Man, Woman, Abacus: A Tale of Enlightenment

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1Published by the Harvard-Yenching Institute HJAS 72.1 (2012): 1–42

Woman, Man, Abacus:A Tale of Enlightenment

Hansun HsiungHarvard University

Rather than become embroiled in a noisy discussion of the mer-its of equal rights, I would direct attention only to an aspect that anyone can easily understand after we have taken up a simple point that is close at hand. This simple point is neither religious nor theoretical.

Fukuzawa Yukichi, “The Numerical Equality of Men and Women,” Meiroku zasshi (1875)

Why should anyone in the western world, in this day of versatile office calculating machines and mammoth electronic computers, waste his time learning how to use a simple abacus? There are several reasons.

Martin Gardner, The Japanese Abacus Explained (1963)

It had all the makings of a tale of Enlightenment. After serving as chargé d’affaires of the first Japanese Legation to the United States,

Mori Arinori 森有礼 (1847–1889) took it as his mission, upon his return to Tokyo in the summer of 1873, to lead Japan out of its self- incurred immaturity. Stopping in London on his way home, Mori “breath[ed] in the John Bull–atmosphere” and met with leading Victorian intellectuals,

I would like to thank Andrew Gordon and the participants in his graduate seminar, David Howell, and the anonymous referee for their valuable criticism.

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such as Herbert Spencer (1820–1903), Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–1895), Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881), and the Orientalist Max Müller (1823–1900).1 A few months later, he confided in a letter to his friend, the Boston merchant Edward W. Kinsley (1829–1891), that he wished “to introduce into Asia all kinds of good modern Europeism [sic] and, Americanism.”2 Not long after his return to Japan, Mori, true to his word, published an article in Meiroku zasshi 明六雑誌, calling for the abolition of concubinage and the equal treatment of men and women.3 Mori must have understood that his call for gender equality would stir controversy in the Japanese intellectual world. In the same letter to Kinsley, he had also confided a sense of alienation and foreboding: “I am, here at home, made a foreigner because of too much breath I breathed in while abroad . . . [in] the great free community of [the] North American Continent.”4 Around the time of writing these words, Mori founded the Meiji Six Society (Meirokusha 明六社), a bimonthly gathering of leading intellectuals who sought “to further the education of the nation.”5 Half a year later, in March 1874, the Society began to publish its proceedings under the title of Meiroku zasshi. Mori’s article opposing concubinage appeared only two months after the inaugural issue of Meiroku zasshi. This was less than five years after John Stuart Mill, in his The Subjection of Women, provoked Eng-lish audiences by positing that “the legal subordination of one sex to the other—is wrong in itself, and now one of the chief hindrances to human improvement.”6 Although some Japanese readers were likely

1 Mori Arinori to Ed. W. Kinsley Esq., 16 May 1873. SC70, Edward W. Kinsley Corre-spondence, Special Collections Research Center, Syracuse University Library.

2 Mori Arinori to Mr. Kinsley, 7 October 1873. SC70, Edward W. Kinsley Correspon-dence, Special Collections Research Center, Syracuse University Library.

3 Mori issued a total of five articles in Meiroku zasshi: “Saishōron ichi” 妻妾論一, Meiroku zasshi 8 (May 1874); “Saishōron ni” 妻妾論二, Meiroku zasshi 11 ( June 1874); “Saishōron san” 妻妾論三, Meiroku zasshi 15 (August 1874);“Saishōron yon” 妻妾論四, Meiroku zasshi 20 (November 1874); “Saishōron go” 妻妾論五, Meiroku zasshi 27 (Febru-ary 1875). These have been reprinted in Meiroku zasshi, 3 vols., ed. Yamamuro Shin’ichi 山室信一 and Nakanome Tōru 中野目徹 (Iwanami bunko, 2009) [hereafter MZ], 1:276–78, 366–69; 2:53–57, 188–90, 353–58. See also Mori Arinori, “On Wives and Concubines,” parts 1–5, Meiroku zasshi: Journal of the Japanese Enlightenment, trans. and ed. William Reynolds Braisted (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1976), pp. 104–5, 143–45, 189–91, 252–53, 331–33.

4 Mori Arinori to Mr. Kinsley, 7 October 1873.5 Meirokusha, Meirokusha seiki 明六社制規 (Meirokusha, 1874), p. 1.6 John Stuart Mill, The Subjection of Women (1869; 2nd ed., New York: D. Appleton and

Company, 1870), p. 1.

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already familiar with Mill’s work at the time of Mori’s initial article, the majority doubtless had to wait until 1878 for a partial translation into Japanese.7 Nonetheless, the controversy, referred to widely in the popular press as the “debate over the equal rights of men and women” (danjo dōkenron 男女同権論), managed through its own internal power to embroil such prominent men as Tsuda Shindō 津田真道 (1829–1903), Katō Hiroyuki 加藤弘之 (1836–1916), Sakatani Shiroshi 阪谷素 (1822–1881), and Nakamura Masanao 中村正直 (1832–1891), all of whom issued several articles on male-female equality and, in par-ticular, on the topic of concubinage.8 “There is not a wagon driver, coo-lie, grocer, or fishmonger these days,” declared the Yomiuri shinbun 読売新聞 in mid-1874, “who, without even knowing its meaning, fails to speak of the equal rights of men and women to any and every one around him.”9 In sketching the contours of the debate, one could quarrel, as the participants themselves did, over differences in terminology, such as “equality” (dōtō 同等) versus “equal rights” (dōken 同権), and “hus-band and wife” (fūfu 夫婦) versus “men and women” (danjo 男女).10 Overall, though, a latent consensus reigned concerning which terms were central and took precedence in decisions about whether or not Japan should adopt a more progressive gender policy. On the surface, Meiroku writers pitted “civilization” (bunmei 文明) against “barbarism” (banzoku 蛮俗), a reference to the concept wherein history proceeded through fixed evolutionary stages from barbarity to civilization.11

7 The translation by Fukama Naiki 深間内基 consisted of only the first two chapters of The Subjection of Women; see John Stuart Mill, Danjo dōkenron 男女同権論, trans. Fukama Naiki (Tōkyō shorin, 1878). The entirety of Mill’s treatise would later appear in Japanese, in a translation by Nogami Nobuyuki 野上信幸, under the title Fujin kaihō no genri 婦人解放の原理 (Ryūbunkan, 1921).

8 For a concise chronological summary, see Shibukawa Hisako 渋川久子, “‘Meiroku zasshi’ ni okeru sho ronsō” 『明六雑誌』における諸論争, Nihon shisō ronsō shi 日本思想論争史, ed. Imai Jun 今井淳 and Ozawa Tomio 小澤富夫 (Perikansha, 1979), pp. 327–36.

9 “Hakichigaeta danjo dōken ga ōkō, fūfu de ha tagai o taisetsu ni” 履き違えた男女同権が横行, 夫婦では互いを大切に, Yomiuri shinbun 読売新聞, July 5, 1875, early edi-tion, p. 2; also quoted in Sekiguchi Sumiko 関口すみ子, Go-isshin to jendaa: Ogyū Sorai kara kyōiku chokugo made 御一新とジェンダー　荻生徂徠から教育勅語まで, 2nd ed. (Tōkyō daigaku shuppan, 2005), p. 362 n. 397.

10 On the significance of linguistic variation, see Sekiguchi, Go-isshin to jendaa, pp. 131–33. On the general use of danjo dōken, consider the distinctions between “equal rights” and “equality” made by Katō Hiroyuki in Meiroku zasshi 31 (March 1875), in MZ, 2:73–80.

11 See Albert M. Craig, Civilization and Enlightenment: The Early Thought of Fukuzawa Yukichi (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009).

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Echoing Mill’s comment on “human improvement,” Mori noted that gender equality was necessary “to aid and further civilization” 文明を助けすすめん, lest Japan become “the single greatest nation of lechers on this globe” 地球上の一大淫乱国.12 Despite the allegedly universal nature of civilization, however, most writers were ultimately unable to rise above thinking in terms of an East-West divide; gender equality meant being more like Europe and less like Asia. In his final contribution to the debate, Mori himself assumed that British common law should be the basis for legal reforms that would protect marriage as a free contract between man and woman in Japan.13 In contrast, Tsuda Shindō demonstrated that one could still adopt the stance of an East-West polarity without idealiz-ing gender equality. Tsuda began by agreeing that the East lagged behind the West in its movement toward civilization. To buttress his point, he referenced the doctrine of the “separation of the sexes” (fūfu yūbetsu 夫婦有別), noting that it originated from Mencius. Nations such as China, mired in Confucian tradition, were to be censured for their “blind adherence to the past” (inishie o mōshin su 古を盲信す). However, Tsuda also pointed out that even in the West, gender equal-ity had not yet been fully accepted as a universal norm. This being the case, Tsuda concluded, it would be unwise for Japan to enforce equality between men and women.14 Voicing yet another viewpoint, Katō Hiroyuki looked to European customs as a counterexample; he claimed that the West was actually in a state of gender inequality, wherein women received greater privileges than men. From his per-spective, the West, ironically, testified to the dangers of gender equality carried too far.15 That such a debate took place in Japan during the 1870s—and that the phrase “equality of husband and wife” ( fūfu dōken 夫婦同権) was, by 1875, a “buzzword of the day [ryūkō no gen 流行の言], scattered

12 Mori Arinori, “Saishōron san,” 2:56; “Saishōron yon,” 2:190.13 Mori Arinori, “Saishōron go,” 3:353–58.14 Tsuda Shindō, “Fūfu yūbetsuron” 夫婦有別論, Meiroku zasshi 22 (December, 1874),

in MZ, 2:242; Tsuda Shindō, “Fūfu dōken ben” 夫婦同権弁, Meiroku zasshi 35 (April 1875), in MZ, 3:194–97.

15 Katō Hiroyuki, “Fūfu dōken no ryūheiron” 夫婦同権の流弊論 and “Fūfu dōken no ryūheiron dai-ni” 夫婦同権の流弊第二, Meiroku zasshi 31 (March 1875), in MZ, 3:73–77, 77–80.


across the pages of every newspaper”—should constitute a familiar narrative of the political possibilities following the Meiji Restoration.16 The early Meiji period was a time when the promise of liberalism gave birth to vibrant oppositional movements against a more conservative, gradualist state.17 Therefore it is not surprising that Fukuzawa Yukichi 福沢諭吉 (1835–1901)—a figure who has come to symbolize Meiji civ-ilization and enlightenment—also expressed his views on the subject in the pages of Meiroku zasshi. Fukuzawa’s belief that men and women claimed equal status as human subjects had already been made clear in Gakumon no susume 学問のすゝめ, Fukuzawa’s most famous work and one of the bestsell-ers of the Meiji period. By mid-1875, he had elaborated the implica-tions of this equal status in Bunmeiron no gairyaku 文明論之概略, his major theoretical text on the concept of “civilization.”18 Fukuzawa was a champion of Japan’s flight from semi-barbarism, and a partisan of the advancements made by Western knowledge. Few readers would likely have batted an eye when Fukuzawa, in agreement with Mori, came out in support of danjo dōken. Yet upon careful reading, Fukuzawa’s treatise, entitled “Danjo dōsūron” 男女同数論 (The numerical equality of men and women) gives rise to some unexpected tensions. Offered as a rejoinder to Katō’s article, which in turn had been submitted as a critique of Bunmeiron no gairyaku, Fukuzawa’s contribution did indeed support gender equality. But its tone and strategy stood at odds with the articles of his interlocu-tors and his image as a so-called “Enlightenment intellectual.” Express-ing frustration at the “futile arguments” (mizukakeron 水掛論) of his interlocutors, Fukuzawa opted to remain free of “a noisy discussion of the merits of equal rights” and “direct attention only to an aspect that anyone can easily understand after we have taken up a simple point that is close at hand.” He thus cut through the debate over whether

16 Tsuda Shindō, “Fūfu yūbetsuron,” 3:194.17 Stephen Vlastos, “Opposition Movements in Early Meiji, 1868–1885,” in The Emer-

gence of Meiji Japan, ed. Marius B. Jansen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 203; Carol Gluck, Japan’s Modern Myths: Ideology in the Late Meiji Period (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), pp. 17–21.

