Fukuzawa's writings may have been the foremost of the Edo period and Meiji period.
English-Japanese dictionary Edit
In 1860, he published English-Japanese dictionary ("Zōtei Kaei Tsūgo"). It was his first publication. He bought English-Chinese dictionary ("Kaei Tsūgo") in San Francisco in 1860. He translated it to Japanese and he added the Japanese translations to the original textbook. In his book, he invented the new Japanese characters VU (ヴ) to represent the pronunciation of VU and VA (ヷ) to represent the pronunciation of VA. For example, the name Beethoven is written by ベートーヴェン in Japanese now.
All the countries of the world, for children written in verse Edit
His famous textbook Sekai Kunizukushi ("All the countries of the world, for children written in verse", 1869) became a best seller and was used as an official school textbook. His inspiration for writing the books came when he tried to teach world geography to his sons. At the time there were no textbooks on the subject, so he decided to write one himself. He started by buying a few Japanese geography books for children, named Miyakoji ("City roads") and Edo hōgaku ("Tokyo maps"), and practiced reading them aloud. He then wrote Sekai Kunizukushi in six volumes in the same lyrical style. The first volume covered Asian countries, the second volume detailed African countries, European countries were discussed in the third, South American countries in the fourth, and North American countries and Australia in the fifth. Finally, the sixth volume was an appendix that gave an introduction to world geography.