In Yedo Mr Fukusawa occupied quarters in a mansion at Teppodzu which belonged to his feudal chieftain the lord Okudaira of Buzen, and it was while the scholars were immersed in their study of Dutch works that the opening of Yokohama to foreign trade brought about a change in their ideas, and led their tutor to enlarge the field of his own researches. For by the year 1859 the treaties with five foreign powers had been concluded, and the first steps were taken by Japan to fully acquaint herself with what had been the progress of other nations during the period of her voluntary severance of all communication with them. Yukichi was only twenty-five years old when he paid his first visit to an open port and saw something of the British people of whose characteristics he had read a great deal but had had previously no personal experience. He had at that time no knowledge whatever of English as a language, but he set himself diligently to work, and with the aid of a dictionary compiled in English and Dutch he sought, by private study, to master the difficulties of a tongue which he perceived would afford him the key to learning of the kind that his ambitions prompted him to seek. It was impossible at that time for him to procure an English teacher, or in all probability it would have been his choice to obtain his information direct rather than by the roundabout fashion in which he was compelled to acquire it—by Dutch intervention, as it were,—and, as it was, the burden of the task of procuring a competent knowledge of so complex a language as ours was rendered vastly more onerous by the nature of the method that he was driven to adopt in his studies. It is due to the memory of this eminent scholar to declare that he surmounted all the obstacles in his path and became the first of Japanese teachers of the Western tongue. But in the meantime, towards the close of 1859, he sailed for the United States of America, in the suite of Kimura, the lord of the province of Settsu, who was despatched on a mission to America by the Government of the Shogun. The party voyaged in the little man-of-war _Kan-riu-maru_, commanded by Katsu, the feudal lord of Awa, and Yukichi was in the United States for some months. The following year he returned to his own land, and his first act was to publish in book form a translation of a work which he had brought with him from the other side of the Pacific. This was the beginning of a long series of similar educational works from his pen for which Japan is deeply indebted to him.