18 Fukuzawa Yukichi, Gakumon no susume (1872–1876), in Fukuzawa Yukichi zenshū 福沢諭吉全集, 20 vols., ed. Keiō gijuku 慶應義塾 (Iwanami shoten, 1958–1971) [hereafter FYZ], 3:81; Fukuzawa, Bunmeiron no gairyaku (1875), in FYZ, 4:146.

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gender equality was truly the path to civilization, or whether emulat-ing “the West” might be detrimental to the Japanese polity. Fukuzawa perceived the need to begin from a standpoint beyond any theory of historical stages or any specific references to European customs. Shed-ding arguments couched in East-West binaries, Fukuzawa wished to proceed from fundamental and universal first principles—“to under-stand what men and women really are, and to clarify what rights really are” まず男女の何ものたるを察し、権の何ものたるを詳かにして.19 Here, Fukuzawa’s concrete position in the gender debate was not at all obvious to his readers. As he emphasized, the “simple point . . . close at hand” of which he spoke was, “neither religious nor theo-retical, but rather a matter deriving from the abacus—the numerical equality of men and women, that all can easily comprehend” 宗旨にもあらず理論にもあらず、算盤尽くの話にて誰にも分かり易き男女同数論なり. Substituting the word “numbers” for “rights,” Fukuzawa contended that any argument about “the equality of husband and wife” (fūfu dōken) should first be based on an argument about the “numeri-cal equality of men and women” (danjo dōsū 男女同数). This numeri-cal equality was the “first stage of equal rights” (dōken no shodan 同権の初段). Polygamy, he maintained, was undesirable because “it does not conform to calculations on the abacus” 算盤の勘定合わぬゆえ、宜しからずのみ.20 If Fukuzawa’s meaning appears unclear today, it is because his argument was hinged upon two particular lines of argument whose logic is rather counterintuitive. The first pertains to his decisive dis-missal of all the previous terms that had defined the discourse on gen-der equality. Fukuzawa made no reference to legal or social precedents in foreign countries or to the rhetoric of civilization and barbarism; and he did not denigrate China or Confucian “superstition.” Yet, more fundamentally, his metaphoric invocation of “calculations on the aba-cus” is itself puzzling. It is difficult to decipher how the abacus enabled him to relate numerical equality to political equality. That is to say: what exactly did he mean by the “numerical equality of men and women,” and how did “calculations on the abacus” correspond to equal rights?

19 Fukuzawa Yukichi, “Danjo dōsūron,” Meiroku zasshi 31 (March 1875), in FYZ, 19:552. In English, see Fukuzawa Yukichi, “The Equal Numbers of Men and Women,” Meiroku zasshi: Journal of the Japanese Enlightenment, pp. 385–85.

20 Fukuzawa, “Danjo dōsūron,” 19:552.


Tongue-in-Cheek Evasions Although scholars widely acknowledge the importance of the Mei-roku gender debate to Meiji intellectual history,21 secondary sources offer little aid in addressing the mystery posed by Fukuzawa’s article. Relevant scholarship is scarce in part because the essay “Numerical Equality” has been omitted from several important collections, such as Chikuma Shobō’s Gendai Nihon shisō taikei 現代日本思想体系, which dedicated a separate volume to Fukuzawa. This lacuna is all the more noticeable because the preceding volume, titled Kindai no hōga 近代の萌芽 (Sprouts of modernity), included five of Mori’s essays on gen-der.22 A decade later, the same publisher Chikuma Shobō’s follow-up series, Kindai Nihon shisō taikei 近代日本思想体系, set aside another whole volume for Fukuzawa, but again skipped over the “Numerical Equality” article.23 One might attribute the lack of attention paid to Fukuzawa’s arti-cle to the neglect of gender as a subject of historical analysis. The renowned Nihon kindai shisō taikei 日本近代思想体系, published by Iwanami shoten, represented Fukuzawa as a thinker of class relations, education, economics, empire, and science, as well as an innovator of “modern” Meiji prose and a pioneer of new techniques of translation. Only once were Fukuzawa’s gender concerns given their due, through his writings on prostitution.24 Similarly, Heibonsha’s much earlier attempt at a source compendium—the Nihon tetsugaku shisō zensho 日本哲学思想全書 series—included Fukuzawa’s treatises on edu-cation, history, and trade but contained no section on “gender” that might have accommodated the essay “Numerical Equality.”25

21 See Albert M. Craig, “Enlightenment Thinkers of the Meirokusha: On Marriage,” Sources of Japanese Tradition (1958; 2nd ed., New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 2:710; Shibukawa, “‘Meiroku zasshi’ ni okeru sho ronsō,” pp. 327–36.

22 See Gendai Nihon shisō taikei (1963–1968), vol. 2, ed. Ienaga Saburō 家長三郎 (Chikuma shobō, 1963); Mori Arinori, “Saishōron,” in Gendai Nihon shisō taikei, vol. 1, ed. Matsumoto Sannosuke 松本三之介 (Chikuma shobō, 1966), pp. 357–63.

23 Ishida Takeshi 石田雄, ed., Kindai Nihon shisō taikei 近代日本思想体系 (1975–1990), vol. 2 (Chikuma shobō, 1975).

24 See Nihon kindai shisō taikei 日本近代思想体系, 25 vols., various editors (Iwanami shoten, 1988–92), 2:364–70; 6:20–26, 265–67; 8:257–59, 265–68; 10:20–23, 35–59, 117–24, 133–36, 205–10; 11:3–4, 273–75, 358–60; 12:312–14, 393–400; 13:73–84, 277–86; 14:101–12; 15:3–35, 37–42; 16:43–74, 353–56, 375–76; 22:183–90, 260–63, 268–70, 340–45.

25 See Nihon tetsugaku shisō zensho, 21 vols., various editors (Heibonsha, 1955–57), 15:297–304; 18:267–312.

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Even works of historiography that were self-consciously con-cerned with the “gender” problematic performed their own maneu-vers of elision. Carmen Blacker equated Fukuzawa’s early views about gender to those of Mori, noting: “Fukuzawa’s ideas on marriage . . . were shared from an early date by Mori Arinori, who . . . published in the Meiroku Zasshi of 1874 an article entitled ‘Saishōron’ (‘On Wives and Concubines’).”26 Forgoing any analysis of the “Numerical Equal-ity” article, she passed over the 1870s to consider only Fukuzawa’s later publications: Nihon fujinron 日本婦人論 (1885), Hinkōron 品行論 (1885), Danjo kōsairon 男女交際論 (1886), Onna daigaku hyōron 女大学評論 (1899), and Shin onna daigaku 新女大学 (1899).27 Gregory Pflugfelder similarly cited in one breath “such spokesmen of Japa-nese ‘enlightenment’ as Mori Arinori and Fukuzawa Yukichi” when he described the “civilized morality” of male-female sexuality enshrined in marriage debates.28 On one level, Blacker and Pflugfelder are cor-rect: Fukuzawa did agree with many of Mori’s substantive conclusions; he even served as witness to Mori’s own marriage to Hirose Tsune, the first civil contract marriage in Japan.29 Blacker, in particular, recog-nized differences between the two men—Fukuzawa never supported women’s suffrage or equal participation in education, and he accepted prostitution as a necessary vice.30 Yet Blacker’s and Pflugfelder’s works are problematic because they failed to treat Fukuzawa’s “Numeri-cal Equality” on its own terms as an important engagement with the Meiroku zasshi debate. As a result, they missed out on the key point I made above that Fukuzawa’s argument wholly bypassed the structure of reason deployed by his interlocutors. No matter how “Western” one

26 Carmen Blacker, “Fukuzawa Yukichi on Husband-Wife Relationships,” in Japanese Women: Emerging from Subservience, 1868–1945, ed. Hiroko Tomida and Gordon Daniels (Kent, Eng.: Global Oriental, 2005), p. 155 n. 3.

27 The same maneuver occurred earlier in Carmen Blacker, The Japanese Enlightenment: A Study of the Writings of Fukuzawa Yukichi (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1964), pp. 78–89. This book, too, ignores the essay “Numerical Equality.”

28 Gregory M. Pflugfelder, Cartographies of Desire (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), p. 149.

29 Ishikawa Mikiaki 石川幹明, Fukuzawa Yukichi den 福沢諭吉伝 (Iwanami shoten, 1932), 2:463. The contract itself, with Fukuzawa’s name as witness (shōnin 証人) was reprinted either in full or condensed in some of these papers, such as the Tōkyō Nichi-nichi shinbun 東京日日新聞. See Maruyama Makoto 丸山信, ed., Fukuzawa Yukichi kenkyū shiryō shūsei: dōjidai hen 福沢諭吉研究資料集成: 同時代編 (Ōzorasha, 1998), 1:155–57.

30 See Blacker, The Japanese Enlightenment, p. 89; Sekiguchi, Go-isshin to jendaa, pp. 269–77.


finds his methods, Fukuzawa had attempted to cut through the rheto-ric about the West employed by other Meiji writers and articulate a set of first principles on which to stake gender equality. These first prin-ciples were to be simple and universal, free from the constraints of the particularities of time, space, or place. The potential ingenuity of Fuku-zawa’s argument, a feature uniquely different from the arguments of Mori or other Meiroku zasshi contributors, remains unexplored. To be sure, a few select texts have begun to map out this terrain. In her groundbreaking work on gender between the Tokugawa and Meiji eras, Sekiguchi Sumiko analyzed Fukuzawa’s article on numeri-cal equality as a strategy of evasion. Sekiguchi claimed that Fukuzawa, by shifting the terms of the debate away from the question of “equal rights” and reframing it in terms of “equal numbers,” allowed himself to avoid the hairy question addressed by Mori and others: what are the relative merits of asserting substantive equality versus treating women as separate but equal?31 Next, the editors of the Fukuzawa Yukichi senshū 福沢諭吉選集, a collection of selected works by Fukuzawa, instructed the reader to interpret the “Numerical Equality” piece as a harbinger of ideas that would be more fully developed in the later work Hinkōron.32 Finally, Albert Craig, although not addressing numeri-cal equality in his Civilization and Enlightenment, deserves praise for including the piece in the second edition of Sources of Japanese Tradi-tion. In this latter work, Craig grouped together all the Meiroku zasshi articles comprising the gender debate as an emblem of the intellec-tual ferment of the period. More revealing of Craig’s thought, how-ever, is his preface to Fukuzawa’s “Numerical Equality” essay: there, he acknowledged that Fukuzawa “was an early and outspoken advocate of women’s rights.” The “Numerical Equality” essay itself, however, was, for Craig, executed “in tongue-in-cheek fashion.” Fukuzawa “uses numbers,” Craig claimed, “in a question that, he [Fukuzawa] realizes, has little to do with mathematics.”33 On account of its “tongue-in-cheek” frivolity, Fukuzawa’s “Numerical Equality” essay was excised in

31 Sekiguchi, Go-isshin to jendaa, pp. 257–58.32 Tomita Masafumi 富田正文, “Kōki” 後記, in Fukuzawa Yukichi senshū, ed. Fuku-

zawa Yukichi Chosaku Hensankai 福沢諭吉著作編纂会 (Iwanami shoten, 1951–1952), 5:408; Fukuzawa Yukichi, Hinkōron (1885), in FYZ, 5:547–78.

