Fukuzawa Yukichi was born in 1835 at the Nakatsu domain's warehouse quarters at Dōjima in Osaka, the second son of Fukuzawa Hyakusuke, a samurai of the Nakatsu domain in Buzen. He was seven years younger than Oguri Kōzukenosuke Tadamasa, who was born in 1827. On the 1860 embassy to the United States he crossed the Pacific at twenty-seven as attendant to Kimura Settsu-no-kami Kaishū, commissioner of warships and head of the Kanrin Maru.
The Kanrin Maru was one of two warships the shogunate ordered from the Netherlands in the thick of its diplomatic troubles, and she reached Nagasaki on the fifth day of the eighth month of 1857. Her name in the Netherlands was the Japan. She was a three-masted wooden ship, 163 feet long and 24 feet in the beam, of a hundred horsepower, driven by steam and screw. In her sailed Kimura Yoshitake as commander, Katsu Kaishū as captain, and Fukuzawa and the rest, a hundred and fifteen in all. She was far smaller than the American warship Powhatan, in which the embassy proper sailed.
Fukuzawa aboard, as Kimura Settsu-no-kami told it
Kimura Settsu-no-kami's own account of the voyage survives.
Katsu was in a sorry state, taken with seasickness and lying in his cabin the whole time, so that we had the trouble of working the ship with no commander. The men who had come aboard from the domains as nominal servants were all worn out and of no use; Fukuzawa alone was unmoved and never sick, and I admired how he looked after me, saw to my food and clothing, and worked with a will
Kimura goes on: after they landed at San Francisco Fukuzawa worked away at everything; when Kimura caught cold he stayed by him and nursed him; and on the homeward passage he had the thought to buy and prepare gifts, which did Kimura credit once they were back (Abe Dōzan, Kaigun no Senkusha Oguri Kōzukenosuke Seiden, a true life of Oguri Kōzukenosuke, pioneer of the navy).
There was also the affair of the salute on entering San Francisco. Katsu said it could not be managed and they should drop it — to fire a salute for no good reason and make a mess of it would be a poor show; the officer Sasakura Kiritarō answered that they could certainly fire it. Katsu burst out, “nonsense — if you can, I will give you my head”, and the salute was fired, and well. The affair is set down in Fukuō Jiden (his autobiography) (Sakamoto Fujiyoshi, Oguri Kōzukenosuke no Shōgai, the life of Oguri Kōzukenosuke). Fukuzawa's respect for Kimura, and his distaste for a Katsu who made light of him, led on to “Yasegaman no Setsu”.
The newspaper Oguri meant to put in Fukuzawa's hands
Oguri Kōzukenosuke had seen early on that Fukuzawa was a man who should work for the Japan to come. Visiting a newspaper office in New York left a strong impression on Tadamasa, and after he came home he planned the first Western-style newspaper in Japan. The man he thought to put at the head of it was Fukuzawa Yukichi.
Oguri had at that time a plan to have Fukuzawa Yukichi publish a newspaper, but there was no one within the shogunate who would listen to it, and in the end he could not carry it out (Nihon Shinbun Hattatsu-shi, a history of the development of the newspaper in Japan)
Tadamasa himself is said to have remarked later that, had it come about, opinion in Japan in those years would have been much changed. Abe Dōzan writes that, had Oguri lived into the Meiji era, he would have led such men as Fukuzawa Yukichi, Fukuchi Gen'ichirō, Kurimoto Joun, Hara Takashi and Inukai Tsuyoshi and shone in the cultural life of the country, and that his death was a great loss to Japan.
Fukuzawa moving to save Enomoto Takeaki's life
After the surrender at Hakodate, Enomoto Takeaki was close to being sentenced to death. The man who moved in earnest to save him was Fukuzawa Yukichi. Fukuzawa drafted the petition for mercy on behalf of Enomoto's aged mother, and urged Kuroda Kiyotaka to spare him. Kuroda, moved by this, worked for the reprieve within the government's army, and it told. The course of it is set down at length in the miscellany in Fukuō Jiden (his autobiography).
Yet Fukuzawa argued that how that same Enomoto and Katsu Kaishū conducted themselves after the Restoration was, on the ground of the Japanese warrior's code, much to be regretted. That is “Yasegaman no Setsu”. The draft was written in 1877, and Fukuzawa sent it openly to Katsu himself.
It is not my real wish to attack another for my own pleasure. I have only set down what has not sat easily with me these many years, to put it to public opinion for the sake of the country and of later ages (Fukuzawa to Katsu, letter of the fifth day of the second month)
The next day, the sixth, Katsu answered:
What I do and do not do rests with me; blame and praise are other men's business, no concern of mine and no affair of mine
Fukuzawa kept the draft in his breast for twenty-four years after that. He made it public in 1901, after Katsu's death. Abe Dōzan takes it that he could not bring himself to attack the man while he lived.
The three men the embassy produced
Abe Dōzan holds that this embassy, planned by Ii Naosuke, was the beginning of Japan's new culture, and that it brought three men forward as a by-product: Oguri Kōzukenosuke, Katsu Kaishū and Fukuzawa Yukichi. He is indignant that writers of the history of the Restoration should set down Katsu and Fukuzawa alone and leave Oguri out — it is “beyond all reason”. On his reading, both Katsu and Fukuzawa crossed the sea on that voyage of 1860 as Oguri's juniors in rank.
Oguri Kōzukenosuke fell in 1868, at forty-two. Katsu Kaishū lived out his span, dying in 1899 at seventy-seven; Fukuzawa Yukichi founded Keiō Gijuku and supported modern Japan through education and the press. Enomoto Takeaki, his life spared, was taken into the new government and carried weight as a diplomat and a minister. Men who had all been within the one frame of the embassy of 1860 lived out the Meiji era each in a different way.
Sources: Abe Dōzan, Kaigun no Senkusha Oguri Kōzukenosuke Seiden (a true life of Oguri Kōzukenosuke, pioneer of the navy), Kaigun Yūshūkai, 1941; Sakamoto Fujiyoshi, Oguri Kōzukenosuke no Shōgai (the life of Oguri Kōzukenosuke), Kōdansha, 1987