The Cambridge History of Japan, Vol. 4: Early Modern Japan

Подождите немного. Документ загружается.

CONCLUSIONS 595

schemes that allow them to neglect the proper conduct of their profession but

still make enormous profits.'

The new abusive rhetoric displaced the more expected discourse of

respect and deference and thus put into place paving stones that others

would tread when they moved toward a new formulation of the politi-

cal norm at mid-century. Even in the face of such frustration and

complicated economic change, the shogunate and daimyo stubbornly

continued to cling to the tenets of class separation, agrarianism, and

rule by status, and their dogmatism was increasingly interpreted as an

arrogant attempt to preserve artificially their dominant position in

politics and society. The failure of the Tempo Reforms in the 1830s

and 1840s opened the door for even more doubts and questioning, and

the edifice of shogunal and daimyo authority collapsed quickly when a

foreign policy crisis became intertwined with domestic upheavals dur-

ing the 1850s and 1860s. It was only in the process of building a new

system to respond to the changing modern environment after 1868

that the Meiji leadership finally adopted policies that reached an ac-

commodation with the forces set in motion by the waves of urban and

commercial growth that Japan experienced during the seventeenth and

eighteenth centuries.

122 Kanshi

zuihitsu

(The public service records of Okumura Hidezane), ms copy, Kanazawa City

Library, Tempo 13 (1842)75/29.

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

CHAPTER 12

HISTORY AND NATURE IN

EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY TOKUGAWA

THOUGHT

INTRODUCTION

Of all the years that spanned the Tokugawa period (1600-1868), the

middle years, Tokugawa

chuki,

here called the "eighteenth-century,"

are distinguished by the creative achievements realized along a broad

front. Important innovations were introduced in theater, literature,

and printmaking in the arts and, more pertinent to this chapter, into

reflections on history, nature, and political economy. Coming in the

era directly before the Industrial Revolution in modern times, this

century offers key insights into the philosophical foundations of mod-

ern Japanese civilization that are grounded in the history prior to

Japan's intense engagements with the Western world. It comes as no

surprise that intellectuals have continued to turn to that history as a

resource for critical inspiration.

An obvious point must

made before continuing.

historical time

was not recorded according to the Christian calendar, "eighteenth-

century Japan" is no more than a rough Western "translation" of a

period of time following the well-known era of Genroku (1688-1704),

essentially commencing with the Kyoho (1716-36), and ending with

the Ka-sei, an elision of Bunka and Bunsei, 1804-18 and 1818-30,

respectively.

The opening years present a sobering aftermath of the ebullient

commercial revolution identified with the Genroku. Often cited as a

specific event to demarcate that moment of uneasiness is the famous

1 In the area of political thought, the outstanding figure is Maruyama Masao, known for his

theory of creative political fabrication and fiction that he traced to the historical philosophy of

Ogyu Sorai: Nihon seiji

shisoshi kenkyu

(Tokyo: Tokyo daigaku shuppankai, 1952). This was

translated by Mikiso Hane, Studies in the Intellectual History of

Tokugawa

Japan (Princeton,

N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1974). The terms for the discussion of postwar politics were

set decisively by Maruyama's reflective writings on Tokugawa thought. Also of interest are

Bito Masahide, Nihon hoken

shisoshi

kenkyu (Tokyo: Aoki shoten, 1961); Yoshikawa Kojiro,

Jinsai-Sorai-Norinaga (Tokyo: Toho gakkai, 1983); Minamoto Ryoen,

Tokugawa shiso shoshi

(Tokyo: Chuo koronsha, 1973); Matsumoto Sannosuke, Kinsei Nihon no shisozo (Tokyo:

Kembun shuppan, 1984); and a special issue on Tokugawa thought in Shiso 4 (1988).

