Individuality in Early Modern Japan 9781351389617, 9781351389600, 9781138308787, 9781315143125

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Individuality in Early Modern Japan

Two of the most commonly alleged features of Japanese society are its homogeneity and its encouragement of conformity, as represented by the saying that the nail that sticks up gets pounded. This volume’s primary goal is to challenge these and a number of other long-standing assumptions regarding Tokugawa (1600–1868) society, and thereby to open a dialogue regarding the relationship between the Japan of two centuries ago and that of the present. The volume’s central chapters concentrate on six aspects of Tokugawa society: the construction of individual identity, aggressive pursuit of self-interest, defiant practice of forbidden religious traditions, interest in self-cultivation and personal betterment, understandings of happiness and well-being, and embrace of “neglected” counter-ideological values. The author argues that when taken together, these point to far higher degrees of individuality in early modern Japan than has heretofore been acknowledged, and in an Afterword the author briefly examines how these indicators of individuality in early modern Japan are faring in contemporary Japan at the time of writing. Peter Nosco is Professor of Asian Studies at the University of British Columbia.

Routledge Research in Early Modern History For a full list of titles in this series, please visit www.routledge.com

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Individuality in Early Modern Japan Thinking for Oneself Peter Nosco

First published 2018 by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2018 Taylor & Francis The right of Peter Nosco to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Nosco, Peter, author. Title: Individuality in early modern Japan : thinking for oneself / by Peter Nosco. Description: 1st Edition. | New York : Routledge, 2018. | Series: Routledge research in early modern history | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2017028293 (print) | LCCN 2017033002 (ebook) | ISBN 9781315143125 (ebook) | ISBN 9781138308787 (alk. paper) | ISBN 9781315143125 (ebk) Subjects: LCSH: Japan—Social life and customs—1600-1868. | Individuality—Japan—History. | Identity (Psychology)—Japan—History. Classification: LCC HN723 (ebook) | LCC HN723 .N59 2018 (print) | DDC 155.20952—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017028293 ISBN: 978-1-138-30878-7 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-14312-5 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by Apex CoVantage, LLC

Contents

List of Figures vii Prefaceix Acknowledgmentsxiii 1 Introduction: Creating a Context for Thinking for Oneself

1

2 Identity and Orientation

19

3 Self-Interest, Protest, and the Public Sphere

43

4 Secrecy and Privacy in Religious Faith and Practice

61

5 Self-Cultivation, Salon Culture, and the Private Academy

81

6 Well-Being and the Pursuit of Happiness

97

7 Values

113

8 Conclusions: Individuality in Early Modern Japan

135

Afterword: Aspects of and Resistance to Individuality in Contemporary Japan

151

Bibliography Index

169 183

Figures

7.1 7.2 7.3 8.1 8.2

Imagining the karmic consequences of mabiki.119 Sketch of an Edo period komusō.  123 A group of contemporary komusō.124 A two-panel screen by Ogata Kōrin (尾形光琳 1658–1716). 140 A scroll by Itō Jakuchū (伊藤若冲 1716–1800) of seven cranes.142 8.3 A six-panel screen by Suzuki Kiitsu (鈴木其一 1796–1858). Reeds and Cranes, Edo Period.  143 A.1 Cosplay at the entrance to the Meiji Shrine in Tokyo. 152

Preface

Sometime in the autumn of 1974 in a class on medieval Japanese history, the late Paul Varley (1931–2015) made a seemingly offhand remark to the effect that all historical writing is autobiographical. Though I did not understand it at the time, it was not long before I came to appreciate that he was both right and ahead of his time. All historical writing discloses as much about its author as it does about the past, and on any number of occasions I have suggested that to know me better, one would do well to simply read anything that I have published. From Remembering Paradise (1990), a study of homesickness for a place one has never been, to my more recent work exploring how different traditions have attempted to manage intramural dissent (Nosco and Chambers 2015), every book and article of mine has had an autobiographical dimension, and this one is no different. When I first began studying the Japanese language a half-century ago, I was introduced to a fictional construct—an exquisitely beautiful country attuned to the rhythms of four changing seasons, and with a homogenous population that throughout its history has shown an uncanny ability to respond to and overcome external challenges. It took a very long time for me to appreciate the disjuncture between the Japan that I read about and the Japan I experienced when I visited and subsequently lived there. For me the question became, was I the misfit, or was the story itself a miss-fit? Of course it was a bit of both, and nearly a half-century of study and reflection has brought me to this point. This Preface is followed by nine chapters. Chapter 1 is an Introduction that lays out the problematic, which very simply is that individuality in Tokugawa (徳川 1600–1868) society figured more prominently than in the version of Tokugawa society that I was taught decades ago. In various ways, persons across classes strove for personal betterment, thereby both fulfilling and shaping their social conditions, imagined limitations, and personal destinies. To me this is visually represented by the Suzuki Kiitsu (鈴木其一 1796–1858) screen that appears in this volume as Figure 8.3, in which one can see five earthbound (societally grounded) cranes generally preoccupied with their grooming and grazing, but of whom two nonetheless take time away from these quotidian activities to gaze, I like to think wistfully, at

x Preface their six colleagues in flight. In Peter Pan fashion, these airborne cranes have seemingly transcended terrestrial constraints and have attained the heights of avian difference and exceptionalism. The middle six chapters, i.e., Chapters 2–7, form the heart of the book. These range widely, but it is hoped that like the cranes in the painting by Itō Jakuchū (伊藤若冲 1716–1800) in Figure 8.2 of this volume, each unique and distinct, the chapters taken together will add up to something significant. That they do so is the goal of Chapter 8, the Conclusions, where I attempt to weave this volume’s diverse themes and threads into a coherent discourse on individuality in early modern Japan. The Conclusions, in turn, are followed by an Afterword in which I compare the contemporary with the early modern manifestations in Japan of the aspects raised in these middle chapters. Each of the substantive middle chapters tells a story that has roots in my personal past. For example, the first, i.e., Chapter 2, deals with identity and orientation. I am the offspring of immigrants who came to America in the late 1940s from a country (Czechoslovakia) that no longer exists. Who are we? Where did we come from? How did we get here? These are the questions with which I grew up, and at a certain point I began to replace the “we” with “I.” But only much later did I realize that one cannot answer the “we” questions without at the same time shedding light on the “I” questions, and vice versa. Most of us who have spent meaningful time in Japan or have had considerable experience with Japanese university students studying abroad will have heard comments that begin with either, “We Japanese are [this or that],” or “Japanese people are [such and such].” All societies, nationalities, ethnicities, races, and groups of any kind do this, and these constructions of identity carry formidable ideological power. Among the most common generalizations is that Japanese people are homogenous and group oriented, while people from other countries in North America or Europe are more variegated and individualistic. There is some truth in this. Japan is superficially less racially/ethnically—the two are so often conflated in discussions about Japan—diverse than the populations of most industrialized countries, and group behavior is prominent, but when in Japan one is struck by the remarkable diversity that one encounters, sometimes just beneath the surface and at other times not beneath the surface at all. So too it is with orientation. I once was with a friend who was having a very serious breakdown. While awaiting assistance, he chanted, “I have a map; a map of central Tokyo; it’s in the O.E.D.” It wasn’t until years later that I understood what this meant. My friend had completely lost his sense of orientation—he needed a map, and this at a time when we were both about to leave for doctoral research in Japan. At that moment of disorientation he needed authoritative knowledge, and where better to find it in those pre-internet days than in the preeminent reference work of the twentieth century, the Oxford English Dictionary, or O.E.D.? The importance

