BD. Edmund Blunden

150. [Blunden]. ‘Japan Meets Europe’. Review of The Japanese Enlightenment: A Study of the Writings of Fukuzawa Yukichi, by Carmen Blacker. TLS, 16 April 1964, p. 309.

Fukuzawa (1835-1901), author, educator, and founder of Keio University, was an important proponent of modernisation both before and after the Meiji Restoration of 1868. Blunden finds Blacker’s volume ‘distinguished’ and believes that Fukuzawa’s work demonstrates that the ‘opening’ of Japan was not altogether the result of outside pressure, for he and other ‘independent thinkers and prophets among the Japanese themselves’ were ‘observant of the changes that would have to come over their extraordinary community’.