No list purporting to be that of the Makers of Modern Japan would be complete were the name of Fukusawa Yukichi, the pioneer of Western education in his own land, to be omitted. His claims to remembrance are manifold and irrefutable, not the least of them being his right to be esteemed the founder of the leading Japanese journal, the _Jiji Shimpo_, of Tokio. But his fame will rest chiefly on his achievement in establishing the Kei-o-gi-juku College, wherein a large percentage of the leading men of the Japan of to-day graduated, and by not a few of whom he is revered as having been in no small degree the architect of their fortunes. Mr Fukusawa,—as he preferred to remain despite the offer of a peerage in his later years,—was born in Osaka, on the 12th of December 1834, that being the year which corresponds to the fifth of the Tempo era, and while yet an infant was taken to his father’s native province of Buzen, in Kiushiu, the family residence being in the town of Nakatsu, a port on the north-east coast of that island. The elder Fukusawa had been staying at Osaka for a time in the service of his feudal chieftain the lord of Buzen. Yukichi dwelt at home, pursuing the customary studies of youths of his age, but with a decided bent towards foreign literature, until in the first year of the Genji period (1854), he went to Nagasaki, and there began the study of Dutch. Prior to this he had been conspicuous as a hard-working scholar in Chinese, which to the Japanese was then, and is still, what Greek and Latin are to us. Yukichi was a whole year at Nagasaki, and then he removed to Osaka, and became a pupil of the celebrated doctor of medicine Ogata Ko-an, under whose guidance he continued the study of the Dutch tongue, and in 1858, the fifth year of the An-sei era, he went to Yedo, and began to impart to a few beginners the knowledge he had thus far acquired of the foreign language. It must be remembered that during Japan’s long seclusion from the rest of the world there were always a few Dutchmen dwelling at Nagasaki, and that Dutch was, as a consequence of that isolation, the only foreign tongue spoken down to the advent of Commodore Perry in 1853. Although by 1858 people of other nations had begun to make their appearance in the country, English was as yet almost an unknown tongue, and Dutch was still the only medium of communication with the Occident. [Illustration: FUKUSAWA YUKICHI]