Preface  xi of such orientation is reflected in common idioms like “I lost my way,” or “I wasn’t myself,” or “I couldn’t find my bearings.” I hope to demonstrate that identity (collective and individual) and orientation (spatial, temporal, and social) are fundamental to individuality, then as now. Chapter 3 concerns self-interest and the public sphere, including political participation and protest. Self-interest is about giving priority to one’s individual interests relative to the common good, and protest is about engaging in extralegal activities in order to effectuate that individual interest. During the writing of this chapter, I have often wondered whether my own participation as a university undergraduate in the tumultuous politics and events of the late 1960s represents a kind of genesis for my interest in protest. Those personal experiences with protest coincide with the start of my lifelong study of Japanese language. Further, having been raised in an academic household and then trained at elitist academic institutions, I imagined that academic freedom was akin to the Confucian doctrine of remonstrance whereby expressing a contrary opinion in a constructive spirit was not just allowed but even encouraged, and this because of its possible contribution to the common good and rectification of error. During the Tokugawa period, as now, political and social realities intruded upon this ideal but never quashed it. Chapter 4 looks at the nexus of secrecy and privacy viewed through the prism of an underground movement within the Nichiren denomination of Buddhism. A society that accepts individuality allows one to be oneself, and typically allows for certain liberties such as the freedom to embrace conventional as well as eccentric religious beliefs and practices without interference so long as those beliefs and practices do not impinge upon others. This liberty is particularly dear to me, as my father came to North America seeking precisely this. The Tokugawa state sought to control what people believed by controlling religionists, and it did so with remarkable success, imposing a variety of institutional controls upon religious institutions and the population as a whole, but its efforts also had the unintended consequence of training those who defied them in prevarication, dissembling, and learning to hide in plain sight. Chapter 5 looks at self-cultivation and the simultaneously elitist and egalitarian culture of the salon and private academy. It was like that for me at Cambridge University, which was by far the most elitist and at the same time most meritocratic society I had ever encountered or have encountered since, and very different from the middle-class world I lived in for five years in Queens, New York. But in both places a liberal education including the mastery of polite arts represented an avenue for social and professional advancement, and while one must be cautious about projecting the present onto the past, one senses comparable motives on the part of much educational activity in Tokugawa Japan. Then as now, there as here, the enterprise of personal betterment was formative and self-supporting, requiring no external subsidy.

xii Preface Chapter 6 is about the conditions for happiness and well-being, and perhaps this requires no explanation. To be an individual means that one can legitimately pursue not just well-being but also personal happiness. Though the world we live in today and that of Japan two to three hundred years ago may appear in some ways as different as night and day, the people who inhabit(ed) these realms share much in common, and especially where the perennial concern with well-being intersects with the more modern pursuit of happiness. Happiness and well-being differ in important ways. Well-being is the more universal of the two, since its basic contours and conditions have remained much the same across different cultures and societies, and across time and place: sufficient food, clothing, housing, and physical security remain well-being’s fundamental components. Happiness, by contrast, is the more subjective and personal, as well as the more modern and elusive; and a third concept—quality of life—straddles the two. Chapter 7 is about values, since individuals can be distinguished and defined as much by their values as by more obvious markers of difference like appearance. However, the values in which I am most interested are not the ideological values generated and promoted by samurai elites, but rather the counter-­ideological values as practiced by urban and rural commoners in pursuit of their individual and collective self-interest.2 Do only ideological values of the sort promoted by the Bakuhan state conduce toward industrialization, bureaucratic rationalism, and modernity, or might counter-ideological values likewise have a hand?3 And, why do thoughtful individuals so often express one set of values but then behave in ways that reflect an altogether other set? This volume cannot definitively answer these questions, but it is hoped that the topics discussed in Chapter 7 will encourage others to continue the discussion elsewhere. In the Conclusions we revisit some of what we observed in each of the previous chapters but with the intention of weaving these disparate observations into a preliminary overarching narrative on individuality in early modern Japan. This will require us to revisit observations made earlier in the volume, in the hope that, by doing so, we will enter into a novel way of looking at Japan’s recent past and in the process historicize characteristics of its present, here too ideally serving as a springboard for further discussion and research. An Afterword consists of observations regarding how the subjects of each of these middle chapters are faring in Japan at the time of this writing in early 2017. My justification for including this reflection is that if the chapters that follow do not shed at least some light on the present, then they fail as answers to the question of how we got from there (early modern) to here (contemporary). I trust that whatever the reader’s background, s/he will be able to form her/his own conclusions regarding the question of how individuality is faring in today’s Japan, and my hope is that like its preceding chapters, this Afterword will form the basis for the advancement of such a discussion.

Acknowledgments

I wish to acknowledge and thank the following for their support of and contributions to this book, while at the same absolving them of any responsibility for whatever errors of fact or interpretation remain. Kojima Yasunori, professor at International Christian University (ICU), and Miyata Kenji, formerly of Perikansha, have been close friends and in their own various ways mentors for close to three decades, and both made any number of most helpful suggestions regarding my research for this volume. Joe and Etsuko Price, similarly cherished friends since 1986, have generously allowed me free use of images of works of art from their vast collection. Independent scholar and author Lisa Tomo Kitagawa, educator and writer Carellin Brooks, Prof. Emeritus M. William Steele of ICU, and Prof. James E. Ketelaar of the University of Chicago were kind enough to read the entire first-draft manuscript and to offer any number of superb suggestions and encouragement at just the right time; Lisa Kitagawa and Bill Steele also rendered yeoman assistance with my obtaining permissions to use certain images, as did Lila Yee, and Troy McClellen was a neighbor-and-friendin-need whenever technology failed me. For one year Gideon Fujiwara of Lethbridge University was as helpful a research assistant as one might ever be blessed to have. Shirin Eshghi, Director of the Univ. of British Columbia Asian Studies Library, was a wizard at finding ways to acquire whatever I have needed whenever I needed it. The Japan Society for the Promotion of Science gave me generous fellowship support that enabled me to devote ten months to research and writing in 2014–15 in the pleasant surroundings of ICU, where the relative isolation gave me ample opportunity to reflect on my own life—my individual self, as it were—and how I arrived to this point. Others who were particularly helpful through their encouragement, questions, suggestions for further reading, and/or responses to ideas that I shared include Rob Eskilsen, Fujita Keisuke, Namiki Eiko, John Nosco, Paul Spickard, and Miriam Wattles. Of the chapters that follow, Chapter 4 has been with me the longest, and I wish to record my special thanks to Profs. Gordon Berger and Conrad Totman for numerous helpful suggestions years ago on much earlier drafts of this chapter, as well as to Prof. Jacqueline Stone for her steadfast

xiv Acknowledgments encouragement regarding its publication. This book benefited from the comments of four anonymous outside readers who gave my manuscript careful, insightful, and prompt attention—usually one has to settle for two out of three—and I am much indebted to their careful eyes. Max Novick and his colleagues at Routledge have been a pleasure to work with, and independent copyeditor Julene Knox has now made three of my books immeasurably better than I ever could. Again, however, please note that whatever shortcomings remain in this volume are singularly my responsibility and not the responsibility of those who generously gave of their time and expertise to help me along with this project. In lieu of a dedication, let me simply say that throughout this project I have been especially mindful of and profoundly thankful to those who taught me to think for myself; the only way to thank them is to pass it on. Vancouver, British Columbia, April 2017

Notes 1 Professor Emeritus of English Donald M. Murray has stated this even more broadly: “All my writing—and yours—is autobiographical” (1991: 66). 2  On values as practiced, see Ikegami 2015: 29–50. 3 The state comprises the central Bakufu headed by the Shogun and the over 260 domains or Han, each with its own Daimyo or lord.

1 Introduction Creating a Context for Thinking for Oneself

Key terms—The terms early modern(ity), individuality, and ideology figure prominently in this volume, making it helpful to have, if not actual definitions, then at least an understanding of what I intend when I use them. This also requires me to acknowledge at the outset that each of these terms has an extended, richly contested tradition, and in the explanations that follow I aim for an almost stick-figure simplicity and clarity that is not a reflection of the sophisticated theoretical debates that inevitably swirl nearby. In terms of early modernity, I follow Björn Wittrock (1998) in appreciating that there are multiple models of early modernity but that they generally share a significantly higher capacity for resource mobilization than in the preceding “medieval” or “late medieval” period, and similarly exhibit a new level of collective identity largely absent in earlier times. Since in this volume I argue that collective identity and individual identity emerge in tandem, I could as well argue that a new level of individual identity is equally prominent in early modern Japan specifically and early modern societies generally. To put approximate years on this in Japan, I would date the beginnings of Japanese early modernity with the ascendance of the warlord Oda Nobunaga (織田信長 1534–82) in the 1570s and its conclusion with the Meiji Restoration of 1868. Examples of monumental resource mobilization would be the construction of Osaka Castle begun in 1583, and the ill-advised invasion of Korea in the 1590s; collective identity emerges roughly a century later but takes yet another century to develop into theories of Japaneseness. In this volume I tend to use the terms early modern, Tokugawa period, and Edo period in ways that are essentially synonymous but with slightly different nuances: “early modern” when I wish to emphasize a comparative dimension; “Tokugawa” when the state is part of the issue being discussed; and “Edo” when my interest is more social and cultural than political. I use individuality to refer to an acceptance and appreciation of human difference, i.e., what distinguishes one person from another. One cannot discount the effect of extant source materials on our understanding of individuality in Japan, but the image that emerges of early modern individuality is that it has antecedents in the honorific culture of samurai elites and in

