The Enlightenment of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is marked as a watershed moment in Western history. An age of reason and scientific discovery, it gave rise to new ways of thinking, solidified the reputations of intellectuals like Isaac Newton and Voltaire and cast away the metaphorical blackness and superstition of the Dark Ages.

A century later, Japan went through its own Enlightenment, gathering knowledge from the West and building itself into a world superpower within a relatively short amount of time. The Japanese Enlightenment period of the nineteenth century was an era of radical thinkers and intellectual wayfarers, explorers who were willing to throw caution to the wind and expose themselves to alien cultures on behalf of their country. A man who was critical to shaping modern Japan was a key figure in this period. His name was Fukuzawa Yukichi.

A philosopher, writer, statesman, teacher and entrepreneur, Fukuzawa became a bridge between worlds for transmuting Western ideas into a Japanese mindset. He built his philosophy upon the nature of civilisation, identity and freedom, a philosophy that’s been grafted into the infrastructure of modern Japanese society.

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