596

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

INTRODUCTION 597

vendetta incident of the "forty-seven samurai" in 1702. This cele-

brated act of

loyal

revenge, admired by many, was also legally treason-

ous,

and after much agonizing debate, the Tokugawa bakufu ordered

the execution of these "loyal" retainers through ritual suicide. Political

thinking concentrated on the meaning of the new commerce that had

come to dominate the economy of the nation and, more pointedly, on

whether or not this new history could be brought under control by

loyal men committed to the system and its laws. Shortly after the end

of the century and signifying the beginning of yet another tempestu-

ous era, is the rageful rebellion of 1837, led by the philosophical

radical and former official of the regime, Oshio Heihachiro (1794-

1837).

With Oshio's rebellion, overt militant action against the regime

itself as an expression of true loyalty and not of personal revenge was

injected with unprecedented forcefulness into the waning years of the

Tokugawa bakufu, a period known as Bakumatsu.

Between these eventful markers, the legitimacy of the Tokugawa

order was rarely doubted nor was it frontally challenged. There was

much faith in reason and the possibility of objective knowledge, as

exemplified by Ogyu Sorai in the beginning, and Honda Toshiaki,

Kaiho Seiryo, and Yamagata Banto at the end. It would be erroneous,

however, to conclude that the Tokugawa regime governed during this

century in "peace and tranquility under heaven," or

tenka

taihei,

the

moral epithet with which the bakufu embellished its rule.

Hardly tranquil, the eighteenth century presents a troubled land-

scape dotted with periodic famines and rebellions in the countryside,

rice riots and bankruptcies among merchant houses in the towns and

cities,

and deepening indebtedness among the regional barons, the

daimyo, and their samurai retinues. Indeed, historians generally agree

that the bakuhan system, with the bakufu at the center in Edo and two

hundred or so semiautonomous domains in the regions, had entered a

period of severe unrest, doyoki, which was reflected in the carefully

planned reforms from within the system to rectify that unrest. Known

as the "Three Great Reforms" -

sandai

kaikaku - of Kyoho, Kansei

(1787-93), and Tempo (1830-44), historians often rely on these re-

forms to provide chronological coherence to the political history of the

eighteenth century.

Although all of these reforms failed to offer lasting solutions, de-

spite the intelligent purpose behind them, they reveal a consistent aim

worthy of notation, namely, to resolve the discordance between what

2 See Iwanami koza Nihon

rekishi,

vols. 11-13 (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1964).

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

598 HISTORY AND NATURE IN TOKUGAWA THOUGHT

had been envisioned by the founders of the Tokugawa order - peace

and tranquility in seclusion and agricultural self-sufficiency - with the

unintended consequences of that settlement, centering mainly on the

commercial revolution and the turbulent economic forces unleashed

by it. A money and market economy of unexpected magnitude had

been generated by the movement of aristocratic retinues to and from

Edo.

Anchored in Osaka, the merchant city of large and small banking

and trading houses, this new economy witnessed the spillage of re-

sources from the countryside into the cities, in the form of rice sti-

pends that were converted into cash and that fueled the expanding

commercial economy.

It was in this troubled middle period, when the sudden demise of

the regime was not thought to be imminent but its competence was

frequently held in doubt, that the meaning of history, nature, and

political economy was pondered, constituting

major intellectual expe-

rience in Japanese history and indeed East Asia more generally. Com-

monsensical questions came increasingly to be asked toward the end of

Genroku as a sober mood replaced the optimism of the generation

before: Why was there so much inefficiency and misery in the se-

cluded kingdom? Why had the initial vision of peace and tranquility

gone awry? Was the apparent errant flow of history due to passionate

and vulgar forces underlying commerce and hedonistic play? Was it

due to the overall structure of the political order itself? Or was it due at

some deeper level to faulty epistemology adopted by the regime that

could not serve as a reliable guide to action?

There was virtually universal agreement that the problem was not

the general design of the political structure

itself,

although this consen-

sus would undergo steady erosion over the century. There were always

warnings about the decline of human virtue and the rise of reckless

passion as the source of political failings. But the more fundamental

concern was directed at the question of epistemology, the manner in

which knowledge was to be approached, ordered, and translated into

action. Attracting the attention of the leading thinkers of the time, this

question informed a good deal of the contentious and polemical de-

bates that went into the compilation of prodigious scholarly works for

which this era is noted.