33 Albert M. Craig, “Fukuzawa Yukichi: The Equal Numbers of Men and Women,” in Sources of Japanese Tradition, 2nd ed. (2005), 2:713.

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the later collection Sources of East Asian Tradition, while the other Mei-roku zasshi articles were preserved.34 Although Sekiguchi, the Senshū editors, and Craig all differ in their specific analyses, they are alike in bypassing questions about the mode of argument, or logic, of Fukuzawa’s piece, focusing instead on Fukuzawa’s substantive conclusions and their implications. For Seki-guchi, a deft evasion signaled an intellectual failure—Fukuzawa’s lack of engagement with gender equality, on which his personal record, as it turns out, was not so immaculate. However, by neglecting to elabo-rate upon the specific meaning of “numerical equality,” Sekiguchi’s the-sis is open to a major challenge. If Fukuzawa’s recourse to numerical equality was merely an evasion, then why did he choose to speak of numbers at all? Out of all the possible ways to deflect the debate, why might Fukuzawa have chosen “calculations on the abacus,” a phrase seemingly irrelevant to the topic of gender? In concentrating only on the ultimate effects of Fukuzawa’s argument, Sekiguchi’s analysis can-not account for the apparent strangeness of Fukuzawa’s approach. Next, the Senshū, which treated the “Numerical Equality” essay as a dress rehearsal for Hinkōron, also shifted attention away from Fuku-zawa’s numerical reasoning. Fukuzawa framed Hinkōron, an essay on prostitution, as a critique of the moral conduct of Japanese men toward women. Although he once, in an offhand manner, employed the phrase “equal numbers” during the course of discussion, he in no way dwelled on the idea that numerical equality begets political equality. Instead, Hinkōron’s connection to the “Numerical Equality” essay derived from a brief note of pragmatic compromise made by Fukuzawa at the end of the latter work. After arguing that men and women are equal because they are equal in number, Fukuzawa concluded that if outlawing con-cubinage would be impossible in the near future, then one should at least hide these practices from view. According to Fukuzawa, things hidden were, by connotation, shameful. By hiding concubinage, then, one might have been able to stir up enough moral disapprobation so as eventually to abolish it forever.35 In Hinkōron Fukuzawa similarly rec-ommended that prostitution be hidden, but he defended this proposal with a completely different logic. Rather than attempting to find a tran-

34 Albert M. Craig, “Civilization and Enlightenment,” in Sources of East Asian Tradi-tion, ed. Wm. Theodore de Bary (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), 2:486.

35 Fukuzawa, “Danjo dōsūron,” 19:552; Fukuzawa, Hinkōron, 5:566–69.


shistorical basis for his argument, he explicitly treated the behavior of males toward females in relation to the succession of Japan’s histori-cal stages, from the barbarism of the Ashikaga shogunate up through the cusp of civilization in the Meiji period. To support his argument, Fukuzawa used an abundance of particular examples to show that Japan was fundamentally different from Europe; he thereby justified his preferred gender policy using a significantly different approach from that of his “Numerical Equality” article. “Owing to certain con-ditions peculiar to Japan that cannot be found in any other civilized country,” Fukuzawa wrote, prostitution should not be eliminated, but merely hidden.36 In sum, Hinkōron and the “Numerical Equality” essay were similar only to the extent that they arrived at parallel conclusions. Summing up the perspectives of Sekiguchi and the Senshū editors, Craig illustrated their commonality nicely, demonstrating clearly that for these contemporary scholars, Fukuzawa’s mode of argument was unimportant. According to Craig, Fukuzawa’s “Numerical Equality” article was “tongue-and-cheek”; its use of numbers was a joke, to be ignored in favor of the underlying point. Gender equality, he stated, “has little to do with mathematics.”37 In short, all these commenta-tors fixated on whether Fukuzawa was for or against gender equality, while downplaying the strange reasons Fukuzawa offered to support his argument. Neither of these viewpoints is wrong. Fukuzawa’s essay obscures, evades, and prefigures. Its clashing admixture of abaci, women, and men seems to create a bizarre collage rather than a rigorous argument. Yet the bizarrerie deserves attention because it challenges us to ask whether an article on a serious topic with a serious audience in a seri-ous periodical might actually have meant both everything it said, and also the quite serious manner in which it said it. Clues suggest Fuku-zawa was serious about the use of numerical reasoning in the gender debate. The simplest of these clues is that as late as 1899, in a series of Jiji shinpō articles that later became Onna daigaku hyōron, Fukuzawa still found it important enough to note that “in the human world, the numbers of men and women are the same” (danjo dōsū 男女同数).38

36 Fukuzawa, Hinkōron, 5:573. 37 Craig, “Fukuzawa Yukichi: The Equal Numbers of Men and Women,” 2:713.38 Fukuzawa Yukichi, Onna daigaku hyōron fu shin onna daigaku 女大学評論附新女大

学 ( Jiji shinpō, 1899), pp. 1–2.

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Although he mentioned this only in passing, and without further elaboration, the fact that twenty years later he would retain the same terms indicates that they were important to him. To determine why this was, I shall shift my focus from Fukuzawa’s substantive theses to an examination of his reasoning in all its humor, inanity, and apparent illegibility. Thus I return to the questions posed earlier: what exactly was the numerical equality of men and women, why was it a matter of calculations on the abacus, and how did this connect to equal rights?

Numerical EqualityFukuzawa’s “Numerical Equality” article, focused primarily on a dis-cussion of polygamy, clearly claimed that equality was a positive statis-tical fact. According to Fukuzawa, “the number of men and women in the world is roughly the same; hence the calculation [勘定] that one man and one woman should become husband and wife” 世界中の男と女の数はたいてい同様なるゆえ、男一人と女一人と相対して夫婦になるべき勘定なり. Intimations of this view date back at least to a letter of 1870 on the morality of familial bonds. There, Fukuzawa wrote that husband and wife are the model of all human morality, since “at the very beginning, when heaven gave rise to human beings, there must have been one man and one woman.”39 Subsequently, in mid-1874, Fukuzawa cited “the study of a certain Westerner” who had shown that male and female populations maintained a “tolerably equal” ratio of twenty-one men for every twenty women in the world. From this Fukuzawa concluded—and this was a year prior to the “Numerical Equality” article—“it is clear that for one husband to take two or three wives fundamentally contradicts the Laws of Nature [tenri 天理].”40 The argument may seem strange to us today. Within the broader scope of the history of ideas, however, Fukuzawa was already in good company when, in 1870, he articulated the notion that heaven began by creating one man and one woman, thereby authorizing natu-ral grounds for monogamous husband-wife relationships. Earlier in the eighteenth century, Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803) had, in his own history, emphasized the importance of “a fair equality in the

39 Fukuzawa Yukichi, “Nakatsu ryūbetsu no sho” 中津溜別之書, in FYZ, 20:50–51.40 Fukuzawa, Gakumon no susume, in FYZ, 3:82.


births of both sexes.” For Herder, the equality of the sexes was proof against Thomas Hobbes’s view that nature attempted to increase, rather than to minimize, strife between persons.41 But between 1870 and 1874 when the eighth volume of Gakumon no susume was pub-lished, Fukuzawa had found different company. This company was the anonymous “Westerner” whom Fukuzawa had referenced when pre-senting his 21:20 ratio in Gakumon no susume: Henry Thomas Buckle (1821–1862). Buckle had introduced the example of male-female popu-lation ratios early on in his History of Civilization in England, in a chap-ter on the virtues of aggregate statistical analysis. Fukuzawa’s reference to Buckle marked a crucial shift in the meaning of numerical equality. In 1870, Fukuzawa had conceived of numerical equality as a principle expressed in a moment of heavenly genesis, a perfect ratio of one to one. In 1874, he thought about it empirically, in terms of population surveys, which yielded an estimate of twenty-one to twenty. It was a shift from cosmological truth to positive statistical fact. As Buckle put it, “The proportion kept up in the births of the sexes” was “a beautiful instance of the regularity with which, under the most conflicting circumstances, the great Laws of Nature are able to hold their course.”42 Previous scholars, whom Buckle chastised, had sought the answer to reproductive ratios in the physiology of individ-ual humans, examining how body type, diet, and lifestyle contributed to the sex of offspring. According to Buckle, these studies were ulti-mately useless; only via “a comprehensive survey of facts” could one eliminate the problematic variations of the individual and “eliminate those disturbances which, owing to the impossibility of experiment, we shall never be able to isolate.”43 Buckle’s championing of comprehensive data gathering is fre-quently cited today as one of the most passionate expressions of a shift in thinking between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that opened the grounds for the modern social sciences in Europe.44

41 “Ein ziemliches Gleichmass in den Geburten beider Geschlechter,” in Johann Gottfried Herder, Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit, ed. Wolfgang Pross (1784–91; Munich: Carl Hanser, 2002), p. 289.

42 Henry Thomas Buckle, History of Civilization in England, 2 vols. (New York: Apple-ton & Co., 1858), 1:121.

43 Buckle, History of Civilization in England 1:125.44 T. M. Porter, “Private Chaos, Public Order: The Nineteenth-Century Statistical

Revolution,” in Probability since 1800: Interdisciplinary Studies of Scientific Development:

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In brief, the analysis of social phenomena during the eighteenth cen-tury was still embedded in a paradigm that focused on rational individ-ual behavior, and perceived the momentum of society as deriving from the singular, purposive actions of individual agents. Then, in the nine-teenth century, the concept of society as sui generis arose.45 Social sci-entists began to perceive macroscopic patterns that existed regardless of the thoughts and actions of each actor in society. Borrowing Lor-raine Daston’s memorable formulation, society changed from being “law-governed because it was an aggregate of rational individuals” to being “law-governed in spite of its . . . individual members.”46 Guiding this new thinking was the emerging discipline of statistics, for which Buckle served as a famous representative voice. Fukuzawa had begun to read Buckle in the early 1870s, around the same time he was reading works by Spencer, Mill, and Alexis de Tocqueville (1805–1859). Furthermore Buckle’s History of Civilization in England played a major role in Fukuzawa’s writing of Bunmeiron no gairyaku.47 To be sure, Fukuzawa was not in complete agreement with Buckle, espe-cially when it came to the subject of determinism. Buckle believed in a strong model of causation that in the final analysis derived from geog-raphy—“four classes of physical agents, namely, climate, food, soil, and the general aspect of nature.”48 Fukuzawa, in contrast, believed that the engines of history were, in the final analysis, moved by a nation’s spirit—its level of knowledge and virtue. Despite this difference, Fukuzawa quite vocally endorsed the method of statistics for the study of civilizations. “Probable patterns in a country,” Fukuzawa wrote, “cannot be discerned from one event or one thing. Actual conditions can only be determined by taking a broad

Workshop at the Centre for Interdisciplinary Research of the University of Bielefeld, September 16–20, 1982, ed. Michael Heidelberger, Lorenz Krüger, and Rosemarie Rheinwald (Biele-feld: Universität Bielefeld, 1983), pp. 27–41, esp. p. 34.

45 Most succinctly, at century’s end, in Émile Durkheim, The Rules of Sociological Method, trans. Steven Lukes (1895; New York: Free Press, 1982), pp. 39, 54.

46 Lorraine J. Daston, “Rational Individuals versus Laws of Society: From Probability to Statistics,” in The Probabilistic Revolution, Volume I: Ideas in History (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1987), p. 295.

47 Craig, Civilization and Enlightenment, pp. 32, 116–22; Inoki Takenori, “Introduction,” in Outline of a Theory of Civilization, by Fukuzawa Yukichi, trans. David A. Dilworth and G. Cameron Hurst, III (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), p. xxvi.