2 Introduction the elitism of Buddhist and Kyoto courtier custodians of culture, as well as in patterns of medieval reclusion. A central contention of this volume is that this earlier exceptional individuality becomes commonplace during the Tokugawa period. Please note that I generally do not use the word individualism, which I understand to be the advocacy and promotion of human difference, as well as the assertion of supremacy of individual self-interest over the interests of the collectivity. The distinction is important for this study. I use ideology, in turn, to refer to any corpus of secular thought intended by those in authority to influence the behavior of individuals and groups. I exclude religious—in early modern Japan’s case principally Buddhist— thought and organizations from consideration because religions by their very nature seek to influence the behavior of groups and individuals, and thus render any definition of ideology that includes them overly broad.1 When bodies of social thought are subject to either indifference or disapproval from the state, I refer to them as counter-ideological. Generally, from the Genroku years (元禄 1688–1704) through the end of the Tokugawa in 1868, the Bakufu (幕府) or central government in Edo had relatively clear ideological preferences but at the same time tended toward cultural liberality, by which I mean it was generally indifferent to cultural expressions and social mores that it did not perceive to be threatening or destabilizing. Individuality and ideology—For decades and with virtually one voice, descriptions of modern and contemporary Japan maintained that Japanese society after 1890 exhibits low levels of individuality relative to its European and North American counterparts, and that this is largely a consequence of exceptionally effective ideological production (DeVos 1985). In this volume I do not take issue with this, but I would add that for individuality to emerge, i.e., for there to be an affirmative acceptance in society of individual difference, a society has to overcome those statesanctioned ideologies which are intended to harness collective energies and to subordinate the behavior of both groups and individuals in service to the state. Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) traced the philosophical roots of the modern British respect for individual difference of perspective to René Descartes’ (1596–1650) dictum, “I think, therefore I am” (Je pense, donc je suis), which validated the notion that since each person has their own existence as the starting point for knowledge, each person’s basis for knowledge is different (Russell 1946: 579). This is consistent with what I am calling individuality in this volume, where I will argue that in Japan during the period under consideration such individuality was prominent and widespread but is not to be confused or conflated with individualism of the sort described above and that one might find in contemporary North America. There are excellent analyses in English of ideological formation in Japan for the years 1570 to 1680 (Ooms 1985) and again for 1890 to 1912 (Gluck 1985), and the nearly two centuries from 1680 to 1870 on which I focus are bracketed chronologically by Ooms’ and Gluck’s contributions. But my

Introduction  3 interests are less in the state-sponsored and endorsed ideologies that form the topic of Ooms’ and Gluck’s brilliant studies, and more in the socially generated counter-ideological forces that both allowed for and reflected individuality’s emergence. In this volume I offer evidence of a new, more widely experienced and accepted individuality, the counter-ideological behavior it exhibited, and the values that supported it, by focusing on those intervening years which may have been individuality’s heyday in Japan. At least in Japan during the years on which this volume concentrates—and perhaps as a universal condition of modernity—individuality and state ideology coexist in an uneasy but creative tension as each seeks to improve its stature relative to the other. That the process remains ongoing is the subject of this volume’s Afterword. Thinking for oneself—An explanation of the several associations of this volume’s subtitle, “Thinking for Oneself,” is also in order. In the Analects (2:15) Confucius is quoted, “Learning without thinking is wasted; thinking without learning is dangerous” (學而不思則罔，思而不學則殆). Confucius’ gist is that learning—rote memorization and textual study alone—is by itself not worthwhile unless one reflects upon what one has studied and through this reflection is transformed by it. Alternatively, giving free rein to one’s thoughts without the grounding of knowledge rooted in a classical tradition can lead one astray into profoundly dangerous territory. Confucius of course was right: A balance between learning and thinking is optimal, since thinking for oneself is essentially counter-ideological and can easily become or at least appear to be subversive. However, learning to think for oneself is one of the founts of individuality: It questions and challenges received wisdom and is at the very heart of critical thinking. Written sources make it clear that this kind of thinking for—and about— oneself is evident in all of Japan’s major metropolises by the end of the Genroku era and was supported by the same societal conditions that allowed for the emergence of a vibrant and self-sustaining popular culture: relatively high levels of literacy; surplus wealth distributed broadly if not equitably; cultural liberality of a sort that challenged the boundaries of what the state deemed acceptable; and high levels of urbanization that brought the best and brightest into cross-fertilizing contact with one another (Nosco 1990: 15–40). These same factors likewise provided a fertile environment for the construction of both individual and collective identity, for the nascent individuality that accompanied this construction, and for an abundance of heterodox thought in a marketplace of ideas. The dynamism that facilitated these social and counter-ideological transformations would not long remain constrained to these hyper-urban environments, and from roughly the mid-eighteenth century “thinking for oneself” would spread to regional centers in the countryside, using existing information and communications networks to spread the word (Ikegami 2005; Beerens 2006: esp. 195–219). A second source for this volume’s subtitle derives from the work of my former teacher and mentor Wm. Theodore de Bary, and especially his 1991

4 Introduction Learning for Oneself: Essays on the Individual in Neo-Confucian Thought. Is there something different about Japanese individuality from individuality elsewhere in the world, and especially within the East Asian cultural orbit? Writing on traditional China, de Bary observed: There is, first of all, the individualism of the hermit or recluse, who has largely withdrawn from society. This we might call a detached or “private” individualism. . . . By contrast, there is a more affirmative and socially defined individualism which seeks to establish the place of the individual or self in relation to others, to secure his status in some institutional framework or on the basis of widely declared and accepted principles. (1991: 5) Later in this volume we briefly examine the Japanese tradition of reclusion, which is among the most immediate antecedents for the subsequent emergence of eccentricity and strangeness, and we also more closely examine various rationales for self-cultivation in Japan, where the transparently selfish aspect of the exercise required numerous apologists. However, lest one conclude that Japanese individualism was merely a parochial version of a broader Confucian and hence East Asian phenomenon, let us continue with a second quotation from Prof. de Bary on how individuality was expressed in the cultural activities of a Chinese scholar during the thirteenth to sixteenth centuries. This individuality, he writes, is a reflection of “the special status and functions of the scholar-official class, the general affluence of the times, the influence of a religious atmosphere pervaded by Buddhist preoccupation with the problem of the self, and the interaction of these with a humanistic tradition that attached special importance to the cultural and political roles of educated man” (ibid: 69). The Japanese early modern context for the emergence of individuality shared this general social affluence and increasing prosperity but otherwise differed fundamentally from the Chinese context as just described: 1) there was no scholar-official class in Japan despite efforts at Bakufu and domainal (Han 藩) levels to represent the samurai (士) as an approximate counterpart; 2) the medieval Buddhist agnosticism regarding the self had to be overcome if individuality was to radicate in Tokugawa soil; 3) there was no comparably deep-seated humanistic tradition in Japan prior to the Tokugawa; and 4) education would only gradually emerge as a qualification for a political role, and this only among those already privileged by samurai birthright. Individuality in Tokugawa Japan does indeed emerge, but it does so in a very different context from its counterpart in China. Yet a third source for this volume’s subtitle is the Japanese title for Tadano Makuzu’s (只野真葛 1763–1825) most important work, her 1817 Hitori kangae (独考), which has been rendered into English as “Solitary

