For Enryō, everything he took in through his eyes and ears during his travels became a sort of living textbook. This all provided updates to the knowledge and experience he had gained from the many Jap-anese and foreign books he had read up until graduating university. Enryō saw the real world as a living textbook from which to learn, and he worked to create living scholarship. He would refer to this as “living books, living learning.” This was a personal philosophy that Enryō adopted while always taking on new challenges in a modern-izing Japan. It is said that today’s Japan is right in the middle of globalization. However, this is not something that started recently. In the period in which Enryō lived, from the mid-nineteenth century to the beginning of the twentieth century, Japan was being pummeled by waves of globalization that centered on the Western powers. The country was in a state of constant movement and change along with the rest of the world. In such an era if Enryō had stayed in Japan and relied only on information from the past written in books he might have quickly fallen behind others. Not only that, if he couldn’t make up the short-fall he may have even lost his seat as one of the central figures in challenging the status quo. For this reason, in order to make the real world his living textbook and engage in living scholarship, he took three journeys around the world, spread out over a twenty-year pe-riod to observe the realities in different countries. Today we live in an age of digitalization and internationalization. There are many ways we can learn about how the world is changing. In Enryō’s case, more than a hundred years ago, he practiced a phi-182
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