A Draft Petition, a Bronze Statue of Yukichi Fukuzawa, and New Materials Concerning the Naganuma Incident

2022/12/12

The true thrill of historical research is the encounter with new materials. For the Keio History Museum's Autumn Special Exhibition "Yukichi Fukuzawa and 'Non-Violence': 150 Years of Gakumon no susume (An Encouragement of Learning)" (held until December 17, 2022), I had the chance to encounter some deeply impressive materials.

This exhibition highlights the "Naganuma Incident," which occurred in 1872 and took 28 years to resolve. The details of the incident were described in the October issue of this magazine. It was a "non-violent" struggle by the people of Naganuma Village against the unilateral seizure of ownership of a marsh called "Naganuma" in Chiba Prefecture by the state.

In the late autumn of 1874, village official Buhei Ogawa and others, who had read Gakumon no susume (An Encouragement of Learning), visited Fukuzawa in desperation to ask him to ghostwrite a petition to the prefecture. This set the incident in motion. However, the original ghostwritten manuscript was lost, and even the "Complete Works of Yukichi Fukuzawa" included it only as a transcription. This draft in Fukuzawa's own hand appeared on the antique market about five years ago. Tracing various documents, it is presumed that this manuscript left the village during the Taisho era. However, this was only part of the draft. When we asked the people of the former Naganuma Village to bring their materials together this time, another draft in Fukuzawa's own hand was discovered among them (Photo 1).

Once materials are published in print, researchers' interest tends to fade. However, there is a breath of history that only the original can convey. We often tend to read the contents of historical materials impersonally as mere data, but the vividness of the brushstrokes and corrections in this manuscript deeply remind us that this was a real event.

Another discovery is a previously unseen Bronze Statue of Yukichi Fukuzawa (Photo 2). Perhaps it was commissioned by the Naganuma villagers pooling their money. Fukuzawa's expression with his arms crossed is intrepid, a quite different presence from the mature bust at Mita (the back is marked "S.N.," but the creator and date are unknown). In the former Naganuma Village, there is a "Song Commemorating the Return of Naganuma" that tells the story of the incident and praises Fukuzawa. Until after the war, there was a festival where all the villagers would sing this together on the anniversary of the recovery of the marsh rights.

Although it has now become a small ceremony with about 10 officials, it continues steadily with the portrait of Fukuzawa displayed. These encounters with materials made me feel the importance of occasionally remembering through a physical sense that history is the accumulation of the activities of living human beings.

(Takeyuki Tokura, Associate Professor, Keio University Fukuzawa Memorial Center for Modern Japanese Studies)