Introduction  5 Thoughts.” Owing to the circumstances surrounding its composition— Makuzu’s service to a royal princess at 16, her ill-fated marriage at 25, and her subsequent move to Sendai following remarriage to a Sendai samurai whom she saw infrequently—this is an altogether appropriate rendering of the title and her life. But owing to Makuzu’s radical observations, which we return to in greater detail on several occasions in this volume, her title could equally as well be rendered “Thinking (kangae) for Oneself (hitori),” something of which she is a superb exemplar. Tadano Makuzu had an uncanny ability to comment on the mores of her own times as if she were a distant observer, reflecting her capacity to think for herself without regard for the consequences. Good Meiji, bad Tokugawa—My interest in this subject of individuality and counter-ideological behavior and values has a genesis of sorts in the fact that Japanese history looked quite different when I began the study of modern Japan as an undergraduate in 1970. It was customary in those days for studies of Japan’s Meiji period (明治 1868–1912) to juxtapose it against a pre-modern Tokugawa, celebrating the former for its embrace of “civilization and enlightenment” while critiquing the latter as a time of backward feudal repression. As Philip C. Brown, the editor of Early Modern Japan: An Interdisciplinary Journal, has described this: The predominant image of early modern Japan. . . was negative. . . [and] owed much to the self-justification of victorious parties in the Meiji Restoration. To legitimate their capture of political power they painted their immediate Tokugawa predecessors as backward and inept. (Brown 2009) Writing in 1872 just four years after the “restoration” of monarchical rule, Fukuzawa Yukichi (福沢諭吉 1835–1901), a paragon of and spokesman for Meiji civilization and enlightenment (bunmei kaika 文明開化),2 set the tone for this perspective as follows: In the time of the Tokugawa Shogunate, the distinction between samurai and common people was sharply drawn. The military families recklessly brandished their prestige. They treated the peasants and townsfolk as despicable criminals. They enacted such notorious laws as that which gave a samurai the right to cut down a commoner (kirisute gomen 切捨御免). According to these laws the lives of the commoners were not truly their own, but merely borrowed things (karimono 借物). . . . [The Shogunate and the 300 Daimyo] treated the peasants and townsfolk despotically. They sometimes seemed compassionate to them, but they did not really recognize their inherent human rights (mochimae no kenri tsūgi 持前の権利通義). (Dilworth and Nishikawa 2012: 14; Komuro and Nishikawa 2002: 20)

6 Introduction Fukuzawa’s influence and importance in the Japan of the 1860s and 1870s was such that works about the West came to be popularly known simply as “Fukuzawa-bon,” and we will return to him frequently throughout this volume (Blacker 1964: 27; Storry 1965: 428). For now let us simply note that the textbooks used in Japanese secondary schools in these early years of the twenty-first century continue to emphasize a contrast depicting the Edo (or Tokugawa) period as a dark time of oppressed and overly taxed peasants, famines, economic and social inequality, a general hostility toward science, and a general backwardness relative to the “brighter” (akarui 明る い) civilizations of Europe and North America (Nishio 2007: 10–26; Brown 2009: 73–75). In Japan this view has been supported by two main tropes with quite different interests. On the one hand we find the Meiji oligarchs, who sought to represent the new state in ways that they hoped would conduce toward the revision of unequal treaties and Japan’s entry into the first rank of the world’s nations. On the other hand, we find Marxist historians for whom representing the new state as the culmination of revolutionary forces conformed more closely to their desired model of history (Dower 1975). These two combined to form a view of a “good Meiji, bad Tokugawa,” which has by no means disappeared, and especially when the topic of individuality arises. One of Japan’s most distinguished twentieth-century intellectual historians, Matsumoto Sannosuke (松本三之助 b. 1926), has written of how it was not until after the conclusion of the Sino-Japanese War of 1894–95 that one finds the rise of individual consciousness as something meaningfully distinct from national consciousness. Matsumoto maintains that prior to that war, individual and national consciousness were conflated in Meiji discourse as symbolized by such slogans as “rich country, strong army (fukoku kyōhei 富国強兵),” “respect officialdom above the people (kanson minbi 官尊民 卑),” “be loyal to your lord and love your country (chūkun aikoku 忠君愛 国),” and “achieve success by leaving self behind (risshin shusse 立身出世).” According to this view, one’s individual interests were perceived to be best served by promoting the collective interests of the nation-state (1996: 191– 211), just as one finds expressed in the 1890 Rescript on Education, which asserted a subject’s filial obligation to loyally serve a paternalistic state. As late as the 1960s the common wisdom regarding the Tokugawa remained that owing to a policy of national isolation and the Bakufu’s ironfisted authority over the regional barons, or Daimyo, Tokugawa Shoguns maintained a remarkably orderly and stable polity for over two centuries. The Shoguns were eventually undone, the story continued, in the mid-nineteenth century by their inability to manage an eruption of internal pressures and a series of foreign policy crises. The subsequent collapse of the Tokugawa regime, in turn, was seen as opening the way for the liberal and humanistic reforms of the progressive Meiji state. This view was from the beginning repeatedly but unsuccessfully challenged. To cite just one potent example, in 1875 Mantei Ōga (万亭応賀

Introduction  7 1818–90) ridiculed Fukuzawa Yukichi’s An Encouragement of Learning (1872–76) and its presumption of equality a full year before the latter work was even finished (Steele 2015). Ultimately, Mantei’s and others’ resistance to Meiji revisionist perspectives was ridiculed and then all but effaced from the accepted narrative of modernity, and this by ideologues whose interests were furthered by their assertion of discontinuity with the past and priority of transforming the polity. To be sure, mine is not the first effort to reconsider this received wisdom, and decades of scholarship have shown much of it to be a halftruth.3 Each of the following chapters, though some more than others, is indebted to decades of revisionist scholarship in a variety of areas, and one example where my indebtedness to secondary scholarship is particularly profound and where perspectives have changed significantly would be in our understanding of peasant uprisings, which increased dramatically in frequency during the Tokugawa period’s last century. The common wisdom here (Borton 1938) had long been that the increasingly severe plight of the Tokugawa peasant resulted in ever more numerous and violent uprisings against local authorities, and that these uprisings serve as a key indicator of the instability of the Tokugawa regime during its declining years. Subsequent scholarship (Bix 1986; Vlastos 1990) demonstrated that these protests played at best a minor role in bringing about the end of the Tokugawa, and that despite a number of severe famines, the horrors of which are not to be underestimated, the material conditions of agricultural households tended to improve throughout the period (Hanley and Yamamura 1978). Still more recent scholarship has shown that these uprisings grew out of increasingly contractual understandings and interrelated expectations between peasant agriculturalists and their immediate local authorities, and thus actually represent an expansion of the limited public sphere in the otherwise authoritarian realm of early modern Japan (Ooms 1996; Berry 1998). A society’s values will either support (accept) or challenge (reject) individuality, and in terms of values, Robert Bellah’s 1957 Tokugawa Religion: The Values of Pre-Industrial Japan defined the field for decades, despite a steady stream of evidence suggestive of gaps and agendas in his argument (Borovoy 2016). Seeing a Japanese analogue to the Protestant ethic and the rise of capitalism in Europe, Bellah (1927–2013) famously argued that the religions and philosophies of the Tokugawa period with virtually a single voice privileged the virtues of diligence (kinben 勤勉), frugality (ken’yaku 倹約), loyalty (chū 忠), fidelity (shin 信), and honesty (shōjiki 正直), and encouraged both education and obedience to authority. Bellah concluded that these values and practices contributed to Japan’s rapid industrialization and economic development, a view that received an enthusiastic embrace from those seeking explanations for Japan’s “miraculously” rapid modernization (Jansen 1965) as well as a possible model for other “pre-modern” aspirants.

