At the age of 36, following a brief visit to his hometown, Fukuzawa Yukichi drafted A Letter of Farewell from Nakatsu. It was 1871 and Fukuzawa had already gained extensive experience, not least through his travels abroad, from which he drew the observations for the drafting of Conditions of the West (Seiyō jijo) that gave him notoriety with the Japanese public. A Letter of Farewell from Nakatsu is considered to be an essential work in the development of his thought, as it anticipates - albeit in an extremely concise form - many of the themes that were to be the cornerstones of his later works. These themes encompass the patriarchal family structure, the dynamics between men and women, and the traditional approach to knowledge and learning, all of which he believed needed to be drastically reconsidered. Fukuzawa’s vision for Japan's future rested on its capacity to embrace the new civilisation introduced by the ‘West’. However, he did not envision this transformation as a blind adoption of a foreign model. Instead, he saw it as a process of modernisation that could simultaneously preserve the valuable aspects of Japanese tradition.
Sapienza University of Rome, Italy - ORCID: 0000-0001-9411-1745
Chapter Title
Fukuzawa Yukichi, Uno scritto di commiato da Nakatsu
Authors
Marco Del Bene
Language
Italian
DOI
10.36253/979-12-215-0422-4.14
Peer Reviewed
Publication Year
2024
Copyright Information
© 2024 Author(s)
Content License
Metadata License
Book Title
Il dono dell’airone
Book Subtitle
Scritti in onore di Ikuko Sagiyama
Editors
Luca Capponcelli, Diego Cucinelli, Chiara Ghidini, Matilde Mastrangelo, Rolando Minuti
Peer Reviewed
Number of Pages
390
Publication Year
2024
Copyright Information
© 2024 Author(s)
Content License
Metadata License
Publisher Name
Firenze University Press
DOI
10.36253/979-12-215-0422-4
ISBN Print
979-12-215-0421-7
eISBN (pdf)
979-12-215-0422-4
Series Title
Connessioni. Studies in Transcultural History
Series ISSN
2975-0393
Series E-ISSN
2975-0261