Challenger Inoue Enryo

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NATSUME Sōseki and MORI Ōgai. Interestingly, TOYODA Sakichi, 2 The period known as Meiji, literally “illuminated politics,” laid the foundations of modern Japan. It was an era when all sorts of cultural products were coming in from the West and the Japanese people that studied these products melded them with traditional culture to create novel hybrids. Through his research on the history of the mentality of the Meiji period, historian IROKAWA Daikichi discovered that “almost every-thing we associate with ‘modernity’—religion, literature, theater, art, intellectualism, philosophy, scholarship, and so on—was created by the generation of people who were born around the 1860s.” They later became known as “the second generation of Meiji youth.” These were the pioneers that challenged the status quo in a time of drastic change and modernization. Irokawa’s list includes five people for religion, eleven for literature and theater, five for art, eight for philosophy and thought, and nine-teen for scholarship and other fields, for a total of forty-eight. Of those still well known today, we can point to writers such as founder of the Toyota Motor Corporation, was also of that genera-tion. In the area of religion, Enryō is also considered a key pioneer in challenging Buddhism to reinvent itself in the modern era. I. The Nagaoka Era The Second Generation of Meiji Youth