3 A comprehensive summary of such works is Inoue Tetsujiro, Nihon

Yomeigakuha

teisugaku

(Tokyo: Fuzambo, 1900); and two sequels, Nihon kogakuha no leisugaku (1902) and Nihon

Shushigakuha no letsugaku (1905). Valuable collections are Seki Giichiro, ed., Nihon jurin

sosho,

14 vols. (Tokyo: Toyo tosho kankokai, 1927-38); Inoue Tetsujiro, ed., Nihon rinri then, 10

vols.

(Tokyo: 1901-3); and Takimoto Seiichi, ed., Nihon keizai taiten, 60 vols. (Tokyo: Meiji

bunken, 1966-). For this essay, I have relied primarily on volumes in Ienaga Saburo and

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

INTRODUCTION 599

The central issue was the reliability of the philosophy utilized by

the Tokugawa regime to justify its claim to moral and secular knowl-

edge. This was the philosophy systematized by the Sung scholar Chu

Hsi (i 130-1200) and known in Western historiography as Neo-

Confucianism. Although it would be unwarranted to claim Neo-

Confucianism to be a comprehensive ideological "orthodoxy" for the

bakuhan system, owing to the bakufu leaders' syncretic approach to

ideas and rituals, Neo-Confucianism contained an epistemology that

Buddhism and Shinto did not, as to how objective knowledge could

be acquired and on the basis of which the flow of history could be

managed in a predictable manner.

Thus, even though the Tokugawa rulers did not sever their ties with

either Buddhism or Shinto, the former provided the rituals related to

death, and Shinto those that sanctified sacred territory under a protec-

tive deity - an image the shogunal figures projected for themselves -

they also saw in Neo-Confucianism a set of broad philosophical propo-

sitions on which servitors in positions of administrative responsibility

could agree to govern according to predictable rules and not by arbi-

trary and whimsical acts. In time, these propositions became the pri-

mary "foil" behind which criticism was leveled against the politics of

the day, with the intended aim of explaining the apparent lack of

control over the course of events.

As a cosmological system authorized by a transcendent moral abso-

lute,

the "Great Ultimate" or taikyoku, Neo-Confucianism articulated

a sharp division between the Tokugawa era of peace and tranquility

and the immediately preceding Sengoku period of constant warfare. A

timeless and absolute norm drawn from outside historical time and

transcending the chaotic warfare of the recent past was called on to

establish the bakuhan structure of noncentralizing governance as being

"principled."

Above all, it was theorized that this cosmology could be verified

through the diligent and disciplined observation of things close at

hand. The cognitive procedure would lead the human mind to un-

cover norms that informed categories of phenomena, each category

anticipating higher and more universal levels that culminated in the

"great ultimate" or "univeral reason" - ri. This perfect virtue, in turn,

Shimizu Shigem

et al., eds.,

Nihon shiso

taikei,

vols.

(Tokyo:

Iwanami

shoten,

1970-82);

and

ltd Sei et al.,

eds.,

Nihon no

macho,

vols.

(Tokyo:

Chud

koronsha,

1972-82).

Multivol-

ume collected works

most

the major thinkers have also been published

modern

form.

4 Divergent interpretive views

are

presented

Maruyama,

Studies;

Bito,

Nihon hoken

shisdshi;

and Herman

Ooms,

Tokugawa Ideology

Early

Constructs,

1$70-1680

(Princeton,

N.J.:

Princeton University

Press,

1985).

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

600 HISTORY AND NATURE IN TOKUGAWA THOUGHT

logically encompassed those abiding moral values such as goodness,

benevolence, wisdom, and loyalty, in short, the very ethic of trust on

which the Tokugawa government relied to regulate itself internally at

the ground level of ordinary administration. Within such a cosmologi-

cal scheme, the bakuhan system gained an intrinsic moral essence that

went beyond military hegemony secured on the field of battle. Thus

the Tokugawa regime presented itself as capable of humane and just

rule in accordance with the norms of

peace

and tranquility.