8 Introduction General descriptions of Tokugawa society typically quoted the proverb “deru kui wa utareru” (出る杭は打たれる), i.e., “the stake that sticks up gets pounded,” in order to support an image of Tokugawa society as tightly ordered and comprised of persons who succumbed to ideological pressures to conform to the norms of their class, and who subordinated their own interests for the sake of the common good.4 The accepted narrative maintained that in Tokugawa society to do otherwise would result in one’s getting “pounded” much like the proverbial errant nail, and it was on this basis that there emerged an image of the Tokugawa state and society as both inimical to individuality, and in broader ways “feudal” relative to the progressive, democratic, and humanistic values of the Meiji. What was especially remarkable about the serial quotation of the proverb was the near-total absence of references to it in the voluminous library of Tokugawa texts. One of this volume’s central aims is to rehabilitate the host of counter-ideological and countercultural values that Robert Bellah ignored—what I style “the neglected values” of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Japanese practice, rather than the values that those in authority (secular or sacred) endorsed—and in the process to resurrect the individuality that was so prominent a feature of mid- and late Tokugawa society, and was so successfully effaced from the historical memory during the Meiji. There is, in fact, considerable contemporary evidence that everyday life in late Tokugawa Japan had its charms, and here observations by Westerners perhaps speak the loudest. Writing in May 1854, William (Wilhelm) Heine (1827–85), a German-American who accompanied Commodore Perry as his official artist on both of Perry’s voyages to Japan, described Shimoda as “small and unimportant” relative to Osaka, Kyoto, and Nagasaki, but otherwise “teem[ing] with novelty and abound[ing] in things worth noting.” In his journal he recorded Shimoda’s “smooth and well-paved sidewalks,” the verandahs that “front all streetside (sic) houses,” and how “in the houses and in the streets immaculateness prevails.” On the oft-commented-upon topic of hygiene, he wrote that the streets of Shimoda were swept at least once daily, and that daily bathing in warm water was customary for “not only the ­well-to-do [at home] but also the poor at public facilities” (Heine 1990: 134–35). Writing just a few years later, two British residents of Edo and equally keen observers recorded their admiration for Japanese mores and overall well-being, and their comments are again all the more striking for their comparisons with England and Europe. Lieut. J.M.W. Silver assigned to the Royal Marine Battalion in 1864–65 wrote, “It is impossible to mark the even and peaceable tenor of Japanese life, the politeness, industry, respect for superiors, and general air of cheerfulness and content, that pervades all classes. . . . Our farmers would gaze with surprise on the luxuriant crops of cereals, roots, and vegetables” (Silver 1867: 10, 13). Regarding the polity,

Introduction  9 Sir Rutherford Alcock (1809–97) described as follows what he saw along the road from Edo to Atami: Much has been heard of the despotic sway of the feudal lords, and the oppression under which all the laboring classes toil and groan; but it is impossible to traverse these well-cultivated valleys and mark the happy, contented and well-to-do populations which have their home and so much pleanty (sic), and believe that we see a land entirely tyrant-ridden and impoverished by exaction. . . . Europe cannot show a happier or better-fed peasantry, or a climate and soil so genial or bounteaous (sic) in their gifts. (Alcock 1863: 376–77) Of course, one can find unflattering comparisons with Europe as well,5 and we interrogate early modern Japanese notions of well-being, contentedness, and happiness in Chapter 6, but for the moment let us stay with the Meiji caricature of Tokugawa society and polity as unremittingly hierarchical and despotic. To be sure, the characterization of the Tokugawa sociopolitical landscape as one that exhorted persons to conform and endorsed socially and economically constructive values is generally true, but it is also incomplete. Yes, Tokugawa ideology aspired to a realm in which nothing ever changes, and applauded obedience to authority, frugality, and agricultural productivity (Ooms 1985), but, as I hope to demonstrate, it did so because there were problems in all of these areas. People at all levels of commoner society learned to flaunt authority through deception and protest; extravagance came to be socially accepted and even celebrated; and especially in urban environments the formerly strict class distinctions began to blur between samurai and moneyed commoners. The ideological pronouncements of the Tokugawa state, like those of the Meiji, are thus better understood as depictions of the world to which the state aspired rather than as descriptions of an existing society. In English, Eiko Ikegami has done the most important recent work on samurai values and concern with reputation. Ikegami (1995) has shown how during the relatively tranquil years in Japan from about 1640 to 1850, the reputations that samurai had previously earned through violence were replaced by a concern with reputation as honorific valor and face, i.e., as something that could be acquired through cultural production and experience at least as readily as through martial skills demonstrated through violence. My project in this volume differs from Ikegami’s in my concern with the proliferation of this sense of face to non-samurai commoners, who represented something in excess of 90 percent of Tokugawa society. Ikegami’s later work (2005) has likewise shown how the cultural networks in which these samurai participated, and which were initially concentrated in Japan’s

10 Introduction largest metropolises of Kyoto and Edo, later spread beyond these confines, creating the pathways for a national culture; here too my project differs from Ikegami’s in its focus on non-samurai commoners.6 Please note that an interest in personality and individualism in Japan is not altogether new in English-language scholarship and predates even Eiko Ikegami’s work of 1995, but with important differences. When Albert Craig wrote about personality in Japanese history in the introduction to a volume he co-edited with Donald Shively (1921–2005), the focus was on exceptional figures, i.e., those who loom larger than life: great heroes of the past, important leaders, seminal ancestors, founders of lasting houses, and those possessing exceptional charisma or special skills. They are remembered principally because unlike the great mass of humanity, they changed the course of history (Craig and Shively 1970). Conversely, four years later Ivan Morris in a single-authored volume focused on paradigmatic figures remembered not because of their successes but precisely because of the poignancy of their failures (1975). My approach differs in its examination of various manifestations of individuality, and the societal conditions and values that supported this appreciation of individual difference. Please again note that what I style individuality is not individualism per se, and I therefore agree with the sociological consensus that there is “relatively less positing of individualism as a goal” in Japan than elsewhere (DeVos 1985: 162). What concerns me in this volume is individuality in the sense of recognizing and accepting the organic integrity of individual persons, their differences, and their unique potential for experiential growth. By looking at instances of resistance to the state such as protest or the practice of forbidden religions, I also hope to demonstrate the presence of ever more widely ranging levels of agency, whereby individuals across classes became practiced in negotiating increasingly complex social arenas. Persons throughout Tokugawa society sought to enrich themselves both materially and spiritually, here and now, within the parameters of a decidedly thisworldly orientation. In Japanese and especially since roughly 2004, there has been an unprecedented flurry of scholarship on the society and culture of the late Tokugawa period, much of it absolutely brilliant, attesting to the current vitality and dynamism of this realm of inquiry.7 In the chapters that follow I synthesize much of this scholarship, while at the same time redirecting it in ways that have not been previously attempted, and I believe this effort to be significant for several reasons. First, individuality has fared poorly in the first halfcentury of Japan’s post-WWII society and beyond, as was reinforced more recently in the wake of the triple tragedy (earthquake, tsunami, and radiation) of March 11, 2011. With but few exceptions, the government in Japan has continued to encourage persons across all strata to subordinate their individual interests to the broader goals of reconstruction and economic advance, and it has done so by encouraging the view that a rising economic tide will lift all boats. The core value supporting this proposition is gaman

Introduction  11 (我慢), or perseverance, and to justify perseverance the state argues that individuals should accept that across the board their lot is incrementally better than it was at the end of the Tokugawa period. This perspective that the present, with all its flaws, is ultimately the best long-term alternative is supported by any number of indicators such as literacy and public education, household wealth, levels of political participation, constitutional freedoms and liberties, opportunities for travel and selfcultivation, religious options, and empirical measures of happiness and wellbeing, all of which support the conclusion that the Japan of today represents an improvement over the Japan of, say, two centuries ago. But individuality is conspicuously absent from these indicators of social progress, and this book will show at the very least that individuality has important roots in Japan’s early modernity, and that contemporary expressions of individuality can be understood not as alarming novelties or examples of antisocial behavior but rather as the outgrowths of an earlier model. Returning to ideology, modern and contemporary Japanese ideology of the familiar “be diligent and save for tomorrow” sort has for over a century steadfastly championed an identification of Japaneseness with such values as industriousness, collectivism, solidarity, conformity, frugality, and orderliness, with the implication being that to be or do otherwise can quite literally be regarded as “un-Japanese,” i.e., strange (fushigi 不思議) or deviant (hen 変). From this perspective, sloth, selfishness, non-conformity, extravagance, and disorderliness are so fundamentally alien to “a Japanese” that they can scarcely be called values and more closely resemble a pathology. This volume seeks to undermine this argument by historicizing it and disclosing the vitality of such counter-ideological values as playfulness, non-conformity, extravagance, and hedonism, along with such counter-ideological practices as self-interested disorder, disobedience, and deception. Any project that has individuality at or near its center will necessarily be complex and multifaceted, and I must remind the reader that this volume does not aspire to an exhaustive treatment of individuality, or the values and societal conditions that supported and represent it. This study was initially intended as a companion to the edited volume Values, Identity and Equality in 18th- and 19th-Century Japan (Nosco, Ketelaar, and Kojima 2015), which contains essays by a dozen authors on various aspects of this closely related problematic,8 but along the way this volume acquired a life and direction of its own, even though it shares with this other the hope that it will provoke a reconsideration of some exceptionally long-standing assumptions and generalizations regarding early modern Japanese society, and thereby its relationship to Japanese modernity. The core chapters—Let us now turn to brief summaries of the chapters that follow this Introduction. Chapter 2, “Identity and Orientation,” is the most closely tied to my previously published research (1990) and continues the revisionist approach (Nosco 2015) that posits that individual and collective identity develop in tandem instead of sequentially, with individual