48 Buckle, History of Civilization in England 1:29–30; Inoki, “Introduction,” p. xxviii; Craig, Civilization and Enlightenment, p. 117.


sampling and making minute comparisons.” Fukuzawa grafted statisti-cal methodology onto his own idealism, arguing that “the changes of the human mind,” when “measured en masse” and “compared . . . over a long period of time” would allow one “to see the direction in which the country’s knowledge and virtue are heading.” Ordering the world into aggregate numbers through statistics would make the spiritual ques-tions of mankind, with all their seeming abstractions and multiplicities of individual desires, solidly graspable, “tangible as a physical object” as “if we were looking at an object’s physical shape or reading letters cut into a block of wood.”49 Although Fukuzawa was directly endors-ing Buckle in this passage, later in his life he would explain his meth-odological support more broadly as a vision of the foundational role of “numbers and sciences” (sūri 数理) in the attainment of knowledge. Punning on a word that, at the time, broadly signified “mathemat-ics,” he chose instead to parse sūri separately into its two constitutent characters—number (sū 数) and science (ri 理). “In my interpreta-tion of education, I try to coordinate all the physical actions of human beings by numbers and sciences,” he explained, and then elaborated: “I believe no one can escape the laws of numbers and sciences.” For Fukuzawa, the world was just as much an order of nations as it was an order of digits.50 Statistics promised the possibility of eliminating loose meta-physics and establishing a more decisive realm of positive fact. Buried within the new statistical movement, however, were several significant political implications. More than a simple zeal for aggregate quantifica-tion, statistics was also, for nineteenth-century Europe, “a movement”51 caught between the growing power of society and an unwavering faith in the state. This proved particularly true for Buckle’s Victorian Britain, where practitioners of statistics, confronted by the social problems of

49 Fukuzawa, Bunmeiron no gairyaku, in FYZ, 4:54–56; Fukuzawa Yukichi, Outline of a Theory of Civilization, pp. 57–58.

50 Fukuzawa Yukichi, Fukuō jiden 福翁自伝 (1899), in FYZ, 7:167. In English, Fuku-zawa Yukichi, The Autobiography of Yukichi Fukuzawa, trans. Eiichi Kiyooka (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), pp. 214–15. Kiyooka translates ri as “reason,” but I choose “science” following Maruyama Masao 丸山眞男, who emphasizes that Fukuzawa appropriated traditional philosophical terms and redefined them within the context of a Newtonian inductive empiricism. See Maruyama Masao, “Fukuzawa ni okeru ‘jitsugaku’ no tenkai” 福沢における「実学」の転回 (1947), in Fukuzawa Yukichi no tetsugaku hoka roppen 福沢諭吉の哲学: 他六編 (Iwanami Bunko, 2010), pp. 36–65.

51 Porter, “Private Chaos, Public Order,” p. 30.

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industrial society, worked toward reform in sanitation, housing, and education not as an end, but as a means to meet “the practical needs of administration.” As Theodore M. Porter points out, statistics originally served as a science of the state, a tool that would “facilitate orderly government.”52 This pro-state, anti-revolutionary character of statistics deeply col-ored the very premises of Buckle’s own methodology. In his terms, sta-tistics revealed the Laws of Nature, and the Laws of Nature exceeded the individual actions of any single man. Fukuzawa, too, articulated a strong notion of historical forces beyond “great men,” insisting on a universal motor, supra-human, that transcended human events.53 The consequence of such a doctrine was, for Buckle, advocacy for a brand of political gradualism. Insofar as the Laws of Nature would inevita-bly take their course, “the wise legislator will ally himself with history, and allow to be achieved gradually what otherwise would be accom-plished violently . . . to minimize the perturbations that disturb the social equilibrium.”54 At the same time, the statist character of statistics also promoted various progressive tendencies. The rise of a numerical language for the understanding of the social world, while serving bureaucratic state apparatuses, was also a means of making these apparatuses more trans-parent to the general public. Numbers, unlike closeted deals brokered in hidden backrooms, were part of a new administrative toolkit that could lead to liberal government and democratic decision-making. Many nineteenth-century European thinkers argued that vast data sets enabled policymakers to transcend conflicts of culture and language by rendering the world into commensurable quantitative units. Unlike everyday language, numbers allowed for comparisons across different times and national borders with greater objective facility. Moreover, numeracy was less tied to distinct education and upbringing than was cultural knowledge. With numbers, one did not require a familiarity with canonical political texts or rhetoric. All humans, so statisticians claimed, could participate in the universality of numbers.55

52 Porter, “Private Chaos, Public Order,” p. 33.53 Craig, Civilization and Enlightenment, p. 118.54 Porter, “Private Chaos, Public Order,” p. 33.55 Theodore M. Porter, Trust in Numbers: The Pursuit of Objectivity in Science and Public

Life (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), pp. 35, 74–76, 80.


Therefore, by even raising the possibility of an argument from aggregate statistics, Fukuzawa was signaling his pronounced distance from the arguments of his interlocutors in Meiroku zasshi. Mori, Katō, and Tsuda had made their case by way of anecdotes and casual folk-ethnographic observations, citing here and there practices in the West they had directly witnessed or else heard about, and then buttressing these observations with a doctrine of civilization versus barbarism. Fukuzawa, in contrast, countering with one simple statistical datum, offered a new approach to the problem of gender—a social science approach that claimed to speak to readers regardless of their knowledge of the Japanese past or the Western present. In addition, through the invocation of statistical reasoning, he defused the over- politicization of gender for all parties involved while making his own political stance clear. Katō had stressed that the radical notion of gender equality would affect Japanese society negatively; Mori had stressed the pro-gressiveness of gender equality as a positive aspect. Rooting the issue in statistics, Fukuzawa was suggesting that gender equality was neither radical nor progressive at all, but a descriptive feature of human soci-ety. Gender equality did not entail massive social change, but only the realignment of society with the original Laws of Nature. This new mode of argumentation was the initial stake, at least, in positing numerical equality as relevant to political equality. It corre-sponds with what Fukuzawa achieved in Gakumon no susume, when he first introduced statistical equality between men and women as a tes-tament to the Laws of Nature. Yet in the “Numerical Equality” essay, Fukuzawa went one step further, departing from Gakumon no susume, as well as from any simple recapitulation of Buckle. When making his sta-tistical case in Gakumon no susume, Fukuzawa had invoked those same Laws of Nature that characterized Buckle’s politics of gradualism. But a mere eleven months later, Fukuzawa did not speak about nature or laws at all in the “Numerical Equality” essay. Rather, he argued that inequal-ity between man and woman was wrong not because it went against the Laws of Nature, but because it “does not conform to calculations on the abacus.” In the “Numerical Equality” essay, the link between fact and norm, between statistical equality and political equality, was the figure of “calculations on the abacus” (soroban no kanjō 算盤の勘定). What accounts for this change in Fukuzawa’s viewpoint? Fuku-zawa’s line of reasoning is puzzling because the concept of numerical

18 Hansun Hsiung

equality does not seem obviously connected to an abacus, which, after all, merely calculates. The puzzle is further complicated by two tex-tual difficulties. In his History of English Civilization, Buckle used gen-der statistics simply to reinforce the elegance of his methodology. He did not attempt to draw any direct political implications from the sta-tistical equality of men and women. Furthermore, when discussing this statistic, he primarily stressed that men and women were unequal rather than equal in number. Although at one point he used the phrase “tolerably equal,”56 what the “beautiful law” of statistics yielded for him was the fact that men always outnumbered women. “We may con-fidently say,” Buckle wrote, “that although the operations of this law are of course liable to constant aberrations, the law itself is so power-ful, that we know of no country in which during a single year the male births have not been greater than the female ones.” On the same page, he twice reiterated this point: “In every part of the world . . . there is . . . excess on the side of male births”; and “In no part of the world . . . are more girls born than boys.”57 Did Fukuzawa deliberately misread Buckle, ignoring a fuzzy “tol-erable equality” that was actually a statistic about inequality, all in order to conjure up a 1:1 ratio of rights from a 21:20 ratio of bodies? Quite mysteriously, right when Fukuzawa performed this sleight-of-hand, the abacus appeared, brandished about like a magic wand. For the Fukuzawa of the “Numerical Equality” essay, the abacus some-how seemed a better basis for argument than Laws of Nature, for the abacus made equal that which was unequal, and made normative that which was inert fact. Fukuzawa had set out to “understand what men and women really are” and “to clarify what rights really are”; in his own words, numerical equality was the “first stage of equal rights.” The stakes involved in making sense of his calculating abacus are therefore quite high. Unless we are simply to dismiss the “Numerical Equality” essay as an aberrant expression of ideas found in Gakumon no susume, we would do well to take seriously the work Fukuzawa took most seri-ously, in particular the work that Fukuzawa himself would regard as being “among all my writings and translations . . . the most trouble-some and effort-consuming.”58

56 Buckle, History of Civilization in England, p. 12257 Buckle, History of Civilization in England, p. 124.58 Fukuzawa Yukichi, “Shogen” 緒言 [Preface], in FYZ, 1:53.


The AbacusIt was neither Seiyō jijō 西洋事情 (1866–1870) nor Gakumon no susume (1872–1876) nor Bunmeiron no gairyaku (1875), but this work—Chōai no hō 帳合の法 (Methods of bookkeeping)—that so consumed Fuku-zawa from 1873 to 1874.59 The first publication to introduce Western double-entry bookkeeping into Japan, Chōai no hō reveals that the invocation of numbers, abaci, and calculation was more than a passing turn of rhetoric for Fukuzawa. The frontispiece to Chōai no hō (see fig. 1) provides readers with a powerful glimpse into the overarching themes of the book: a pencil and a ruler frame the right and left sides; and running down the length of each of these instruments is the phrase “The tip of the pen allows us to rule the age, and with effort enriches the world.” The layout of the page itself conveys a strong aesthetic of symmetry, with images of a scale and an abacus framing the top and bottom respectively. The two images are central to defining the innovative role of bookkeep-ing in Fukuzawa’s political thought. The rhetoric of the frontis piece, declaring that one “rules the age” with a pen, had deep meaning for Fukuzawa. As his own preface indicates, Chōai no hō was not sim-ply an instruction manual, but also a bid to redraw the boundaries of proper knowledge. Over the course of several pages, Fukuzawa decried “scholars” (gakusha 学者) for their bias against the forms of learning practiced by commoners (hyakushō chōnin 百姓町人).60 The follow-ing year, he would reiterate this point by scorning “scholars” as “merely knowing difficult characters, reading difficult ancient texts, enjoying waka, and writing Chinese poetry.”61 Thus the primary goal of Chōai no hō was to demonstrate to effete poets and recondite Confucians the necessity of bookkeeping—previously ignored, but eminently useful.

59 For the most prolific discussion of Fukuzawa Yukichi from the perspective of the history of accounting, see Nishikawa Kōjirō 西川孝治郎, “Fukuzawa Yukichi to boki” 福沢諭吉と簿記, Kigyō kaikei 企業会計 5.6 ( June 1953): 756–60; Nishikawa, “Seiyō boki dōnyū-shi no kenkyū” 西洋簿記導入史の研究, Kaikei 会計 115.4 (April 1979): 585–601; Nishikawa, “Fukuzawa Yukichi to shūshi boki-hō” 福沢諭吉と収支簿記法, Kaikei 66.6 (November 1954): 57–69; Nishikawa, “Nihon ni okeru seiyō boki no fukyū to kisū-hō” 日本における西洋簿記の普及と記数法, Kaikei 67.5 (May 1955): 99–107. See also Nishi-kawa, Nihon boki shi dan 日本簿記史談 (Dōbunkan, 1971), pp. 212–47; Nihon boki-gaku seisei-shi 日本簿記学生成史 (Yūshōdō, 1982), pp. 3–16.

