Fukuzawa’s embrace
Fukuzawa Yukichi was an avid traveler and expounder of European and American ways to Japan. Fukuzawa studied Dutch and then English, went on a diplomatic mission to San Francisco in 1860, created an English to Japanese dictionary, and promulgated a creed of personal independence. He found that the values of education, exchange of ideas, and competition had led to American and European dominance and sought to inculcate the Japanese populace with these values.
In Fukuzawa’s account of the United Kingdom, Fukuzawa seemed oblivious to the Parliament, political parties, and civility (how they would dine after so-called fighting over policy!). This self-depreciation reflected his ruddy persona. As a writer, he put himself in the perspective of an average Japanese person and worked his way out from there.
Years later, Soseki seemed to be living that life of educational edification and independence that Fukuzawa preached, but was that sufficient for the Japanese people to resist the West? Would this wholesale cultural change even work?
Soseki’s skepticism
Fukuzawa and Soseki had different temperaments. But they had different views on the goal of education and how the importing of foreign technologies was justified and useful for the future of Japan. Fukuzawa maintained that study of foreign technologies and methods could improve Japanese lives and even consolidate and strengthen the Japanese character that had fallen into disrepair from allegiance to Chinese classics, rigid gender and societal roles, and lack of industry compared to the Colonial Powers. You can have the best of both worlds.
Soseki seems to say no. That the materialist goals of the Colonial Powers would ultimately destroy Japan from within. Wholesale importing of their technology and methodology required Japan to compete with the Colonial Powers on their terms. This competition led to the neglect of their own worldview and a breakdown of their essential values and society.
Soseki looks to the future
Who was right? Well, the run up and disaster of the first two world wars indicate you can’t copy the Colonial Powers without accepting their goal and so their way of looking at things. Japan was defeated and occupied. However, Fukuzawa was correct in that adopting technologies and methods could and did improve Japanese lives and even connect them fruitfully with the wider world.
In rejecting materialism as a foreign import, Soseki was ahead of his time. Europe and America thought that materialism would solve their problems after world wars, but materialism led to the erosion and extinguishing of many democratic and even social values. Soseki did not want Japan to enter that European and American cycle. He followed spiritual leaders in Asia like Confucius and the Buddha who unshackled material growth from human progress centuries ago.