As the younger son of an impoverished lower samurai, Fukuzawa had little chance for advancement. Hence he entered school in Nagasaki to study the new techniques of rangaku (“Dutch learning”)—the term the Japanese used to describe Western knowledge and science in the years when the Dutch were the only Westerners with access to Japan, before the country was opened to the West in the mid-19th century. After going abroad with the first Japanese missions to the West in 1860 and 1862, Fukuzawa wrote Seiyō jijō (“Conditions in the West”), a book that became popular overnight because of its simple and clear descriptions of the political, economic, and cultural institutions of the Occident. Continuing his efforts to introduce Western ways into Japan, he developed a lucid writing style and began the first attempts at public speaking and debating in Japan. In the xenophobic years before the Meiji Restoration (1868), Fukuzawa's championing of Western ways provoked many attempts on his life. After the restoration, when the Japanese government began actively to seek foreign knowledge, Fukuzawa was often invited to enter government, but he refused, insisting on the need to develop an independent intelligentsia.

Fukuzawa wrote more than 100 books explaining and advocating parliamentary government, popular education, language reform, women's rights, and a host of other causes. In 1868 he founded Keiō Gijuku, which developed into Keiō University in Tokyo, the first great university independent of government domination and one that was to produce many business leaders. In 1882 he founded the Jiji shimpō (“Current Events”), which was for years one of Japan's most influential newspapers and a training ground for many liberal politicians and journalists. Writing in his Autobiography (Eng. trans. 1934) shortly before his death in 1901, Fukuzawa declared that the abolition of all feudal privileges by the Meiji government and Japan's victory over China in the Sino-Japanese War of 1894–95 (which gave Japan the status of a world power) had fulfilled his life completely. His only regret was that many of his friends had not lived to see these great accomplishments.