60 Fukuzawa, Chōai no hō, in FYZ, 3:333–35.61 Fukuzawa, Gakumon no susume, 3:30.

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Fig. 1. Frontispiece to Fukuzawa Yukichi, Chōai no hō (1873), vol. 1. In FYZ, 3:332. Courtesy of the C. V. Starr East Asian Library, University of California, Berkeley.


“Although scholars often engage in high debate and speak of ruling all under heaven, they have no idea how even to pay off their own debts,” Fukuzawa told his readers.62 The frontispiece therefore symbolized that “the tip of the pen,” and not abstruse philosophy, would “rule the age, and with effort enrich the world.” Chōai no hō proved “troublesome and effort-consuming” for Fuku-zawa because even the most learned and Westernized scholars of his age were unfamiliar with bookkeeping. Even the “ordinary economy” textbooks of the Tokugawa period, which Tetsuo Najita described as “‘must reading’ for [Tokugawa] merchants,” provided no directions on bookkeeping, and historians of accounting practices agree that no known bookkeeping manual has yet been found for Tokugawa Japan.63 Thus it is safe to assume that knowledge of bookkeeping hardly circu-lated during Japan’s early modern period and that Fukuzawa had few, if any, native precedents upon which to build. Given these conditions, he chose to base Chōai no hō on an English-language primer for book-keeping, rather than composing his own manual from scratch.64 Fukuzawa would later report in his autobiography that he first came across an older edition of the primer Bryant and Stratton’s Com-mon School Book-keeping at some point during the 1850s. His initial encounter with this work was far from positive, and after a few pages he gave up reading it, complaining that the topic was opaque. At the time, he apparently did not keep any personal accounts and had rarely encountered Japanese account books (daifukuchō 大福帳). Fukuzawa recalled the following childhood episode:

[My father] tried to give his children what he thought was an ideal education. The teacher lived in the compound of the lord’s storage office, but having some merchants’ children among his pupils, he naturally began to train them

62 Fukuzawa, Chōai no hō, 3:333.63 Tetsuo Najita, Ordinary Economies in Japan: A Historical Perspective (Berkeley: Uni-

versity of California Press, 2009), p. 30; Kees Camfferman and Terry E. Cooke, “Dutch Accounting in Japan 1609–1850: Isolation or Observation?” Accounting, Business and Financial History 11.3 (November 2001): 369–82; Nishikawa Kōjirō, “Nihon no kaikei-shi: Hirado to Dejima kara” 日本の会計史——平戸と出島から, Kigyō Kaikei 24.7 ( July 1972): 129–33; Tsūzoku keizai bunko, 12 vols., ed. Nihon Keizai Sōsho Kankōkai (Nihon keizai sōsho kankōkai, 1916–17).

64 Henry B. Bryant, Bryant and Stratton’s Common School Book-keeping: Embracing Sin-gle and Double Entry. Containing Sixteen Complete Sets of Books, with Ample Exercises and Illustrations. For Primary Schools and Academies (1861; 7th ed., New York: Ivison, Phineey, Blakeman & Co., 1871).

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in numerals: “Two times two is four, two times three is six, etc.” . . . [W]hen my father heard this, he took his children away in fury. “It is abominable,” he exclaimed, that innocent children should be taught to use numbers—the tool of merchants. There is no telling what the teacher may do next.65

Most likely this recollection dates to the 1840s, but it was not until 1860 that Fukuzawa first wrote about bookkeeping proper, in his expanded Japanese edition of Ziqing 子卿’s Hua Ying tongyu 華英通語. Hua Ying tongyu was a collection of common English terms trans-lated into Chinese and organized by general category, such as “profes-sions,” “clothing,” “metals,” “medicines,” “currency,” “things that move through the air,” and “things that move on the ground.”66 Fukuzawa took Ziqing’s work and appended Japanese translations to it, repub-lishing the new work in Japan. “Book-keeping” was among the many collected entries, and Fukuzawa’s edition featured the entry for book-keeping shown in figure 2. The translation of sili shubu 司理數簿 that appeared in the original Chinese edition67 comes rather close to an English meaning—“managing accounts.” Fukuzawa’s Japanese trans-lation, however, was kanjō カンジヤウ, which by his time had come to mean, broadly, “to calculate, add up, or reckon.” In specific usage, it could also have meant to “pay” or “settle accounts” in the sense of pay-ing what one owed, as in “settling up” a bill or a tab.68 Almost another decade would pass before Fukuzawa would grapple seriously with the subject of bookkeeping. As his understanding of the matter grew more sophisticated, his language changed. This change may have in part stemmed from his involvement, circa 1869, in the affairs of the Yokohama-based Maruya Trading Company 丸屋商社, an importer of Western goods and books.69 Known more famously today as the bookstore Maruzen 丸善, Maruya Trading started with the help of a one-thousand-yen investment by Fukuzawa, who later recommended his own students at Keiō gijuku spend time working there to gain firsthand experience with commerce. Hayashi Yūteki 早矢仕有的 (1837–1901), founder of Maruya, was the ninety-fifth student to

65 Fukuzawa, Fukuō jiden, 7:8; Fukuzawa, The Autobiography, p. 3.66 Ziqing, ed., Hua Ying tongyu, 2 vols. (China: 1860).67 Ziqing, Hua Ying tongyu, 2.126b.68 See entry for kanjō in Nihon kokugo daijiten.69 Norio Tamaki, Yukichi Fukuzawa, 1835–1901: The Spirit of Enterprise in Modern Japan

(Hampshire, Eng.: Palgrave, 2001), pp. 99–107.


matriculate at Keiō, and is credited as having composed his own work on bookkeeping called Seiyō chōai keiko hōchi 西洋帳合稽古報知 (1874). These connections to education point to Fukuzawa’s strong interest and emphasis on bookkeeping at the time. Many early Keiō students went on to publish significant works on bookkeeping, includ-ing the first student ever to matriculate there—Kobayashi Kotarō 小林小太郎 (1848–1904), who translated two double-entry bookkeeping textbooks by C. C. Marsh in 1876. Even more significant are the careers of several other students: Takeda Hitoshi (1856/7–?), who started a bookkeeping school (Takeda boki gakkō 武田簿記学校) in the Ginza district in 1879; Morishima Shūtarō 森島修太郎 (1848/9–1910), who wrote six works on accounting and was an instructor at Mitsu bishi Commercial School (三菱商業学校); and Morishita Iwakusu 森下岩楠 (1852–1917), who co-authored a number of Morishima’s works and was also a Mitsubishi instructor.70 At the start of his engagement with the Maruya Trading Company, Fukuzawa had already complained about the lack of adequate book-keeping instruction in Japan and the troubles it caused for those who wanted to start a proper business. When expressing this opinion, he used the term chōai to denote bookkeeping.71 This term, however, did not yet stick, for in the summer of 1871, Fukuzawa wrote instead of shōbai kaikei 商売会計.72 At that time, kaikei, a neologism whose first attested usage had appeared in 1779, was roughly a synonym for kanjō,

70 See Maruyama Makoto, Fukuzawa Yukichi monka 福沢諭吉門下 (Nichigai Aso-shiētsu, 1995), pp. 1, 16, 37, 63–64, 74.

71 Fukuzawa, Maruya shōsha no ki 丸屋商社之記, in FYZ, 19:22.72 Fukuzawa, Keimō tenarai no bun 啓蒙手習之文, in FYZ, 3:18–19.

Fig. 2. Bookkeeping entry in Ziqing [ J. Shikei], Kaei tsūgo, trans. and ed. Fukuzawa Shien [Yukichi] (Keiō gijuku, 1860), p. 73b. Courtesy of the C. V. Starr East Asian Library, University of California, Berkeley.

24 Hansun Hsiung

and dictionaries cite the collocation kaikei kanjō.73 Fukuzawa’s own sense of shōbai kaikei probably also implied the idea of statistical sur-veying. In 1866, when Fukuzawa published the first volumes of Seiyō jijō, he had used kaikei to translate the act of “Enumeration” specified in Article I, Section 2, Clause 3 of the U.S. Constitution, mandating a national census.74 To carry out a quantitative survey, and to do so in a manner useful for the needs of “business” or “commerce”—this was the way in which Fukuzawa conceived of bookkeeping prior to Chōai no hō. The overlapping meanings of “enumeration” and “bookkeeping” during this phase of Fukuzawa’s thinking connect bookkeeping back to the theme of statistics as an emergent discipline. Standard dictionaries note that by 1871, writers interested in the modern science of account-ing had begun to use the term kaikei, but other sources reveal much terminological ambiguity.75 One example of such ambiguity is Keizai shōgaku 経済小学 (1867), a pre-Meiji textbook on Western methods of political economy, which was a translation of the English-language textbook Outlines of Social Economy by William Ellis (1800–1881). In its introduction for Japanese readers outlining the state of academic knowledge in the West, Keizai shōgaku divided academic knowledge into five principal disciplines, glossing each with a corresponding Eng-lish term in katakana: Ethics (kyōka 教科), Politics (seika 政科), Nat-ural Sciences (rika 理科), Medicine (ika 医科), and Fine Arts (bunka 文科). It further parsed Politics, the parent category for political econ-omy, into seven subdisciplines, namely, Civil Law (minpō 民法), Com-mercial Law (shōhō 商法), Criminal Law (keihō 刑法), Constitutional Law (kokuhō 国法), International Law (bankoku kōhō 万国公法), Sta-tistics (kaikeigaku 会計学), and political economy (keizaigaku 経済学).76 In this textbook, kaikei meant neither accounting nor bookkeep-ing, but corresponded precisely to Buckle’s prime territory: the new discipline of statistics.

73 See entry for kaikei in Nihon kokugo daijiten.74 Compare: “The actual Enumeration shall be made within three Years after the first

Meeting of the Congress of the United States, and within every subsequent Term of ten years, in such a Manner as they shall by Law direct.” Fukuzawa: 諸州人口の数は此度定義の後、三年の内会計し、爾後は十年毎に一度会計すべし. For Fukuzawa’s transla-tion, see Fukuzawa, Seiyō no jijō, in FYZ, 1:333.

75 See kaikei in Nihon kokugo daijiten. 76 Kanda Kōhei 神田孝平, “Preface,” Keizai shōgaku 経済小学 (Edo: Kanda-shi, Keiō 3

[1867]), pp. 1V-1R.


Fukuzawa was undoubtedly familiar with Keizai shōgaku. The translator of the work and author of its introduction, Kanda Kōhei 神田孝平 (1830–1898), had been an instructor at the bakufu-funded Cen-ter for Western Studies, the Kaiseijo 開成所, where Keizai shōgaku was used as a textbook. By 1873 Kanda had become a key bureaucrat in the new Meiji regime and a member of the Meiji Six Society. In the pages of Meiroku zasshi, he published profusely on numerous topics related to currency reform and industrial policy, as well as an article concern-ing the role of music in nation-building.77 Fukuzawa would therefore have been aware of Kanda’s work on political economy and familiar with the use of the term kaikeigaku as “statistics.” This sense of kaikei as statistics is important because by 1873, Fukuzawa had deliberately chosen to discard it. In translating Bryant and Stratton, he preferred to employ the term chōai rather than kaikei. Later in life, Fukuzawa clearly explicated his rationale, and indicated to readers why he had gone to great pains to select appropriate terms for this book in particular. Fukuzawa made every attempt to render the terms and concepts of bookkeeping in a way that would reflect actual merchant experience in Japan, rather than relying on abstruse terms imported from the West. He even personally carried out fieldwork in Japanese merchant houses, so as “to understand [their] daily language” 商家通用の言葉.78 Through chōai, Fukuzawa wished to invoke the intimate practice of real Japanese persons and their lived engagements. Fukuzawa’s shift from statistics as an objective science to chōai as a subjective practice is vital to understanding his essay “Numeri-cal Equality.” The difficulties Fukuzawa experienced in translating Bryant and Stratton’s textbook illustrate the exact nature of such sub-jective practice. Although choosing the correct term for bookkeeping was a significant dilemma for Fukuzawa, the main hurdle that he had to overcome was the numerical representation of money 大困難は金高を記す.79 Consider, first, the appearance of numbers in Fukuzawa’s 1868 Kinmō kyūri zukai 訓蒙究理図解, an elementary physics primer for children (see fig. 3). Here, the specific degrees along the thermom-eter are written in the Japanese that was still used in Fukuzawa’s time. In

77 For his articles, see MZ, 2:105–14, 2:149–53, 2:163–65, 2:252–55, 2:273–76, 2:345–49, 3:139–45, 3:158–65, 3:240–45. In English, see Braisted, ed. and trans., Meiroku zasshi, pp. 213–18, 235–37, 240–41, 283–86, 293–95, 327–30, 408–12, 417–20, 457–61.

