trained to look upward for permission and downward in contempt - to obey superiors and lord it over inferiors. Fukuzawa saw this habit of dependence as a national danger: a people accustomed to bowing before rank at home would bow before foreigners abroad, and a country of such people could never stand on its own in a predatory world. Equality, for him, was the ground of independence. If every person is born no one’s inferior, then every person can and must learn to stand on their own feet, think with their own head, and carry their share of the country’s fate. The declaration that opens the book is thus not a sentiment but a summons: become equal in fact by becoming educated, self-reliant, and free.
This is the opening of the lesson. The rest — the dialogue, the primary source, and the recall — is in the app.
You learned that Fukuzawa opened An Encouragement of Learning by declaring natural equality (Heaven creates no one above or below another) and then explained real inequality as the fruit of learning , not of birth. Explain both halves in your own words.
Leads to Thomas Jefferson.
Begin this lesson →epoché — a humanities education that remembers you.