‘Learn and Earn, Earn and Learn’: British Influence and Fukuzawa Yukichi’s Creation of the First Japanese Business Elite

Abstract

In the late autumn of 1858 a 23-year-old man arrived in Edo and settled down in the Nakatsu clan house in Tsukiji, at the east end of the city. This man, Fukuzawa Yukichi, had been ordered by the senior clan officer to assume the headship of the domain school. This was the start of Fukuzawa’s Keio Gijuku (Keio College), so named because it was started in the fourth year of the Keio era, in the midst of the Restoration turbulence. Keio College educated some 6300 men and produced some 500 graduates between the late 1850s and 1889. It was superseded by Keio University, founded in January 1890, which had produced 1047 graduates by 1910: 792 in economics, 132 in law, 68 in politics and 55 in arts.¹ These figures show clearly that the university was overwhelmingly economics-orientated.