The procedure of acquiring knowledge through observation, how-

ever, yielded disturbing evidence that was at odds with the ostensive

goals of "ordering" and "saving" the people -

keisei saitnin

- that gov-

ernments universally should realize. No heady theorizing was required

to realize that many trends of the day were not in accord with prevail-

ing moral beliefs, such as merchants dominating the economy, samurai

living in debt, peasants rebelling and townspeople flocking to vulgar

theater. Agreeing on a persuasive alternative approach to knowledge,

however, was quite another matter that required addressing broad

theories of epistemology. If observing things close at hand was unreli-

able,

as they did not yield general meaning, where then should the

inquiring mind seek stable knowledge with which to better steer the

course of history? In short, what was the proper object of cognition

from which stable norms might be extracted? Two broad responses to

this problem dominated much of the intellectual history of the eigh-

teenth century.

One powerful resolution identified history, as expressed in language

and text, to be the reliable object of knowledge, in contrast with

speculative cosmology. Within this historicist frame of reference, there

were those who insisted that the field of history be defined in terms of

origin and the first articulation of

principles.

To grasp the present, the

seeker must detach himself or herself from indigenous history and the

convenient references to recent history and clarify a creative move-

ment, this most often being ancient China where civilization presum-

ably began. However, others denied the validity of such a search for

beginnings in a "foreign" culture, arguing instead for the sufficiency

of norms as shaped within indigenous history either as a result of a

lengthy evolutionary political history, as in the inexorable rise of the

bakuhan system, or in a moment of divine creation when the sacred

community of the Japanese people first came into existence.

The alternative position to these theses of history proposed that all

human knowledge, including documentation of the past, were rela-

tive,

vis-a-vis universal nature. Although history was obviously a valu-

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

HISTORY 601

able source of inspiration to show how people sought to gain deeper

empirical and emotional insights into nature, thereby strengthening

the bonds of trust among themselves in society, it was to nature that

the human mind must ultimately orient its quest for knowledge. What

was normative here was not a fixed and refined moment in human

time,

but nature as infinite and thus ontological. The human mind

could never fully comprehend nature, and therefore knowledge would

remain relative even as it expanded. Human morality, then, was not so

much a replication of nature as it was a series of human understand-

ings based on the reverential and objective study of nature as an

inexhaustible resource of knowledge. Modern Japanese scientific

thought may be traced to this view of nature.

Though these two major themes of history and nature hardly de-

plete the range and richness of eighteenth-century Tokugawa thought,

they provide an introductory perspective into some of the conceptual

events of that important era.

HISTORY

It was Ogyu Sorai (1666-1728) who best articulated the basic proposi-

tion that reliable knowledge was to be located in history, in docu-

mented human experience itself and not outside human time in a

transcendent absolute. It was captured in his famous dictum: "The

ultimate form of scholarly knowledge is history."

Undoubtedly the

most provocative and influential of the historicist thinkers, Sorai ar-

gued that although nature was certainly universal and infinite, the

human mind was finite. Nature could not serve as a stable source of

social norms precisely because it was beyond the grasp of human

intelligence, and the procedure of directly observing nature to deduce

moral norms was therefore flawed and arbitrary. Historical text, on the

other hand, could be authenticated through the systematic philological

"study of ancient language," or

kobunjigaku.

The intellectual choice

that scholars faced regarding the proper object of

study,

therefore, was

not between nature and history but between a textual field in one

period of time as compared with another. While affirming that the

source of knowledge was external to the human self and thus needed to

be observed, Sorai insisted that the object was not, in the first in-

stance, nature or the immediate social universe but a distant epoch,

Gakumon

tua

rekishi

ni kiwamari

soro

koto ni

sord.

From Sorai's

Tomonsho,

in Inoue, ed., Nikon

rinri ihen vol. 6, pp. 146-203, esp. p. 153. A modern rendering is by Bito Masahide, ed.,

Nihon no

meichd,

vol. 16 (Tokyo: Chuo kdronsha, 1974), pp. 297-358.