12 Introduction identity emerging out of and eventually superseding collective identity. I link identity to various forms of orientation—spatial, temporal, and social— showing how the taxonomic precision of these forms of orientation made each individual essentially unique. I conclude the chapter with observations regarding the metaphysical contexts for individuality provided by a number of religions and religious modes of thought during the Tokugawa period. As mentioned, Chapter 3, “Self-Interest, Protest, and the Public Sphere,” is where I am the most dependent on secondary sources, and I include it because one cannot imagine a successful study of individuality that does not at least attempt to meaningfully address the issues of protest and public sphere. I analyze these in terms of the aggressive pursuit of self-interest whereby individuals engaged in calculated risks, often acting in tandem or solidarity with like-minded others, fundamentally in order to improve their lot. The pursuit of self-interest is heady stuff but can also be regarded as problematic. Many societies as well as smaller groups imagine themselves to be organism-like, including such diverse entities as sports teams, military units, fraternal associations, Confucian states, and so on. For these, the ideal is achieved when each of their constituent parts—each individual member, household, occupational group, class, and so on—is perceived to be accomplishing its assigned role perfectly. In organic societies the private sphere typically contracts; the macrocosm is understood as the totality of microcosms; and the pursuit of individual self-interest is castigated as selfish. By contrast, in capitalist liberal democracies, the tendency is to imagine that the society is working well when the society’s mechanisms for resolving competition inspire confidence and are believed to be working effectively and impartially. In these latter, the pursuit of self-interest is understood as natural, i.e., something to be managed but not eschewed, and self-interest is generally informed by ethical considerations, so that, for example, voluntarism is championed and generosity lauded. Protest is intoxicating, and those who have participated in protests or riots of all stripes, such as those following sporting events, the announcement of unwelcome political or judicial outcomes, and implementation of policies deemed immoral or injurious to the common good, will recognize that under the influence of the mob, one can easily be swept into actions of a sort that would ordinarily be individually unimaginable. The collective nature of protest provides what at times proves to be an illusory sense of protection from retribution or retaliation, as in the case of Tiananmen in 1989, but, more often than not, there is safety in numbers. Chapter 4, “Secrecy and Privacy in Religious Faith and Practice,” concentrates on the controversial fujufuse (不受不施) movement within Nichiren Buddhism. Consistent with its absolutist aspirations, the Bakufu sought to suppress this fundamentalist strain for its defiance of the state’s authority. What made it particularly difficult for the Bakufu to regulate fujufuse practitioners, however, was that unlike Christians, who had no aboveground

Introduction  13 church, fujufuse followers were able to survive within the labyrinthine network of aboveground Nichiren temples. This network was certainly no stranger to intramural disputes but found little incentive to act as the Bakufu’s enforcement agent in what was ultimately a victimless transgression. The strictness of enforcement of anti-fujufuse policies waxed and waned during the Tokugawa and was strongest during both the beginning and final decades of the period. But when enforcement was weakest during the middle decades of the period—and just as one observes in the experience of underground practitioners of Christianity—one can detect traces of a de facto sphere of individual privacy in matters of personal faith. The next chapter, “Self-Cultivation, Salon Culture, and the Private Academy,” uses self-cultivation and personal betterment to show the radical epistemological shift from medieval to early modern times. In the same way that individuality supports the pursuit of self-interest, it likewise serves as an ideological foundation for self-cultivation and freedom of association. The early modern focus on the self—its cultivation, its interests, and its development—was already familiar to Japanese aristocrats and military elites, who knew from decades of personal experience how to make names for themselves. But in an age of sharply diminished levels of conflict, samurai recognized that the self of necessity had to be redefined and reconstituted, and as far as non-samurai commoners were concerned, the social, cultural, and intellectual focus on self was fundamentally new. During the early decades of the Tokugawa, samurai learned the traditional polite arts and accomplishments from young nobles and subsequently became the purveyors of these same subjects to moneyed commoners, who proved an eager audience. These commoners, in turn, soon became the transmitters as well as the consumers of these cultural fields. Working through networks of knowledge that mimicked financial networks and coursed through the same paths initially formed through the movement of goods and services, varied forms of cultural production became nationalized before there was a nation. A salon culture akin to the coffee-house culture of early modern Europe developed in the last Tokugawa century, providing a liminal and essentially classless society much like that found within the confines of the private academy, all of which was fundamentally made possible by the radical expansion of literacy. From salon culture and private academies, we turn in Chapter 6—the most philosophical chapter in this book—to concepts of well-being and happiness during the Tokugawa period. There was no acknowledged right to the pursuit of individual happiness in late Tokugawa Japan, but individuals had what I style “reasonable expectations” regarding the most basic conditions of well-being. Resembling what today is called “quality of life,” one finds philosophically grounded understandings of what constitutes a life well lived, in which personal self-cultivation was justified and encouraged by the Confucianism that defended its teachings on the self by asserting that one could make society better by making oneself better.

14 Introduction We moderns can easily imagine the provision of well-being to be a responsibility of the state, and one finds traces of this perspective in writings from across the early modern ideological perspective. Further, the pursuit of happiness comes to be validated in Tokugawa practice in ways that give it a close family resemblance to a human right. Well-being and happiness in this way combine into something akin to quality of life, a distinctly modern concept that includes such elements as access to quality education, health care, life expectancy, and so on, all of which enter into the Tokugawa discourse on what it is to be fully human. The last of the six substantive chapters is about values, specifically the values that Bellah overlooked, including non-conformity, which becomes a value when juxtaposed against the highly ideological value of conformity; dissembling and prevarication, which manifest as outgrowths of selfinterest and as the inverse of honesty; conflicted values, especially the evolving binary of duty (giri) and emotionality (ninjō); same-sex (homosocial) friendship and sociability; and a concern with financial stability and household continuity, reflected at all levels of Tokugawa society from the most elevated Daimyo to the lowliest peasants. Since a particular concern in this volume is whether Tokugawa values changed over time, and, if so, how to demonstrate this, we will look carefully at the “Solitary Thoughts” of Tadano Makuzu, the truly remarkable woman who will then serve as the pivot for our transition to this volume’s concluding chapter. In the Conclusions, I walk the reader once more through the observations and themes of the preceding six chapters, interweaving them in a way that, it is hoped, demonstrates that individuality—understood as an appreciation and acceptance of individual difference—was an integral part of the remarkable societal vitality that in an alternative sense represented deteriorating times for the status quo. I also indirectly challenge the notion of a “good Meiji, bad Tokugawa.” This last sets up the Afterword, in which I briefly examine each of the topics addressed in the six central chapters, seeking to place them into a historical context by comparing what we have discovered in early modern Japan with their counterpart manifestations in early twenty-first-century Japan. I invite the reader to consider whether accompanying the rapid assimilation of Anglo-European perspectives and models there has, ironically, been an erosion of Japanese levels of individuality. Some caveats—Before proceeding further, it is important to note an ethical dimension to the analysis that follows: one’s understanding of selfhood will inevitably have implications for one’s understanding of individual responsibility. Takeuchi Seiichi (竹内整一), a specialist in ethics, has suggested that there is a distinctive feature to early modern Japanese understandings of the self, and Takeuchi uses a variety of essentially linguistic arguments to argue his thesis. He points out that the character 自 (self) can be read both as mizukara (自ら), meaning “by oneself,” and as onozukara (自ずから), meaning “of itself,” and from this he infers a link between the two that blurs the distinction between agency and inevitability. When interpreted in this

