Fukuzawa Yukichi

Fukuzawa Yukichi was a Japanese author, writer, teacher, translator, entrepreneur and journalist who founded Keio University, the newspaper JijiShinp and the Institute for Study of Infectious Diseases. He was an early Japanese civil rights activist and liberal ideologist. His ideas about government and social institutions made a lasting impression on a rapidly changing Japan during the Meiji Era. He is regarded as one of the founders of modern Japan. He is called a Japanese Voltaire.

Fukuzawa Yukichi was born into an impoverished lowranking samurai family of the Okudaira Clan of Nakatsu in 1835. His family lived in Osaka, the main trading center for Japan at the time. His family was poor following the early death of his father, who was also a Confucian scholar. At the age ofhe started Han learning, and by the time he turnedhad studied major writings such as the Analects, Tao Te Ching, Zuo Zhuan and Zhuanguzi. Fukuzawa was greatly influenced by his lifelong teacher, Shzan Shiraishi, who was a scholar of Confucianism and Han learning. When he turnedin 1854, shortly after Commodore Matthew C. Perrys arrival in Japan, Fukuzawas brother asked Yukichi to travel to Nagasaki, where the Dutch colony at Dejima was located, in order to enter a school of Dutch studies . He instructed Yukichi to learn Dutch so that he might study European cannon designs and gunnery.

Source: Wikipedia