Fukuzawa Yukichi — The Man Who Pretended to Be Fine

The Boy Who Didn't Cry

"I'll give you some sake, so let me shave this spot."

Whenever his mother said that, it is said, the little boy held back the pain and sat still without crying.

The hollow at the back of the neck hurts when a razor touches it, so he hated having his head shaved. But if there was sake in it for him, that was another story.

The person who told this story was the boy himself, in his sixties. It was a bad habit he was born with, he said, and he was truly ashamed of it. Then he added:

"I will hide nothing, and openly turn myself in."

His name was Fukuzawa Yukichi. He was the man who used to be on Japan's 10,000-yen bill.

Where a Nakatsu child would say "sō ja chiko," he would slip and say "sō de omasu." In the town of Nakatsu, in Kyushu in the south of Japan, this boy and his brother and sisters were always outsiders.

All five of them had been born in Osaka. Their father, Hyakusuke, had worked at the Nakatsu domain's compound there. When Yukichi, the youngest, was born, his father was delighted and, it is said, told his mother again and again that when the boy was ten or eleven, they would send him to a temple to become a Buddhist priest. Then, when Yukichi was a year and a half old, his father died, and their mother took the children back to her own hometown, Nakatsu.

Dressed in Osaka-style clothes and speaking Osaka dialect, the five of them could not join the circle of their dozens of cousins. They always played by themselves.

Around the time he began reading Chinese classics, Yukichi came across a certain line.

Do not let joy or anger show on your face. Whether you are happy or furious, keep it off your face.

That's it, he thought. From then on, when people praised him, he did not rejoice inside. When people looked down on him, he did not get angry. He never once fought with a friend, and he never came home crying to tell on anyone to his mother.

He never said the words I'm in trouble, either. He had never once said them since he was young, he wrote when he was old.

If anything, he talked a lot. He chatted easily with anyone. But it was all on the surface, he later said. In all his years in Nakatsu, he never made a single friend he could open his heart to.

The Nakatsu domain was a small country ruled by a lord. Inside it, everything was decided by rank. His father, Hyakusuke, too, had been a low-ranking samurai.

Children of high rank called lower children "kisama," a rude word for you. Lower children called higher ones "anata," the polite word. In studies, Yukichi always won. He was not weaker in a fight, either. Still, the way they spoke to each other never changed.

One day, his older brother Sannosuke sent a letter to a karō, one of the domain's top retainers. Trying to sound a little scholarly, he added the words "to your secretary" under the name.

The letter came back. What is this word, secretary? Write "to the gentlemen of your office" and send it again.

Yukichi, watching from the side, cried alone in anger.

"This is ridiculous. Who would stay in a place like this? There is nothing for it but to get out."

He was always thinking that in his heart, he wrote.

But leaving would take money, and his family had none.

When he was fourteen or fifteen, there were two poor students at the Chinese-classics school he attended. Both of them were getting by as masseurs while they studied.

Yukichi's heart leapt. Even if he ran away from home without a coin, he could always earn his food by giving massages. He asked the two to teach him, practiced hard, and became quite good at it.

In 1853, America's Black Ships arrived. All of Japan was talking about Western cannons. His brother said: to study Dutch gunnery, you have to read Dutch books. Would you like to try?

"If other people can read it, I'll read anything, sideways writing or not."

In the spring of 1854, at nineteen, Yukichi set out for Nagasaki.

As he left town, he turned around and spat. Once I'm out, I'm a bullet. I'm never coming back. Then he walked off fast. He remembered how good that felt for the rest of his life.

A year later, a letter came from that same Nakatsu. His mother, it said, was sick.

A Worried Face

Your mother is sick. Come home at once.

The letter from his cousin in Nakatsu had a second sheet tucked inside. The truth is, I wrote this because the retired head of the Okudaira family, a family of top retainers, ordered me to. Your mother is perfectly fine. Don't worry.

Fukuzawa Yukichi had been in Nagasaki for about a year.

The old man's son, Okudaira Iki, was the one who had been looking after Yukichi in Nagasaki. It seemed that Iki had asked his father to call Yukichi home.

Yukichi could guess why.

For that year, Yukichi had been living as a houseguest with Yamamoto Monojirō, an expert in gunnery. Iki was the one who had introduced him.

In that house, Yukichi took on every job there was. He read books aloud to his teacher, whose eyes were bad, and went out to make excuses about the family's debts. He drew water and even took care of the cats and dogs the lady of the house loved. In the end, he was asked if he would like to be adopted into the family.