Introduction  15 way, events are no longer the result of human action and instead have the character of being sui generis with an attendant erosion of personal responsibility (Takeuchi 2010). Takeuchi believes that this confluence is reflective of a distinctive subtlety that is uniquely Japanese, and, in arguing so, he places himself in a lineage of scholars whose perspectives can be traced back to early modern nativists like Kamo no Mabuchi (賀茂真淵 1697–1769) and especially Mabuchi’s most famous student, Motoori Norinaga (本居宣長 1730–1801), for whom language, ethnicity, and culture were seamlessly and inextricably intertwined. I examine these nativists in the next chapter, but, unlike Takeuchi, I do not address linguistic issues and focus instead on how these nativists explained individual difference at the same time that their assertions of collective identity—and in Norinaga’s case his belief that life itself was entirely determined by kami (deities)—problematized individual and personal ethical responsibility. There are two additional caveats regarding what I do not attempt in this volume. First, with only occasional exceptions (of which the most important is Tadano Makuzu, whom we examine in some detail), this volume does not examine the circumstances of women—as distinct from men—in their values, individuality, or identity. Women managed the finances and staff of samurai households, studied alongside men in private academies, provided labor and other forms of essential support to agricultural as well as familyrun enterprises, were obviously instrumental in determining household size, and in divorce, inheritance, ownership of property, and other matters, thus exhibiting levels and modes of agency that flew in the face of the patriarchy associated with this period. I wish that I could satisfactorily address this lacuna in my work, but on balance I think it better that I not address a subject than address it poorly.9 Second, I wish that I knew enough about economics to address the contribution of transactions to the nascent individuality that this volume explores.10 We today live remarkably complex lives, with our smartphones, credit/debit cards, mortgages, rents, taxes, electronic payments, direct deposits, checking and savings accounts, investments, transportation, purchases of food and clothing, recreation, entertainments, and so on. Each transaction reinforces a sense of oneself as a responsible autonomous actor in an increasingly complex environment. Indeed, whether this construct is fictional or empirical, learning how to negotiate one’s financial environment is believed to be fundamental to one’s “growing up.” Save for the electronic dimension of the list above, the lives of households and the individuals who inhabited them during the Edo period became comparably complex, and in similar ways likely strengthened that sense of selfhood that is fundamental to the emergence of individuality. But with regrets, this too is beyond my reach. To summarize the principal points of this introductory chapter, it has been a commonplace to think of Japan’s early modern Tokugawa period as a time when an authoritarian government successfully maintained the peace

16 Introduction and managed change for some two and a half centuries, and when society as a whole was characterized by harmony, conformity, and homogeneity. A closer examination, however, reveals a far more complex and unstable environment. Yes, the surface was mostly peaceful, and Tokugawa ideology did indeed advocate on behalf of conformity, but it did so precisely because there was a growing concern among those in authority for what they deemed the excessive pursuit of individual interests at the expense of the broader social good (Brecher 2013). Further, some six decades have passed since Robert Bellah famously argued that a number of otherwise disparate strains of thought and religious movements in Tokugawa Japan converged in their emphasis on frugality, diligence, honesty, obedience, and loyalty, and that this consensus of values contributed to Japan’s subsequent “economic miracle” and rapid modernization. His emphasis on these values, however, has caused other values equally prominent but counter-ideological in Tokugawa society to be overshadowed and underappreciated in scholarship on the period. These “neglected values” are our second focus and include the individual pursuit of self-interest and happiness, an understanding of well-being that moved well beyond necessities, and an interest in individual personal experience as a means toward self-fulfillment. Third, commonly held contemporary understandings of what it is to be “Japanese” are ideologically charged and at least partially erroneous. For most of the last half-century, Japaneseness has been identified both inside and outside Japan with a self-effacing conformity, which perseveres (gaman 我慢) in the face of individual hardship for the sake of the broader wellbeing of the community. In the practical terms of everyday experience, one frequently observes an older generation in Japan criticizing today’s radical non-conformists as being “un-Japanese.” At the same time, one also observes among a younger generation weaned on conservative politics and perspectives traces of an uncritical acceptance of much ideological production. This book’s project, by contrast, includes the effort to show that today’s eccentrics, hedonists, non-conformists, and even demonstrators in Japan are the heirs to a tradition with roots in the Tokugawa period, when individual difference was celebrated in ways that have ironically become exceptional in present-day Japan. This project will also challenge conventional wisdom by suggesting the corollary thesis that there may have been a more vibrant public sphere in the Japan of one and a half centuries ago than exists today. In the next chapter, then, we begin our exploration of the emergence of individuality by historicizing the construction of both collective and individual identity, as well as the factors that contributed to the new forms of personal orientation—spatial, temporal, and social—that emerge in early modern Japan.

Notes   1 I for similar reasons excluded both religion and the market in my working definition of the kinds of voluntary associations that represent civil society, as well

Introduction  17 as the kind of self-sustaining urban culture that I understand as popular culture (Nosco 2002).  2 On Fukuzawa, the definitive work in any Western language remains Carmen Blacker’s The Japanese Enlightenment: A Study of the Writings of Fukuzawa Yukichi (1964).   3 Indeed, a trio of the leading European authorities on Japan already in the late 1980s felt “it was the right moment to survey the situation in Japanese studies from as wide a perspective as possible,” observing that “increasingly, a new mood, a new language could be identified in the work of Japanese and Western researchers” (Boscaro, Gatti, and Raveri 1990: ix).   4 Strictly speaking, “stake” is the more accurate translation of kui, the basic idea being that whatever or whoever attracts too much attention will get hurt.  5 Isabella Bird’s Unbeaten Tracks in Japan: An Account of Travels in the Interior, Including Visits to the Aborigines of Yezo and the Shrine of Nikko (www. gutenberg.org/cache/epub/2184/pg2184.html, accessed March 6, 2017), a collection of her letters written in 1878, fifteen years after Alcock’s observations, contains notoriously unflattering characterizations of the Japanese people whom she either met or observed, as well as flattering comments as recorded on her trip to Yamagata and Akita.  6 For more detailed analysis of Tokugawa networks, see the web-based studies of Bettina Gramlich-Oka, http://icc.fla.sophia.ac.jp/html/projects/Network_­ Studies_2014-2015.html, accessed November 11, 2014.   7 Listed alphabetically by surname, prominent works include Endō 2008; Hamano 2014; Higuchi 2009; Ibi 2009; Imahashi 2009; Katsurajima 2008; Kurozumi 2003, 2006; Kuwabara 2007; Maeda 2002, 2009, 2012; Makabe 2007; Miyagi 2004; Namikawa and Kojima 2013; Nishio 2007; Shimauchi 2009; Shimizu 2005; Suzuki 2013; Tanaka Kōji 2009, 2010; Tien 2012; Tokuda 2004; Tsujimoto 2011.   8 I would refer interested readers to the table of contents for the edited volume, which includes the following: Peter Nosco and James Ketelaar, “Introduction: Individuality and Identity in Early Modern Japan”; Eiko Ikegami, “Waiting for Flying Fish to Leap: Revisiting Values and Individuality of Tokugawa People as Practiced”; Anne Walthall, “Good Older Brother, Bad Younger Brother: Sibling Rivalry in the Hirata School”; W. Puck Brecher, “Being a Brat: The Ethics of Child Disobedience in the Edo Period”; Peter Nosco, “The Co-Emergence of Individuality and Collective Identity”; Gideon Fujiwara, “Rebirth of a Hirata School Nativist: Tsuruya Ariyo and his Kaganabe Journal”; Greg Smits, “New Cultures, New Identities: Becoming Okinawan and Japanese in 19th-Century Ryukyu”; James Ketelaar, “Discovering Erotic Emotionality in Tokugawa Japan”; Yasunori Kojima, “Laughter Connects the Sacred (sei 聖) and the Sexual (sei 性): The Blossoming of Parody in the Edo Culture”; M. William Steele, “The Unconventional Origins of Modern Japan: Mantei Ōga and the Politics of Play”; Daniel Botsman, “Flowery Tales: Ōe Taku (1847–1921), Kōbe, and the Making of Meiji Japan’s ‘Emancipation Moment’ ”; Naoki Sakai, “From Relational Identity to Specific Identity—On the Idea of Equality”; and Isomae, Jun’ichi, “Epilogue: Re-imagining Early Modern Japan—Beyond the Imagined/Invented Modern Nation.”   9 An excellent introduction in English to this vast subject would be Bernstein 1991, especially pp. 1–148. In Japanese a fine place to begin such an inquiry would be Yabuta Yutaka and Yanagiya Keiko 2010. 10 Though dated, Susan B. Hanley and Kozo Yamamura’s Economic and Demographic Change in Preindustrial Japan (1978) remains an excellent starting point for scholarship in English on this vast subject.

