Meiji, there had been many able young Japanese leaders who, while no less anxious than the Satsuma and Choshu samurai to make a new and better Japan, were not thinking primarily in terms of military strength. There were men like the young samurai, Fukuzawa Yukichi, who as a student of Dutch in the last years of the Tokugawa, had become aware of Western concepts, and later under the influence of American ideals became a prolific writer, established a great newspaper, and founded an educational institution which was to become Keio University—one of the several great universities of modern Tokyo.
There were also foreigners in Japan, particularly the Christian missionaries, who came largely from America, and they helped found many of the early schools. Here they taught the Christian ideals of the West which, although tolerated by the early Meiji leaders, were quite at variance with their aims and beliefs. Christianity as an organized religion did not spread quickly in modern Japan, but it won a few hundred thousand converts who were drawn largely from the intellectual classes. Through them the ethics and ideals of Christianity had a much more profound influence on Japanese thought and life than one might assume from the fact that less than one per cent of the population became professing Christians.
The culture of the early Meiji period was a strange conglomeration of undigested borrowings from Western civilization mixed with many elements remaining intact from feudal times. In the late years of Meiji, however, the birth of a completely modern and yet indigenous culture was presaged by the appearance of an