Learning to Stand Upright: Fukuzawa Yukichi, Tocqueville, and the Spirit of Independence

Fukuzawa read Tocqueville as Japan was emerging from feudal hierarchy into modern statehood, and he understood that the destruction of feudalism did not automatically mean the birth of liberty. Fukuzawa was less interested in whether Japan could copy railways, schools, and armies than whether it could produce a free society. In Tocqueville’s writing, Fukuzawa found a vocabulary for the dangers of centralization and the habits of independence needed for a free society.

Under the Tokugawa shogunate, lasting from 1603 to 1868, Japan enjoyed more than two centuries of relative peace that relied on a rigid social order. Society was divided by hereditary rank, with samurai, peasants, artisans, and merchants each assigned to a fixed place in a hierarchy governed by tradition. The Tokugawa shogunate tightly restricted foreign contact, leaving Japan increasingly isolated from the industrial and military transformations reshaping the world.

This period of isolation ended in 1853, when Commodore Matthew Perry arrived with American steamships and demanded that Japan open its ports to foreign trade. The American steam ships exposed the vast technological gap between Japan and the West. Faced with the threat of foreign force, Japan signed the Treaty of Kanagawa in 1854.

The crisis helped unravel the Tokugawa order. In 1868, the Meiji Restoration formally restored power to the emperor and launched a dramatic program of modernization to adopt Western technological advances. But the spirit behind Japan’s modernization came as much from ideas as from technology. Through translation, explanation, and adaptation, intellectual middlemen like Fukuzawa made Western ideas accessible to Japanese readers.

It took until 1809 for the news of American independence to reach Japan, mainly because most foreign books on world geography, then available in Japan, had been published before the American Revolution. When Japanese scholars learned of the United States, they encountered more than a new country. They found a startling political experiment: a republic composed of free and equal individuals.

Tocqueville did not see democracy as an automatic triumph of liberty. He saw it as a new social condition, one that could produce independent citizens or passive subjects.

In Democracy in America, Tocqueville warned of the dangers unique to democratic societies: the tyranny of the majority, conformity of public opinion, and the centralization of political power. Under democracy, outright tyranny might become rarer, but a milder form of despotism remained a constant threat.

Fukuzawa was born in January 1835 in Osaka, the same year Tocqueville published the first volume of Democracy in America. Unlike Alexis de Tocqueville, Fukuzawa lived under the Tokugawa shogunate in a poor lower-​samurai family where social mobility was extremely limited. Fukuzawa had to imagine what freedom might look like after the feudal order’s collapse, whereas Tocqueville, an aristocrat, watched democracy replace the old hierarchies of Europe.

Fukuzawa was eighteen when the American fleet arrived, a moment that redirected his life. In 1860, Fukuzawa joined Japan’s first official mission to the United States. He sailed to San Francisco only a few years after Japanese sailors first saw a steamship and began studying Western navigation. What struck Fukuzawa most was not American machinery, but American customs, manners, and ways of thinking, which were far more foreign to him than American technology:

The gulf between Japanese and American political assumptions became clear when Fukuzawa asked about George Washington’s descendants. Under the Tokugawa order, lineage carried enormous moral and political weight; rank was rooted in birth, and the descendants of great warrior families inherited social reverence. Fukuzawa expected Washington’s family to occupy a similar place in American life. Instead, his hosts answered with casual indifference, as if the matter were politically unimportant. This small interaction revealed that Americans could honor a founding hero without turning his descendants into a sacred caste.

Upon returning to Japan, Fukuzawa became one of Meiji Japan’s foremost champions of Western political ideas. In Seiyō jijō (Conditions in the Western World), first published in 1866, he introduced Japanese readers to American history and political institutions. He translated the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution into Japanese, making the language of natural rights, representative government, and constitutional order accessible to a public still emerging from feudal hierarchy. But Fukuzawa’s Westernization was not for mere imitation. He believed Japan had to understand the institutions, habits, and spirit that made Western civilization powerful, not simply copy its superficial appearance.

