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Fukuzawa Yukichi

 

            Fukuzawa Yukuzawa has one of the best-known faces in Japan, as his portrait appears on 10,000 yen bank notes. He was a leading intellectual figure and educational reformer of the later nineteenth century. This was the period known in Japanese history as the Meiji Restoration; after centuries of military governments which had followed a policy of enforced isolation from the outside world a revolution led to the re-establishment of imperial rule and the opening up of the country to overseas trade and technology. Fukuzawa was determined that Japan should benefit from the best of Western technological and economic achievements, and so embarked on a conscious programme to adopt into the Japanese context key elements of European and America life. During that period, Eurocentrism has a great impact on Fukuzawa and Japan. It is a variant of ethnocentrism. In general ethnocentrism puts the own ethnic, national, religious or linguistic identity as the norm to judge other countries and cultures, or even subgroups in the own society. Eurocentrism is also a theory about the way cultural processes tend to move over the surface over the world as a whole.[1] They tend to flow out of the European sector and toward the non-European sector, such as Japan, China and Korea. In Blaut's article, he points out that this tendency appears not as a general prejudiced belief, but in a belief of false or inaccurate reality. Specifically, in accurate information on subject of history and origins. Moreover, the concept of Eurocentric diffusionism comes from the idea that ideas and beliefs flowed out of Europe to the rest of the non-European world. Fukuzawa got great influence from Eurocentrism, which showed in the practical and popular character of his writings, therefore, Fukuzawa Yukichi was Eurocentric.
             First, Fukuzawa used Europe as a standard that Japan should follow because he wanted Japan to truly become part of the civilized world of the West.


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