78 Fukuzawa, “Shogen,” in FYZ, 1:53.79 Fukuzawa, “Shogen,” 1:53.

26 Hansun Hsiung

Fig. 3. Illustration depicting the various temperatures in Fahrenheit, including the boiling and freezing points of water, average temperatures for normal and feverish bodies, and average seasonal temperatures. Fukuzawa Yukichi, Kinmō kyūri zukai 訓蒙究理図解 (1868), in FYZ, 1:10. Courtesy of the C. V. Starr East Asian Library, University of California, Berkeley.

his introduction to Chōai no hō, however, and in the “translator’s notes” (yakushachū 役者註) in the main body of the text, Fukuzawa goes to lengths to explain the new system of notation. As is depicted in figure 4, although he retained kanji for the values 1 through 9, Fukuzawa intro-duced the arabic numeral “zero” into the writing of monetary amounts


in Chōai no hō. Using zero proved necessary insofar as Fukuzawa wished to write in decimal notation. Rather than adopting zero universally, however, he incorporated this decimal notation into a complex dual-ity of numeric thinking. Thus, in figure 5, the bottom rows represented monetary values in decimal notation (10 yen, and 12 yen, 50 sen, respec-tively), but the top rows represented specific quantities of rice and bar-ley, listed in standard Japanese notation—the system that runs A-man, B-sen, C-hyaku, D-jū, et cetera. In short, money was recorded accord-ing to one semiotic order (zero-based decimal notation), whereas quan-tities of traded goods were recorded according to another. For Fukuzawa, the importance of decimal representation for mon-etary values lay primarily in the need to line up numerical figures on the page and add them up quickly.80 In contrast to the values on the

80 Fukuzawa, “Shogen,” 1:65.

Fig. 4. Explanation of numerical nota-tion from Fukuzawa, “Preface,” Chōai no hō, in FYZ, 3:336-37. Courtesy of the C. V. Starr East Asian Library, University of California, Berkeley.

28 Hansun Hsiung

Fig. 5. Sample rice and wheat measures from Fukuzawa, Chōai no hō, in FYZ, 3:343. Courtesy of the C. V. Starr East Asian Library, University of California, Berkeley.

thermometer, which required no mathematical operations, the mone-tary values of transactions had to be constantly re-tallied to render cur-rent sums. The importance of quick and accurate arithmetic must have been clear to Fukuzawa, for the original text of Common School Book-keeping, the basis of Fukuzawa’s translation, contained an appendix, titled “Proficiency in Mathematics,” that focused on honing students’ skills at adding numbers on the page. “The kind of proficiency most available to a Book-keeper,” Bryant and Stratton wrote, “is facility and accuracy in addition. The ability to add long columns of figures with speed and certainty is one of the very best claims a young man can present. . . . So highly is this accomplishment esteemed . . . that where it is wanting other qualifications sink into comparative insignificance.”81 Bryant and Stratton’s text then provided examples of how to add col-umns of figures on paper by lining them up properly. This method of addition, where figures were aligned on the decimal, was impossible in the traditional style of Japanese notation used in Kinmō kyūri zukai, unless one were to be able to write out the non-expressed zeroes in such kanji as hyaku-man 百万, jū-man 十万, man 万, and sen 千. For the

81 Bryant, Common School Book-keeping, p. 184.


conception of bookkeeping that Fukuzawa intended to translate, some form of decimal notation was essential. Money, in particular, had to be represented in decimal columns, for the most basic purpose of the double-entry register was to pro-duce a legible record by which one could easily check accounts for accuracy. In Fukuzawa’s time, double-entry bookkeeping was an inher-ently “public system of accounting” whose main function was not to calculate profit and loss, but to legitimize merchant activities. Well-ordered books meant that a merchant was behaving in accord with the just and virtuous morals of society. As Mary Poovey has demon-strated, the precision and meticulousness of one’s ledger, the extent of “diligence and care” applied, confirmed a merchant as an impartial and objective agent, a subscriber to “an ethic of self-denial” rather than an ethic of profit mongering.82 A well-kept ledger was not simply about facts, but also about norms. The key to double-entry bookkeeping—the thread linking num-bers to moral virtue—was the concept of balance. Fukuzawa explained:

The term Double Entry, as distinctive from Single Entry, refers to the fact, that for every transaction, two or more entries are made in the Ledger. The condition of these entries is such that each transaction, when properly recorded, will produce on the Ledger equal debits and credits; that is, the same value that is carried to the debtor side of one or more accounts must also be carried over to the creditor side of one or more accounts, thus pro-ducing a perpetual equilibrium of debits and credits and affording a distinct test of the correctness of the work. The theory of “equal debits and credits” is the leading feature of Double Entry.83

The initial presumption of double-entry bookkeeping was that there should be symmetry in all transactions: whenever goods or services changed hands, one party became a debtor and the other a creditor. If A were to buy two yen worth of books from B, and five yen worth of books from C, A would be a debtor for seven yen, B would be a creditor

82 Mary Poovey, A History of the Modern Fact: Problems of Knowledge in the Sciences of Wealth and Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), pp. 29–38; Porter, Trust in Numbers, pp. 97–105. For the older view that emphasizes profits and losses, see Max Weber, Economy and Society, ed. and trans. Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), 1:163; Basil S. Yamey, “Scientific Bookkeeping and the Rise of Capitalism,” The Economic History Review 1.2/3 (1949): 99–113.

83 Fukuzawa, Chōai no hō, 3:465.

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for two yen, and C would be a creditor for five yen. All three were to be recorded in one’s own double-entry ledger. On a balance sheet, these credits and debits were placed parallel to one another and summed. By correctly recording a debt to the other party every time one gained a credit, and vice versa, one could ensure that the final sum of debits and credits in a ledger balanced—in this case, seven yen of debits (A), and seven yen of credits (B + C). The illustration in figure 6, from Chōai no hō, a trial balance sheet, allows us to visualize this crux of double-entry bookkeeping. The sheet ends with the words byōdō fugō—which is Fukuzawa’s translation for “equilibrium” but literally means something like the “unity” or “com-ing together” of equals. Corresponding debits and credits for each account have been ordered on the page, and summed on both sides. This is where Fukuzawa’s notion of the abacus comes back into play. Fukuzawa saw no need for translating the appendix on addition in the original text, for he believed that Japanese readers would come to understand this new representational system of monetary values with little difficulty. He reasoned that numbers aligned on the decimal in a ledger was “just the same as looking at the rows of an abacus” 恰も算盤の桁を見るが如し; over fifteen years later, when looking back at Chōai no hō for the first edition of his Collected Works, he would reiterate this analogy.84 We can use the frontispiece of Chōai no hō shown in figure 1 to illustrate Fukuzawa’s point. At the top of the chalkboard are arabic numerals in decimal notation—the year of publication, according to both the recently adopted Gregorian calendar and the restored impe-rial year—1873/2533. “Written out” in cursive on a chalkboard, a new order of the page now becomes apparent: the pencil tip as well as the ruler connect the abacus at the bottom to the numbers inscribed at the top, all of which is dominated by the figure of the balance. The physical object of the abacus was first textualized into decimal notation, and in turn, the decimal notation was used specifically to facilitate quick sum-mation to produce the balance of monetary values that stood at the core of double-entry bookkeeping.

84 Fukuzawa, Chōai no hō, 3:336, also 3:345. See also his reiteration of this point decades later in his introduction to his own collected works: Fukuzawa, “Shogen,” 1:65, where he said that “because [writing in decimal notation] is just like the digits on a Japanese aba-cus, it will likely be easy for people to accept.”


Fig. 6. Trial balance from Fukuzawa, Chōai no hō, in FYZ, 3:472. Courtesy of the C. V. Starr East Asian Library, University of California, Berkeley.

What were the “calculations on the abacus” that grounded Fuku-zawa’s argument for gender equality? In double-entry bookkeeping, numerical balance at the end of a ledger also represented the fairness, honesty, accuracy, and objectivity of the merchant. According to Mary Poovey, balances were equated to justice in European double-entry bookkeeping, “because what they displayed—the identity of two num-bers—could be easily verified . . . simply by comparing the two num-bers”; double-entry bookkeeping thus “constituted a system in relation to which one could judge right from wrong . . . [an] instrument that produced both truth and virtue.”85

85 Poovey, A History of the Modern Fact, p. 55.

32 Hansun Hsiung

In Fukuzawa’s system, however, the balanced account books that symbolized justice, truth, and virtue were replaced by the abacus as a normative symbol. In the frontispiece, it was the abacus that occu-pied the central role in the assemblage of linked instruments—pencil, ruler, writing surface, and scale. The abacus, moreover, was organized analogically to decimal notation, one of double-entry bookkeeping’s prime conditions of possibility. “Calculations on the abacus,” though they might seem condensed and encoded, operated as a partial stand-in for a larger discourse in which the fact of balance implied a whole host of virtuous norms. Through a series of associations in his chain of reasoning, Fukuzawa perceived the calculations of the abacus that were used for bookkeeping as the balance that set the norm of moral conduct. One might argue that in interweaving merchant practice with vir-tue, Fukuzawa more closely resembled the pre-Meiji Kaitokudō 懐徳堂 thinkers than his own contemporaries in the gender equality debate. Yamagata Bantō (1748–1821), Kusama Naokata (1753–1831), Nakai Riken (1732–1817), and other students of the Kaitokudō had claimed that pre-cise techniques of measurement and calculation developed by mer-chants laid the foundation for a unique kind of universal moral virtue different from the traditional five Confucian virtues.86 In his preface to Chōai no hō, Fukuzawa similarly exhorted scholars to augment their textual knowledge with the practical knowledge of merchants. Yet this set of thinkers illuminated by Najita might be connected to Fukuzawa and bookkeeping in another way, via the resemblance between their milieu and the eighteenth-century Scottish milieu that had such a strong impact on Fukuzawa’s early thought. Setting the stage, John Locke, in a widely read treatise on education, had advised “all Gentlemen to learn perfectly Merchants Accompts, and not think it is a Skill, that belongs not to them, because it has . . . been chiefly practiced by Men of Traffick.”87 His exhortation to bookkeeping came during a period when an interest in economic knowledge was explod-ing due to a growing realization that the fate of the English nation—a concern that was then entering the consciousness of its citizens—was

86 Tetsuo Najita, Visions of Virtue in Tokugawa Japan: The Kaitokudō Merchant Academy of Osaka (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987).

