Fukuzawa Yukichi · Politics
Fukuzawa’s central ideal of <em>dokuritsu jison</em> - independence and self-respect - and his famous thesis that a nation can be independent only when its individual citizens are: personal self-reliance as the foundation of national freedom, the citizen in place of the subject.
If one phrase captures Fukuzawa’s life work it is dokuritsu jison - independence and self-respect. To be independent, he taught, is to manage your own affairs and to have no mind to lean upon others: to judge right and wrong with your own head, provide for yourself by your own effort, and answer for your own choices. It is the opposite of the servile habit, bred by centuries of feudal rule, of waiting for a superior’s permission and taking one’s cue from above. Fukuzawa thought this inner posture - upright, self-reliant, unwilling to be either a master or a slave - was the true mark of a modern person and the thing Japan most needed to cultivate. Knowledge mattered to him enormously, but knowledge in the service of this: a self that stands on its own feet. The educated dependent, clever but craven, was to him a contradiction and a danger.
Fukuzawa wrote in the shadow of a real fear: that Japan, like so much of Asia, might be swallowed or bullied by the Western powers. His diagnosis was unusual. The threat, he argued, was not only military or economic but characterological - it lay in the habits of the Japanese people themselves. Centuries of feudalism had trained them to defer, to await orders, to see politics as the business of their betters and their own role as obedience. Such a people, he warned, could not defend a nation’s independence, because they had no experience of independence in their own lives; they would treat foreign powers exactly as they had treated domestic lords - with a servility that invites domination. A government cannot supply from above the backbone that its citizens lack from within. If the people remain dependents and spectators, waiting to be governed, then the country’s independence rests on nothing and will not hold. National strength had to be grown in the soil of individual character.
The jison - self-respect - in Fukuzawa’s pairing is as important as the independence. He meant a settled refusal to be either grovelling or domineering: not to flatter and fawn before the powerful, and equally not to bully and despise the weak. Both the cringe and the swagger, he saw, are diseases of the same servile mentality, which measures everyone by rank and cannot imagine a relation of equals. The person of true self-respect deals with everyone, high or low, as a fellow human being - deferential to none, contemptuous of none. Fukuzawa held this out as a new social manner for a new age, replacing the elaborate hierarchy of bows with the plainer dignity of mutual respect among independent people. It was also, again, a national matter: a citizen who will not cringe before domestic power is far likelier to stand firm before foreign power. Self-respect at the level of the individual soul was, for Fukuzawa, the seedbed of a self-respecting nation.
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 made dokuritsu jison (independence and self-respect) the core of citizenship, argued that national independence rests on personal independence ( isshin dokuritsu shite ikkoku dokuritsu ), and warned that a servile people cannot keep a free country. Explain the chain from self to nation in you…
Leads to John Stuart Mill.
Begin this lesson →epoché — a humanities education that remembers you.