By the 1870s, the ideas of representation, constitutionalism, and popular rights had become political demands. The Freedom and People’s Rights Movement, beginning among frustrated former samurai and later spreading more widely, demanded a constitution and an elected assembly. Tocqueville entered Japan at precisely this moment, when Japanese reformers were asking whether representative institutions could restrain oligarchic power and cultivate a freer public life.

Tocqueville first became known in Japan through Nakamura Masanao’s 1870 translation of Self-​Help by Samuel Smiles. Fukuzawa’s associate Obata Tokujiro later translated key portions of Democracy in America, including sections on freedom of the press, public spirit, rights, and administrative decentralization.

Before he ever read Democracy in America, Fukuzawa’s observations in An Encouragement of Learning already showed affinities with Tocqueville’s thinking about democracy:

This closely resembles Tocqueville’s fear that citizens in democratic societies would be skillfully managed rather than openly oppressed. Fukuzawa understood how difficult it would be to transform Japanese society which was so accustomed to inherited authority: “Schools are licensed by the government,” he said, “Almost seventy to eighty percent of private enterprises have some government connection.” Private enterprise needed to play a larger role in Japanese society because newspapers, lectures, businesses, and associations outside the state were where people learned to act, think, argue, and build without waiting for permission.

When Fukuzawa eventually read Democracy in America in 1877, Tocqueville gave him sharper language and a firmer institutional focus, as seen in his essay “Bunkenron” (or “On Decentralization”). For the project of transforming a society that functions from the top down through a hereditary system, Fukuzawa found an appropriate solution in Tocqueville’s praise of local liberties. Quoting Obata Tokujirō’s translation of Tocqueville, Fukuzawa warns of the dangers of centralized power:

In Japan, this warning had special force. A society long trained in obedience could not become free by adopting new laws and institutions; liberty required the slower cultivation of independence and self-​government. The citizens had to practice responsibility before constitutional government could become more than machinery. Decentralization broke the habit of waiting for political power to act on one’s behalf.

Fukuzawa kept his distance from both the Meiji government and the Popular Rights Movement, fearing that reformers were too focused on capturing political power rather than cultivating independence outside of the state. Interestingly, Tocqueville made a similar criticism of French opposition parties under the July Monarchy:

It was not enough for Japanese or French reformers to demand a parliament if they still imagined politics as the art of seizing the center and ruling from above. A free society requires citizens capable of acting outside the state and of criticizing political power. Tocqueville helped Fukuzawa see that decentralization did not merely affect the administration of government but also taught people to rely on their own judgment and resist the temptation to treat the government as the source of all action.

Through writing bestselling works, such as Things Western and An Encouragement of Learning, founding Keio University, creating his newspaper Current Events, and constructing Japan’s first public speaking hall, Fukuzawa did more than any single individual to prepare his Japanese readers for the habits necessary to uphold representative government, equality under the law, and individual independence.

What took European nations centuries to build, Japan compressed into a few extraordinary decades. Fukuzawa lived long enough to see Japan move from a closed feudal order to a modernizing nation determined to stand among the great powers. The speed of the transformation was almost disorienting. In his autobiography, Fukuzawa reflected on the strangeness of having witnessed so much change in one lifetime:

Fukuzawa’s liberalism was more defensive and national than Tocqueville’s American example. He did not embrace Western ideas because he wanted Japan to become a copy of the West, but because he believed civilization, education, free inquiry, and individual independence were necessary for survival in a world of expanding empires. Fukuzawa’s deeper lesson echoed Tocqueville: strength without independence of spirit would only reproduce servitude in a modern style. Tocqueville warned that democracy could produce equal but passive subjects; Fukuzawa foresaw that Japan could outwardly modernize while remaining spiritually feudal. His life’s work was to prevent that fate.