In between, the Dutch he was learning got better and better. This was a young man who had needed three days just to learn the twenty-six letters of the ABC.

Iki, who had introduced him, did not like that, it seems.

Also, all that year, Yukichi had not drunk a single drop of sake. The Yamamoto family thought he was a geko, someone who cannot drink. In truth, he was dying for a drink. Still, he held out "as if I were dead," he wrote.

Making up his mother's illness to drive him out! Yukichi was furious to the bottom of his heart. Should he have it out with them, argument and all?

But he quickly thought again. There was no way to win a fight against a family of the domain's top retainers.

He went to Iki and put on a face full of worry. My mother has suddenly fallen ill. She is usually so strong. Being so far away, I can't stop wondering how she is.

Iki put on a surprised face, too. What a shame. Go home quickly. When she's better, I'll make sure you can come back.

The next morning, Iki handed him a letter for a relative in Nakatsu. He had left it unsealed on purpose. I'm sending him home because his mother is ill, but he is in the middle of his studies, so arrange for him to come back to Nagasaki.

"You little monkey, you fool."

Yukichi cursed him in his heart. His face stayed, to the end, the face of a young man politely saying thank you.

He had never meant to go back to Nakatsu. If he was going anywhere, it was Edo, today's Tokyo.

He left Nagasaki together with a Nakatsu merchant named Tetsuya Sōbei. They walked about twenty-eight kilometers, and reached Isahaya on a night with a bright moon. There he told Sōbei the truth, and he wrote down their exchange in his autobiography like this.

"I don't feel like going back to Nakatsu anymore. Take this luggage of mine back with you."

"If I go back to Nakatsu without you, what will I say to your mother?"

"Oh, never mind. I'm not going to die or anything, so give my mother my regards."

But he had almost no money. Only what he had scraped together by selling his Dutch dictionary. It was not nearly enough for the boat to Osaka.

So, as he walked, Yukichi wrote a letter. The sender: Tetsuya Sōbei. This gentleman is the young master of a samurai family in Nakatsu, and completely trustworthy, so please take good care of him. It was addressed to an inn for boat passengers in Shimonoseki. He had gotten the name out of Sōbei before they parted.

It was a fake letter. The innkeeper took one look at it and gave him a room.

The boat to Osaka was full of people going sightseeing. Everyone drank and gambled noisily. Yukichi wanted a drink, too, but he had no money. At the port near the Konpira shrine, everyone went off to have fun, and he stayed behind alone to watch the boat.

On the fifteenth day, the boat reached Akashi. Osaka was still about sixty kilometers away.

I'll walk from here, he said. I'll pay what I owe at our domain's compound in Osaka. The boatman wouldn't hear of it. I don't know you. I can't let you off halfway. The more Yukichi begged, the louder the boatman got.

Just then, a man on the same boat, who looked like a merchant from Shimonoseki, stepped forward.

"This gentleman is a samurai. He doesn't look like he's out to cheat you. If he does cheat you, I'll pay. Go on, sir, off you get."

It was like meeting a Buddha in hell, Yukichi thought, and in his heart he bowed to the man.

He had less than a hundred mon left, a few small coins. At a teahouse he drank two gō of sake, about a third of a liter, and ate a dish of boiled bamboo shoots and four or five bowls of rice. Then he walked on and on along the pitch-dark road, and after ten at night he finally reached the Nakatsu domain's compound in Osaka. His brother Sannosuke was working there.

The next day, he walked around town with Buhachi, who had come from Nakatsu as his brother's attendant. Long ago, Buhachi had worked for the Fukuzawa family in Osaka and looked after baby Yukichi.

Buhachi pointed down a side street. When you were about to be born, I went there in the middle of the night to fetch the midwife. I used to carry you every day to watch the sumo wrestlers practice. The practice place is over this way.

Yukichi's heart filled up, and before he knew it, tears were falling.

The young man who had spat on his hometown as he left was crying in the town where he was born.

When his brother heard the whole story, he said:

"If you were coming from Nagasaki, Nakatsu is on the way. You looked at Nakatsu out of the corner of your eye and went around our mother, didn't you?"

If I let you go to Edo now, we'll be in it together. There must be good teachers in Osaka, too.

That was how he entered the school of a doctor named Ogata Kōan. It was the spring of 1855, and Yukichi was twenty.

In Osaka, with his brother nearby, he could read as much as he liked. He would never have to tell anyone he was in trouble. Or so it seemed.

The news that this brother had died would come the very next year.