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

602 HISTORY AND NATURE IN TOKUGAWA THOUGHT

detached from the present and the recent past, when social norms were

first created. Only after these norms and the intent behind their cre-

ation were clarified could the scholar then objectively "observe" things

in the present. Without this knowledge, the act of observation was

simply relative and subjective. Studying the ancients was not mere

antiquarianism for Sorai. Rather, it was aimed at locating refined

moral norms locked in ancient language that might guide the political

order and control of the rapidly changing present.

Sorai's thinking was prefigured by ltd Jinsai (1627-1705), a re-

nowned philosopher of merchant background who taught during the

latter part of the seventeenth century.

Observing things close at hand

did not yield to Jinsai a moral perspective on universal reason. He

moreover rejected the claim that natural and social hierarchies were

morally fixed by a cosmological absolute. This minimized the virtue of

ordinary human beings and belittled their capacity to order and con-

trol, in a moral manner, the world around them. Jinsai had thus

concluded that the scholar must first sever his analytical view of things

from existing reality - the hierarchical order received from the imme-

diate past - and seek out the initial creative formulation of the univer-

sal moral worth of all human beings, regardless of their social and

political status.

Bypassing the history of Japan that had yielded the present as well

as that of imperial China that had relied on deceptive metaphysics,

Jinsai proceeded to study ancient language and texts. Significantly, he

identified as fundamental to all subsequent humankind the writings of

Mencius. Here was the first clear expression of the universalistic idea

that all human beings possessed a potential for goodness and that

goodness was not a static virtue or an unchanging absolute available

only to the knowledgeable few or the influential. Kings, Mencius had

emphasized, could be powerful and also wicked. Viewing virtue as an

active potential residing in all human beings, regardless of status,

Jinsai separated virtue from an abstract absolute and emphasized the

"horizontal" dimension of

as a universal human possession, a cease-

less tendency toward action found everywhere in society. Although

hierarchy was necessary for social existence, Jinsai emphasized that

virtue persisted at every level.

6 Jinsai's key essays Gomdjigi and

Dojimon

are in Yoshikawa Kojiro and Shimizu Shigeru, eds.,

ltd Jinsai - ltd Tdgai, vol. 33 of

Nihon shiso

laikei

(Tokyo:

Iwanami shoten, 1971), pp. 11-113;

and Ienaga Saburo and Shimizu Shigeru et al., eds., Kinsei shisdka

bunshu

vol. 97 of Nihon

koten bungaku taikei (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1966), pp. 49-200. See also Yoshikawa, Jinsai,

Sorai, Norinaga; and Koyasu Nobukuni, ltd Jinsai - jinrinteki sekai no shiso (Tokyo: Tokyo

daigaku shuppankai, 1982).

HISTORY 603

The ultimate value of Mencius, then, was the existential emphasis

given to human virtue as never static, and not an absolute to be recov-

ered through diligent meditation or study. Virtue was constantly being

acted out by ordinary individuals

as a

continuous part of human history,

in small and unspectacular ways that never led to final resolutions, as in

total enlightenment. It was best to speak of the "way," Jinsai thus

concluded, not as an ultimate and unchanging reason but as small

pathways that human beings journeyed over in daily life, with compas-

sion, fairness, humility, and truthfulness. This included for Jinsai a

healthy appreciation of the inevitable human

passions,

jo, of fear, sad-

ness,

joy, and anger as essential to human life. The active tendency

toward goodness was thus to be found in the actual world of work, play,

learning, and commerce without regard to distinctions previously im-

posed by metaphysical and political hierarchies. Through Jinsai,

Mencius took

on a

fresh moral and intellectual cogency among common-

ers often not adequately appreciated by historians of thought. Through

Mencius, ancient text had framed action in the present at whatever

level

in society that could be moral in a universally human sense.