87 John Locke, Some Thoughts Concerning Education (London: A. and J. Churchill, 1693), p. 197.


inextricably bound with trade. Starting in the 1660s, a “culture of com-merce” began to emerge in England, stimulating a sudden increase in the publication of political treatises relating to mercantilism, as well as didactic texts on merchant arts, skills, and techniques of reasoning. Through the circulation of these writings, previously disparate strands of thought relevant to economics coalesced into a consistent, identifi-able discourse that attracted widespread public fascination and specu-lation. Now, the entire nation, not just the merchant, had to care about commerce, and learn the arts of “men of Traffick.”88 The best minds of the newly annexed Scotland turned their atten-tion to the problem of national economic growth as a means to catch up with England proper. Dubbed the “Scottish Ascendancy” by histo-rians of accounting, this period had a decisive impact on establishing bookkeeping as a formal subject of study.89 During the course of the eighteenth century, alongside the works of Hume, Adam Smith, and Francis Hutcheson, there appeared textbooks on bookkeeping by Alex-ander Malcolm and John Mair. The latter’s Book-keeping Methodiz’d (1736) was repeatedly adapted by various editors up through 1853 and was the most-cited English-language bookkeeping text until the third quarter of the nineteenth century.90 Adam Smith himself owned a copy of Alexander Malcolm’s A New Treatise of Arithmetick and Book-keeping (1718), and when the Physiological Library of the University of Edinburgh was founded in 1724 as a collection of the “best Editions of Books, both ancient and modern,” the curators saw fit to acquire a copy of Malcolm’s New Treatise among the 410 original volumes,

88 See Natasha Glaisyer, The Culture of Commerce in England, 1660–1720 (Woodbridge, Eng.: Boydell Press, 1999); Arthur H. Cole, The Historical Development of Economic and Business Literature (Boston: Baker Library, Harvard Graduate School of Business Admin-istration, 1957); Perry Gauci, The Politics of Trade: The Overseas Merchant in State and Soci-ety, 1660–1720 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001).

89 Basil S. Yamey, H. C. Edey, and Hugh W. Thompson, Accounting in England and Scotland: 1543–1800 (London: Sweet and Maxwell, 1963), pp. 170–73. More recently, M. J. Mepham, "The Scottish Enlightenment and the Development of Accounting," in Account-ing History: Some British Contributions, ed. R. H. Parker and B. S. Yamey (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), pp. 268–91.

90 H.C. Bentley, A Brief Treatise on the Origin and Development of Accounting (Boston: Bentley School of Accounting and Finance, 1929), p. 14. On Mair as “easily the most popu-lar accounting text in the major American cities during the latter half of the eighteenth century,” see T. K. Sheldahl, “America’s Earliest Recorded Text in Accounting: Sarjeant’s 1789 Book,” Accounting Historian’s Journal 12:2 (1985): 7. On translations of Mair’s work into other European languages, see Mepham, “The Scottish Enlightenment and the Devel-opment of Accounting,” pp. 272–73.

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placing it next to John Locke’s 1696 Several Papers relating to Money, Interest and Trade in their catalogue.91 Bookkeeping was thus part and parcel of the new disciplines of society and economy that character-ized the “Scottish Enlightenment,” appearing, by the end of the cen-tury, in Edinburgh Magazine’s New Books column alongside Theology, Law, Medicine, Poetry, Novels, Politics, and Political Economy.92 Although the growing importance of merchant knowledge in mat-ters of national concern influenced Fukuzawa’s thought, one must also bear in mind that the “Numerical Equality” article, written in 1875, deployed its arguments within an intellectual schema significantly dif-ferent from that of Najita’s Kaitokudō or of eighteenth-century Scot-land. Fukuzawa’s recourse to bookkeeping was less directly concerned with merchants than with the immediate problem of how to cope with new modes of numerical reasoning and their ramifications for poli-tics. Specifically, he was confronting the discipline of statistics and the profound consequences that Henry Buckle’s theses might have in the realm of ethics. Bookkeeping, in other words, was a tortured yet nonetheless cogent synecdoche that allowed Fukuzawa to posit the need for bal-ance and equality as a normative value while simultaneously keeping his distance from Buckle’s “Laws of Nature.” More than an inert sta-tistic, bookkeeping was a human activity that implicated all responsi-ble humans. The contrast between this latter view and Buckle’s notion of statistics is stark. Statistics had offered an argument that aggre-gate numerical regularities corresponded to inevitable truths about the world—truths caused by forces outside of human control. In the case of gender equality, this meant that regardless of one’s own per-sonal actions, society would gradually move toward a state of equal-ity between the sexes, reflecting the necessity of statistical truth. That

91 See A Catalogue of the Library of Adam Smith, Author of the “Moral Sentiments” and “The Wealth of Nations,” 2nd ed., comp. James Bonar and the Royal Economic Society (London: Macmillan and Co., 1932), p. 111. On the Physiological Library, see University of Edinburgh Physiological Library, The physiological library: begun by Mr. Steuart, and some of the students in natural philosophy in the University of Edinburgh, April 2. 1724: and augmented by some gentlemen; and the students of natural philosophy, December 1724 (Edin-burgh: 1725), p. 3.

92 “Books and Pamphlets Published in April 1796,” Edinburgh Magazine (May 1796): 379–80; “Books and Pamphlets Published in May 1796,” Edinburgh Magazine ( June 1796): 459–60; “Books and Pamphlets Published in London February 1797,” Edinburgh Magazine (March 1797): 209–11.


is, there was no compelling incentive for action in statistical thought. Thus in the “Numerical Equality” essay, Fukuzawa moved away from this argument, signaling his discontent with the moral passivity of sta-tistical thinking. He may have trusted numbers, but he did not trust them as a sufficient ground for moral action. He had to find support for gender equality in an ethical element that was related specifically to the common imperatives of everyday human conduct. That Fukuzawa saw bookkeeping as more useful than statistics is evident from the manner in which he sought to instill principles of bookkeeping into his own students. In 1871, Fukuzawa listed book-keeping as a subbranch of mathematics (sūgaku 数学), thereby plac-ing it under the rubric of “number” and “science” (sū and ri), which he believed was at the core of all forms of knowing.93 More telling is the placement of bookkeeping within the Keiō curriculum, over which Fukuzawa, as founder and president of the university, exer-cised final control. According to a course guide from 1879, Keiō offered three progressive levels of matriculation: three preparatory semes-ters for minors, four preparatory semesters for adults, and, finally, the main course of instruction (honka 本科). In the area of mathematics, the first level offered only two semesters on arithmetic, and the sec-ond level advanced to elementary algebra. During the main course of instruction, students proceeded on to geometry and trigonometry during their second and third semesters, respectively; then, in the final two semesters before graduation from Keiō, they learned bookkeeping (bokihō 簿記法), which was the crowning achievement and endpoint of their mathematical education.94 Indeed, bookkeeping was a kind of final lesson in life itself. Else-where, Fukuzawa had likened life to a “business” (shōbai 商売) and suggested that one keep rigorous accounts of his actions in the realm of knowledge and virtue, so as not to suffer any losses 智徳事業の帳合を精密にして損亡を引受けざる様.95 And if this held for life conduct in general, certainly it held for specific choices regarding such matters as marriage, concubinage, and prostitution. Opposite-sex relations, as a subcategory of the business of life, should also be

93 Fukuzawa, Keimō tenarai no bun, 3:18–19.94 Keiō gijukusha chū no yakusoku 慶應義塾社中之約束 (Keiō gijuku shuppan, 1879),

pp. 5–9.95 Fukuzawa, Gakumon no susume, 3:118.

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conducted along the principle of bookkeeping. Paraphrasing Fuku-zawa, one could say to all philanderers, polygamists, and lechers: keep your affairs balanced.

A Tale of EnlightenmentYet in the end, this article is a tale of Enlightenment. Only here, “Enlight-enment” concerns the transformation of the elements and relations that comprise the field of legitimate knowledge at any given time or place, rather than any substantive ideology—that is, a set of proposi-tions about civilization, human progress, or the liberation of men (and women) from self-incurred immaturity. Borrowing from Robert Darn-ton’s analysis of the French instance, Enlightenment lies most of all in a “shifting [of] the epistemological ground, rearranging categories and realigning borders.”96 The problem of Enlightenment, then, is three-fold: first, it is a question of what hierarchies and structures took pre-cedence in the diverse terrain of knowledge during early Meiji; next, it is a question of how various proficiencies, disciplines, and techniques were organized as areas of “proper” intellectual inquiry; and, finally, it is a question of what rules governed the set of possible operations when attempting to relate these various areas to one another. It remains to be explained why thinking about bookkeeping should have arisen at all as a viable referent in Fukuzawa’s argument. What does it mean when the debate about gender equality, which was so pivotal for Meiji society, suddenly changes into an argument about numbers and bookkeeping? What is implied by the fact that Fukuzawa thought it entirely appropriate to use bookkeeping as a moral meta-phor in the pages of Meiroku zasshi? Even if a reconstruction of Fuku-zawa’s argument proves capable of explicating bookkeeping’s meaning within the “Numerical Equality” article, it comes up short when held up against the external world in which Fukuzawa lived. There is no self-evident reason why, in the late nineteenth century, the relation between bookkeeping and political thought would have made sense for average readers. In the British world upon which Fukuzawa drew, the

96 Robert Darnton, “Epistemological Angst: From Encyclopedism to Advertising,” in The Structure of Knowledge: Classifications of Science and Learning Since the Renaissance, ed. Tore Frängsmyr (Berkeley: Office for the History of Science and Technology, University of California, 2001), p. 64.


topic of bookkeeping was rapidly disappearing from serious intellec-tual discourse, downgraded as a separate professional activity that was distinguished from presumably more theoretical “higher learning”—the “better-established disciplines” and “academically respectable sciences.”97 As bookkeeping in the West became “mere bookkeeping,” the argument that it was as important as economics, political science, or sociology clashed like a grand “lèse majesté” against the sovereign epistemological order.98 Bookkeeping could be explained away with the kinds of strategies employed by Sekiguchi Sumiko and Albert Craig in treating Fukuzawa’s “Numerical Equality” essay: as an evasion, or minor footnote, or, finally, a “tongue-in-cheek” play. In the context of nineteenth-century European intellectual history, bookkeeping and political philosophy should not have occurred side-by-side at a time characterized by the “disavowal of political economy’s relation . . . to accounting.”99 And yet in early Meiji Japan, amidst efforts to Western-ize politics and political philosophy, they did occur side-by-side. Fukuzawa’s refiguration of “equal rights” into a matter of “equal numbers” through bookkeeping therefore presents two possibilities: that an abacus and gender equality can occur in the same sentence with utter seriousness; or that the prevailing conditions of the early Meiji period, patrolling and structuring the relations between differ-ent bodies of knowledge, could allow for the destabilization of the dis-ciplinary hierarchies that accompanied the Western concepts entering Japan. These two phenomena reveal a series of moments when John Stuart Mill stood shoulder-to-shoulder alongside the forgotten names of Bryant and Stratton, and bookkeeping stood alongside political phi-losophy. More than a classic tale of Mori and Herbert Spencer, or a tale of the conflict of liberalism with conservatism, the story of Japa-nese Enlightenment demonstrates how knowledge in the early Meiji period experienced a porousness and instability across boundaries of “intellectual” and “non-intellectual” endeavors. It was this porousness that allowed for a serious intellectual like Fukuzawa to make a serious argument about gender through the seemingly trivial subject of book-keeping. Specifically, the difficulty of Fukuzawa’s argument about the abacus and gender equality is an example of how hierarchies, such as

97 Porter, Trust in Numbers, pp. 91–93, 103.98 Porter, Trust in Numbers, p. 50; Poovey, A History of the Modern Fact, p. 29.99 Porter, Trust in Numbers, p. 31; see also pp. 65, 366–67 n. 6–7.

