The political scientist Masao Maruyama wrote in 1943 (at the very height of wartime nationalism) that Yukichi Fukuzawa "was a Meiji thinker, but at the same time he is a thinker of the present day."
Fukuzawa (1835-1901) was, in a way, the first Japanese cosmopolitan. He was an educator, writer and propagator of Western knowledge during the Meiji Era (1868-1912), and he was also an opponent of narrow nationalism.
He writes in his autobiography ("Fukuo Jiden," 1897): "I was opposed to the closing of the country and to all the old regime of rank and clan. I was in the service of the shogunate but had not the least idea of rendering service. I disliked the bureaucratic, oppressive, conservative, antiforeign policy of the shogunate, and I would not side with it."
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