Ogyu Sorai found much in Jinsai's thinking to admire, especially as

he too had independently reached similar conclusions regarding the

unreliability of Neo-Confucian metaphysics, the centrality of historical

genius as the proper source of moral knowledge, and the importance

of leaving the present and identifying with that genetic moment.

Sorai, moreover, did not dispute Jinsai's propensity to see virtue in

human action at all levels of society. He disagreed profoundly, how-

ever, on where the ultimate genesis of moral knowledge should be

located and on what this knowledge should clarify in the first and most

fundamental instance. Whereas Jinsai directed his historicism to ex-

pand the spaces for universal moral action among commoners, stress-

ing the horizontality of human potential, Sorai insisted that this per-

spective did not address the question of why there was hierarchy and

governance at all, and what these meant to history and to the ongoing

present as a moral field.

Sorai's admiration for Jinsai, therefore, was qualified on firm con-

ceptual grounds, as he reiterated in his key writings on the way and on

names -

Bendd

and Benmei.

He expressed particular dissatisfaction

7 The Bendd and Benmei are in Yoshikawa Kojiro and Maruyama Masao, eds., Ogyu Sorai, vol.

36 of Nihon shiso taikei (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1973). See also Bito Masahide, ed., Ogyu

Sorai, vol. 16 of Nihon no meicho (Tokyo: Chuo koronsha, 1974). See also Tahara Tsuguo,

Tokugawa shisoshi kenkyu (Tokyo: Miraisha, 1967); Imanaka Kanshi, Soraigaku no kisoteki

kenkyu (Tokyo: Yoshikawa kobunkan, 1966); Hixaishi Naoaki, Ogyu Sorai

nempuko

(Tokyo:

Heibonsha, 1984); J. R. McEwan, The Political

Writings

of Ogyu Sorai (Cambridge, England:

604 HISTORY AND NATURE IN TOKUGAWA THOUGHT

with Jinsai's conception of moral potential which he thought hardly

differed from the Neo-Confucian view that all human beings possessed

an innate goodness. For Sorai, Jinsai had succumbed to a simple

theory of human virtue and had not explained why structures and

hence history had come into existence in the first place. The ideas of

Mencius, Sorai argued, were inadequate and inappropriate to the

study of this problem, as they were articulated as part of

passionate

polemic against the proponents of legalism and Taoism. Thus, al-

though Jinsai had addressed the question of commoners managing and

controlling their immediate lives in ways that were moral in

universal-

istic sense, Sorai focused on the broader issue of governance as a

structured presence and further sought to resolve this problem by

theorizing about historical and social genesis.

Sorai reasoned that human history was not "natural," but was "cre-

ated," fashioned with artificial means. Unlike nature, which was infi-

nite,

having neither beginning nor end and thus being in this sense

timeless, human history had a determinable beginning, an epoch when

societies were forged and thus separated from nature. In a state of

nature human beings did not possess history, but in society they did.

Once the intent behind that creation could be uncovered, however,

history, like natural time, could persist indefinitely into the future. Yet

that vision of endless and dynamic continuity that all regimes, includ-

ing the Tokugawa bakufu, must first grasp in order to rule wisely

could be clarified only through the systematic philological analysis of

the textual evidences of ancient history. It was on the basis of this

knowledge of the "beginning" that political societies would survive

and flourish or decline and fall, as could easily be demonstrated in the

fate of Chinese dynasties and regimes in Japan's history before the rise

of the Tokugawa.

Though he conceded that many of the texts existed in fragmentary

form only, requiring historians to explore without prejudice a wide

variety of

evidence,

including formal texts on law and ritual as well as

the songs that conveyed the true feelings of princes and commoners,

Sorai went on to formulate

grand and provocative perspective. In the

ancient world well before Mencius and even Confucius, great, heroic

kings,

sen'3,

grasped the original mandate of Heaven to bring peace

and well-being among humankind. They replaced strife and struggle

in nature with rites, laws, administrative procedures, moral norms,

Cambridge University Press, 1962); and Olof G. Lidin, Ogyu Sorai's Distinguishing the Way

(Tokyo: Sophia University Press, 1970).