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“applied” and “pure,” and “vocational” and “theoretical,” obscure the way in which bookkeeping could penetrate political philosophical dis-course. To understand one of the most significant debates of the Meiji period, we must abandon these hierarchical distinctions, and allow abacus, pen, ruler, and ledger to stand alongside abstract rights. In recognizing the destabilization of these hierarchies, it is impor-tant not to reconstitute another set of hierarchies that would also pre-clude a more sympathetic view of the porousness of knowledge during this period. Chōai no hō offers a code for deciphering the argument in the “Numerical Equality” essay, but neither the abacus nor bookkeep-ing can be considered master tropes guiding Fukuzawa’s entire oeuvre. Previous scholars are more than correct to highlight other streams of Fukuzawa’s thought—for instance, ideas of civilization inherited from Scottish textbooks on political economy, or his lifelong struggle against Confucianism. Scholars are also right in pointing out that Fuku zawa’s gender views changed over time, as in the case of prostitution.100 Instead of substituting bookkeeping as a single master trope for under-standing Fukuzawa, it is more accurate to view bookkeeping as one of many vital areas of Fukuzawa’s interest. Bookkeeping occurred simul-taneously with other discourses without claiming primacy; Bryant and Stratton never replaced John Stuart Mill. The vital insight is, rather, that names as unknown and unexpected as Bryant and Stratton were a part of Fukuzawa’s political thought at all, standing alongside the better-known names of philosophical giants. Such alongsidedness can be documented quite literally. In Keiō’s early years, mandatory mathematics courses culminated in lectures on bookkeeping in the final two semesters, demonstrating that in the overall curriculum, high politics and bookkeeping occupied not only the same page of Fukuzawa’s prospectus for Keiō, but also the same time of study—as shown in Table 1. Within a single day, Keiō stu-dents moved from hearing lectures on John Stuart Mill and Herbert Spencer to acquiring skills in double-entry bookkeeping. It is therefore reasonable to assume that Fukuzawa, the master behind this curricu-lum, performed the same movement in his own thought. Confirming this is a marginal note Fukuzawa made in his personal copy of Mill’s Utilitarianism, a note that reveals how Fukuzawa used a metaphor of

100 Sekiguchi, Go-isshin to jendaa, pp. 271–77.


balanced economic transaction to illustrate Mill’s concept of retribu-tive justice.101 In this section, Mill had attempted to harmonize retrib-utive justice and preventative justice along with a new sociological claim that crime results from social forces rather than any individual ill will.102 In the margins, Fukuzawa rejected both preventative justice and the sociological claim. Where Mill observed that “no rule on the subject [of punishment] recommends itself so strongly to the primi-tive and spontaneous sentiment of justice, as lex talionis, an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth,” Fukuzawa wrote: “The purpose of pun-ishment . . . is to compensate for the damages of that crime.” He then continued, “We compensate for borrowed money by adding inter-est, and for borrowed time by paying wages. Shouldering these natu-ral consequences [nachuraru konsekuensu ナチュラルコンセクエンス] is sufficient grounds for justice.”103 On the one hand, this is certainly a theoretical argument about political philosophy and its notion of justice. On the other hand, it again reveals Fukuzawa’s characteristic interest in economic balance as fact and norm—an interest that set-tles in alongside Mill’s claims, coexisting with and reinforcing them without overwhelming them. Just as Fukuzawa associated the abacus

101 For a general outline of Fukuzawa’s encounter with Mill, see Koizumi Takashi 小泉仰, “J. S. Miru, Fukuzawa Yukichi, Nishi Amane no kōri genri tekiyō hō” J. S. ミル・福沢諭吉・西周の功利原理適用法, in Nishi Amane to Nihon no kindai 西周と日本の近代, ed. Shimane Kenritsu Daigaku Nishi Amane Kenkyūkai 島根県立大学西周研究会 (Peri-kansha, 2005), pp. 451–56. See also Anzai Toshimitsu 安西敏三, “Fukuzawa Yukichi to J. S. Miru Fujin no reijū” 福沢諭吉と J.S. ミル『婦人の隷従』, in Kindai Nihon to Igirisu shisō 近代日本とイギリス思想, ed. Sugihara Shirō (Nihon keizai hyōron sha, 1995), pp. 31–57.

102 John Stuart Mill, Utilitarianism, 4th ed. (London: Longmans, Green, Reader, and Dyer, 1871), p. 85.

103 Anzai Toshimitsu, “Fukuzawa Yukichi no seigikan: J. S. Miru Kōri shugi dai-go-shō o megutte” 福沢諭吉の正義観——J.S. ミル『功利主義』第五章をめぐって, Fukuzawa Yukichi nenkan 福沢諭吉年鑑 19 (December 1992), quoted on p. 243.

Table 1. Primary Curriculum Years 4 and 5 at Keiō gijuku (1879)

Year 4 Subjects Year 5 SubjectsLogic J. S. Mill: On Liberty

J. S. Mill: Considerations on Representative Government

Herbert Spencer: The Study of Sociology

Herbert Spencer: Social Statics Sheldon Amos: The Science of Law

Bookkeeping Bookkeeping

Adapted from Keiō gijukusha chū no yakusoku, p. 9.

40 Hansun Hsiung

with “Laws of Nature” in his “Numerical Equality” essay, here he asso-ciated balanced economic transactions with nature, claiming that such transactions were examples of “natural consequence.” Crime and pun-ishment should balance out one another in the same way that wages should be commensurate with labor, and interest with the length of a loan. Once more, balance in finances is the normative basis for a politi-cal discussion that seems to have nothing to do with balanced finances. Like Christopher Hill, I choose to describe the Meiji Enlighten-ment as a period of “epistemological rupture.” I think of early Meiji as a chaotic period of resettlement: the instabilities caused by this rupture allowed for uneven and unexpected connections between seemingly disparate fields of knowledge.104 Although the rupture itself was new, the increased flow of ideas that accompanied it in many ways intensi-fied a preexisting educational syncretism that is best expressed in the popular term “peripatetic study” (yūgaku 遊学); this was a prominent feature of learning in the mid-nineteenth century. Whereas specific private academies often specialized in Chinese, Dutch, Kokugaku, or military subject matters, the scholars themselves were highly mobile; traveling freely from school to school, they became multidisciplinary intellectuals.105 Fukuzawa himself was an example of this educational experience; moving from Nakatsu to Nagasaki and then to Osaka, he became trained in military arts and the natural sciences—all before reaching Yokohama and embarking upon his full-scale study of the West. Yet, although Japan’s opening to the West at first only further encouraged this expansive learning, its possibilities were ultimately foreclosed by the political imperatives of the Meiji state. According to Maruyama Masao, who cites the Meiji Six Society as evidence, Meiji intellectual culture up until the late 1880s was one of considerable intercourse among thinkers of a wide variety of political leanings and disciplines, producing an environment where “academics and artists were neighbors.” Moreover, the ferment of the Freedom and People’s Rights Movement (jiyū minken undō 自由民権運動) proved that aver-age persons who showed interest, could, regardless of their formal edu-

104 Christopher L. Hill, National History and the World of Nations (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), p. 32.

105 Richard Rubinger, Private Academies of Tokugawa Japan (Princeton: Princeton Uni-versity Press, 1982), pp. 213–23.


cation, enter into associations to debate high political philosophy. This fluid and open atmosphere was changed by the formation of Japan’s imperial universities in 1886. In Maruyama’s analysis, the modern Jap-anese university, which was designed in particular for the education of a service elite within public and private sectors, gave rise to highly specialized university departments and disciplinary “sectionalism.” It was “against the etymological meaning of the word université,” explains Maruyama, “[that modern Japanese universities] imported Western knowledge piecemeal based on disciplinary specialty.”106 Elsewhere, Maruyama refers to this pattern of compartmentalized knowledge by comparing it to “octopus pots” (takotsubo タコツボ), with each pot separated from the others.107 At the same time, the qualifications for obtaining “intellectual” status increasingly came to be based upon an appropriate educational pedigree at specific universities. Overall, the changes in Keiō’s educational system fit Maruyama’s thesis. Up through 1885, bookkeeping was still taught as part of the primary curriculum at Keiō University, alongside François Guizot’s (1787–1874) History of Civilization in Europe.108 After the primary cur-riculum was divided into four separate tracks based on concentra-tion—literature, economics, law, and politics—bookkeeping became a required second-year course for economics majors.109 In 1911, it was eliminated completely, replaced by courses on social problems, indus-trial policy, monetary theory, and banking.110 Bookkeeping, which was once a subject that students studied as they read Mill, ceased to play an important role in higher education overall. Other Meiji works further support the porousness between dispa-rate forms of knowledge, demonstrating that it also occurred in fields beyond bookkeeping. Nishi Amane’s “Renga sekizō no setsu” 煉火石造之説 (Essay on brick construction) argued that the strength of popular rights can be measured by the strength of buildings. Japanese buildings

106 Maruyama Masao, “Kindai Nihon no chishikijin” 近代日本の知識人, in Maruyama Masao shū 丸山眞男集 (Iwanami, 1996), 10:238–39, 244–45.

107 Maruyama Masao, Nihon no shisō (Iwanami, 1961), pp. 129–32.108 Oda Katsutarō 小田勝太郎, ed., Tōkyō sho-gakkō gakusoku ichiran 東京諸学校学

則一覧 (Eirandō, 1883), pp. 465–67; Shimomura Yasuhiro 下村泰大, ed., Tōkyō ryūgaku hitori annai 東京留学一人案内 (Shinyōdō, 1885), pp. 86–88.

109 Keiō gijuku 慶應義塾, ed., Keiō gijuku ichiran 慶應義塾, 2nd ed. (Keiō gijuku, 1899), p. [2].

110 Keiō gijuku, ed., Keiō gijuku sōran (Keiō gijuku, 1911), p. 19.

42 Hansun Hsiung

“do not compare in strength and firmness with those of Europe,” Nishi wrote, positing that just as “uprightness is the nature of bricks,” so “protecting human rights is the nature of man.”111 Again in the pages of Meiroku zasshi, we find an article by Tsuda Shindō that appears to be a scientific explanation of earthquakes. Closer reading reveals, how-ever, that it is simultaneously an argument about war, one that uses earthquakes to ask whether “the large profit arising from the employ-ment of soldiers by the nation can be likened to the Creator’s achieve-ment in forming the world through the use of earthquakes.”112 Here, modern seismological knowledge overlapped with political theses that reflected the lingering aftermath of the 1873 debate over the invasion of Korea. In early Meiji, the theoretical and practical—and sometimes simply bizarre—cohabited in the same space and were combined by thinkers like Nishi, Tsuda, and Fukuzawa without the imperatives of disciplinary subordination that would differentiate them decades later. To take seriously these moments when expected structures seem con-founded is to explore how seemingly familiar political concepts can be articulated in seemingly strange and foreign ways. This strangeness, in turn, forces us to reflect upon how our own hierarchies of “proper” or “legitimate” knowledge preclude possibilities that once viably existed for Meiji thinkers. Without going so far as to accept that an abacus explains all of Fukuzawa’s views on gender equality, it is nonetheless clear that norms of balance derived from bookkeeping played a key role in Fukuzawa’s political thought, coexist ing simultaneously with a traditional canon of political philosophy represented by John Stuart Mill and Herbert Spencer. Taking seriously bodies of knowledge typ-ically excluded from the canon of respected disciplines—bodies of knowledge such as bookkeeping—makes room for new interpreta-tions of Meiji texts. It allows for the writing of a Meiji intellectual his-tory wherein the boundary of what is “intellectual” itself becomes the object of inquiry.

111 Nishi Amane 西周, “Renga sekizō no setsu” 煉火石造の説, Meiroku zasshi 4 (undated), in MZ, 1:163.

112 Tsuda Shindō, “Jishin no setsu” 地震の説, Meiroku zasshi 17 (September 1874), in MZ, 2:119.

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Man, Woman, Abacus: A Tale of Enlightenment

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