Minae Mizumura - The Fall of Language in the Age of English

Just off the western tip of Nagasaki was a small, artificial island whose ports had provided the only window on the West ever since the Edo government imposed an isolationist policy in 1636. The policy was the outcome of a major peasant uprising organized by Japanese Christians who had converted to Catholicism through missionaries sent by the Portuguese. The shogunate feared the spread of Christianity but was not willing to put a total stop to trade. The Netherlands, a great sea power in the seventeenth century, promised not to engage in any missionary activities, and so the Dutch East India Company was allowed to establish a trading post on that little island. From then on, the meager information Japan managed to glean of the Western world came via the Dutch language. The few Japanese intellectuals who chanced to come into contact with Western knowledge were impressed, and so, despite the dire shortage of books and teachers, not to mention the near nonexistence of dictionaries, they established schools all over Japan to teach the Dutch language along with Western science, especially medicine. Some progressive domains encouraged such “Dutch learning” (later called “Western learning”), but the Okudaira domain, where the Fukuzawa family had served for generations, was not among them. The best way for Fukuzawa to absorb Dutch learning was thus to go to Nagasaki.

On arriving, he saw the Roman alphabet for the first time in his life and was shocked: “I could hardly believe these ABC’s to be signs of a language” (37). He quickly set about learning the language, but his one-year stay was not as fruitful as it could have been. The Okudaira domain saw no point in anyone seriously learning Dutch. Fukuzawa was assigned to stay as a nonpaying boarder, half-secretary and half-servant to a family that owned precious copies of Dutch books and drawings on gunnery and rented them out to inquirers from all over Japan. Put in charge of the family rental business, he soon acquired a good deal of knowledge about gunnery — without ever laying eyes on an actual gun — but was never allowed to officially learn the Dutch language. He had to pick up what he could by seeking out doctors who practiced Western medicine or interpreters who conducted trade negotiations. On uncovering a silly intrigue by a jealous rival who wanted him out of the way, he left Nagasaki, intending to go to Edo, present-day Tokyo, to start learning Dutch in earnest. An arduous journey without money took him only as far as Osaka, the place of his birth, where his older brother was temporarily stationed, their father having by then passed on. The brother urged him to take up the language then and there. It turned out to be good advice.

Osaka was home to Ogata Academy, run by Ogata Kōan (1810–1863), a doctor trained in Western medicine. It so happened that this was one of the best places to acquire Dutch learning in all Japan. Fukuzawa’s stay at the academy lasted for three years, and he made the most of it. At one point, the death of his brother required him to return to the Okudaira domain, but though he was now the head of the family he refused to stay and, unmoved by recriminations from his relations, headed back to the academy after raising money for travel expenses by selling off valuable family possessions. Only his aged mother, who would be left at home alone, gave him her blessing.

Fukuzawa’s vivid descriptions of academy life capture the rowdy mischief, anarchic behavior, abject poverty, and in-your-face filthiness typical of such Edo-period students — all of them frantically learning Dutch as if their lives depended on it.

One day, taken sick, Fukuzawa noticed that he had no pillow. He then realized that for the past year he had never actually had a decent night’s sleep:

I realized suddenly that I had not used [a pillow] for the whole year that I had been there. I had been studying without regard to day or night. I would be reading all day and when night came I did not think of going to bed. When tired, I would lean over on my little desk, or stretch out on the floor resting my head on the raised alcove ( tokonoma ) of the room. I had gone through the year without ever spreading my pallet and covers and sleeping on the pillow. So obviously the servant could not find my pillow, for it did not exist anywhere in the apartment. This incident may illustrate our intense manner of studying. In this I was not unusual; all my friends lived in this way. We could not have studied harder. (79)

Moreover, since the academy had only ten books in Dutch, in order to study students had to copy out the original, taking turns. They each had to soak rice paper in alum so the ink would not smear, and make their own quill pens. Furthermore, as for the essential Dutch — Japanese dictionary, three thousand pages in all, there was only one precious copy. Students gathered around it to look up words. Before exams there was always a line.

One day, Ogata Kōan brought an expensive Dutch book on loan from a daimyo, Lord Kuroda. Kōan first called in Fukuzawa, who was the student representative, and handed him the book. “It was a new text on physical science recently translated from English,” Fukuzawa wrote. “The contents seemed to hold much that was new to us, especially the chapter on electricity.” The book described the structures of a battery, and his “heart was carried away with it at first sight.” His ability to perceive at a glance that this book represented the latest developments in science is testimony not only to his own ability but to the high scholarly level at the academy. When he took this “text on physical science” to show the other students, they “rose up as one and crowded around” (88) in awe.

The book was theirs for only two nights, while Lord Kuroda was visiting Osaka. Just to stare at it was meaningless, and to copy a thousand-page book in two nights was impossible. But Fukuzawa wanted to copy at least the part about electricity, and he mobilized everyone for the task:

If we could have broken the book up and divided the copying among the thirty or fifty “ready-quill men,” the entire contents might have been kept. But of course injuring the nobleman’s possession was out of the question. However, we worked at full speed, and the Ogata students could work expertly. One read aloud; another took the dictation; when one grew tired and slowed down, another was waiting with his quill, and the exhausted one would go to sleep regardless of time, morning, noon, or night.

Thus, working day and night, through meal hours and all, we finished the whole chapter in the time allotted, and thus the section on electricity, about three hundred pages including its diagrams, remained with us in manuscript. (88–89)

The students wanted to copy more, but there was just not enough time: “[W]hen the evening of Lord Kuroda’s departure came, we all handled the book affectionately in turn and gave it a sad leave-taking as if we were parting with a parent” (89). The image of young men affectionately caressing the book that was a repository of human knowledge and bidding it a sad farewell is striking.

Looking back, Fukuzawa himself seems puzzled over why they sought knowledge at such cost, and in the end he suggests that intellectual snobbery or pride may have been at work:

[H]owever much we studied, our work and knowledge had practically no connection with the actual means of gaining a livelihood or making a name for ourselves. Not only that, but the students of Dutch were looked upon with contempt by most men. Then why did we work so hard to learn Dutch? It would seem that we were simply laboring at difficult foreign texts for no clear purpose.

However, if anyone had looked into our inner hearts, he would have found there an untold pleasure which was our consolation. In short, we students were conscious of the fact that we were the sole possessors of the key to knowledge of the great European civilization. However much we suffered from poverty, whatever poor clothes we wore, the extent of our knowledge and the resources of our minds were beyond the reach of any prince or nobleman of the whole nation. If our work was hard, we were proud of it, knowing that no one knew what we endured. “In hardship we found pleasure, and the hardship was pleasure.” To illustrate, our position was like that of someone taking bitter medicine without knowing exactly what it was good for. We simply took it because nobody else could take it — the more bitter it was, the more gladly we took it. (90–91)