A Little Peach-Blossom Paradise

In 1868, while civil war reached Edo, a small school of Western learning at Shinsenza in Shiba kept its lessons going "under a rain of bullets" and called itself a little peach-blossom paradise amid the battlefield. Its founder was Fukuzawa Yukichi, and the school became Keio Gijuku.

This collection lets the young school speak for itself: the founding record printed in 1868, the midsummer toast drunk while the fighting went on, the 1869 prospectus with its fees, reading list and stern view of sake, Fukuzawa's admiring report on the neighborhood schools of Kyoto, the story of a teacher who demanded that a foreign safe-conduct be thrown into the fire, and four later speeches in which Fukuzawa tells students to become people of practical work, dreams of a research institute where scholars are left free, and asks his aging comrades to keep the school's character alive.

Each piece is translated complete and unabridged from the Japanese, with a translator's note, brief endnotes and source information.