2 Identity and Orientation

Who is this “We”? Marilynn Brewer and Wendi Gardner1

Perhaps the reader will, like me, recall writing their first home address along these lines: full legal name; street address; town; county; state/province; country; continent; earth; Milky Way; and so on. This spatial orientation sheds light on who we are by recording where we are. Similarly, an interest in ancestry or the keeping of a diary or ledger provide temporal orientation by placing oneself within a genealogical lineage or a structure of telling time. This chapter is about orientation, the construction of collective and individual identity, and the contribution of individual identity to individuality. I hope to demonstrate, first, that in Japan, as elsewhere, individual and collective identity are constructed in tandem and in multiple ways with a sense of patrimony at their foundation and with orientation as their superstructure; second, that a concern with one’s individual identity had an antecedent in the Warring States period (Sengoku 戦国 1477–1582), in which there was a concern with reputation and the impulse to make a name for oneself; third, that Confucian and nativist understandings of human nature or disposition provided a metaphysical basis for understanding individual difference; and fourth, that individual identity itself forms the fount for the emergence of individuality. There is something perennial and universal about the human impulse to ask who we are, where we came from, and how we arrived at our present circumstances, and this is so at both the personal/individual as well as the societal/collective levels. These are the questions of the epic, as well as the questions of historical narrative—of Homer as well as Herodotus. To ask who we are or who I am is to begin the process of constructing identity, and to do so, it helps to have an Other, something or someone outside oneself or one’s community with whom one can partially identify but from whom one also can partially differentiate oneself. It thus may seem counterintuitive to begin a book on individuality with a chapter on collective and individual

20  Identity and Orientation identity, but as I have recently done elsewhere (Nosco 2015: 113–33), I draw on the work of Tom Postmes and Jolanda Jetten, who have championed a revisionist perspective in their observation that “group and individual are not independent and separate, but are intimately connected and fundamentally inseparable” (2006: 1–2). This approach renders it impossible to interrogate the one without the other, since individual and collective identity inevitably develop in tandem and are intrinsically symbiotic. To personalize this, learning who we are helps me to learn who I am, and vice versa. Since I use the terms individual identity, collective identity, and social identity repeatedly in this chapter as well as occasionally in those that follow, let me begin by sharpening as best I can the distinctions between these necessarily overlapping terms. Collective identity refers to the totality of concepts and propositions that answer the “we” questions; collective identity is not the same as equality but is related to it, since we can be equally part of a collective without identically sharing its qualities, characteristics, and attributes. Naoki Sakai has brilliantly likened this dimension of equality to those who might carry a particular credit card, but nonetheless be very different in all other aspects (Sakai 2015). Note that collective identity has its variants and one of these, politicized collective identity, is discussed in Chapter 3, along with other issues relevant to political participation and protest as components of Japan’s early modern public sphere. Individual identity, by contrast, is best understood as whatever is identified by words like “me” or “I” (in Japanese the analogous terms are ware, written 我 or 吾, onore, written 己, and watakushi, written 私). Individual identity provides answers to the “I” questions and is not the same as individuality but is likewise fundamental to it; this is because individual identity provides a basis for the acceptance of difference, which is how individuality is understood in this volume. Social identity, in turn, refers to those categories and roles to which one is assigned by birth or that one acquires through relationships, education, vocation, or recreation, and it is thus more accurate to speak of a multiplicity of social identities which cohere in an individual person through that person’s values (Hitlin 2003: 118). Social identity is other-determined, while individual identity is self-determined (Wensink 2012), and a particular concern for us will be how social identity emerges from societal orientation. Please note that individual identity, collective identity, and social identity are symbiotic—they need each other—and necessarily overlap. Two factors integral to the construction of identity are the acceptance of an orientation that has temporal, spatial, and social dimensions, and the positing of an Other. These various forms of orientation offer answers to questions such as what my relationship to the past is, and what my place is, both geographically and within society. Orientation’s answers to these questions provide essentially Cartesian perspectives on our world, and by validating differing points of view (perspectives), they offer an epistemological rationale for individuality. For its part, the presence of a definable

Identity and Orientation  21 Other lays a foundation for the definition of oneself as well as one’s group by sharpening the distinction between self and Other. The collective identity that emerges from one’s sense of identification with one or more groups can overwhelm an individual’s personal identity and individuality, even as it emerges in tandem with it. Conversely, one’s individuality can be so strong as to relegate one to society’s margins and outside conventional understandings of collective identity, as was the case with Japan’s early modern eccentrics or kijin (奇人), whom I discuss later in this volume under the rubric of non-conformity. As we will see there, one of the distinctive features of these radical individualists was their ability to find ways to inhabit liminal social spaces and to express their non-conformity (individuality) without directly challenging the existing political order (ideology). Identity, equality, and individuality—As mentioned, individual identity is not the same as individuality but it does provide a springboard for it. Probably the closest one finds to this argument in Japanese scholarship is in a work by Shimizu Masayuki (清水正之), who focuses on the self–other relationship in everyday life (nichijō seikatsu no kaishakugaku 日常生活の解釈 学), rather than on Japan’s relationship to China as a remote imaginary and early modern Other (2005: 1–5, 232–42). In his interrogation of the nativist understanding of the Japanese heart (Nihon no kokoro 日本の心) or more poetically the Yamato heart (Shikishima no Yamatogokoro 敷島の大和心), Shimizu raises the problematic question of truth/sincerity (seijitsu 誠実) vs. duplicity (kyogi 虚偽), an issue to which we return later in this chapter. Likewise, as noted, collective identity is not the same as equality, though they are related and are at times difficult to disentangle. Japanese collective identity was largely constructed during the eighteenth century in various forms whose contours and features we would find familiar today, yet part of the construction was based on the assumption that despite individual differences, Japanese people are all equally Japanese. That is to say, the positing of Japaneseness in no way effaced early modern notions of individual difference, and in this respect nativist constructions of identity structurally resembled the most prominent Neo-Confucian assumptions regarding identity, as we observe later in this chapter. The notion of being equally Japanese was also buttressed by the sense of a cultural and historical patrimony that emerges during roughly the first half of the Tokugawa period, i.e., a sense of being part of a people who are equally heirs to a history, a canon of classics, and an agglomeration of famous sites, foods, mores, and so on. Despite an elite samurai background, Fukuzawa Yukichi was probably the most prominent early Meiji champion of the metaphysical concept of equality, as famously demonstrated in the opening words of his 1872 Gakumon no susume (学問のすすめ An Encouragement of Learning): “Heaven (ten 天), it is said, does not create one person above or below another. This signifies that when we are born from heaven we are all equal (bannin wa bannin minna onaji 万人は万人皆同じ) and there is no innate distinction

22  Identity and Orientation between high and low” (Dilworth 2012: 3; Komuro and Nishikawa 2002: 6). Now compare Fukuzawa’s words with the opening words of the 1776 Declaration of Independence attributed to Thomas Jefferson regarding the “self-evident” truth that “all men are created equal,” and “are endowed by their Creator” with “unalienable Rights.” The comparison I am drawing between Fukuzawa’s heaven and Jefferson’s Creator is apt, since one observes just a few pages later in Fukuzawa’s same work that: the birth of man is the work of nature (ten no shikarashimuru tokoro nite 天の然らしむる所にて) and not the power of man. . . . [E]ach person should fulfill his own duty (ono ono sono shokubun wo tsukushite職分を尽くし) without infringing upon others. For they are species who share the same heaven (moto dōrui no ningen ni shite, tomo ni itten o tomo ni shiもと同類の人間にして, 共に一天を与にし) and are creatures between the same heaven and earth . . . . Equality means equality in essential human rights (kenri tsūgi no hitoshiki 権利 通義の等しき), even though in external conditions there may be extreme differences between rich and poor, strong and weak, intelligent and stupid persons. (Dilworth 2012: 12–13; Komuro and Nishikawa 2002: 18) Fukuzawa’s challenge in the first years of Meiji was to find intelligible ways to communicate what for many were substantially new concepts, and this often required him to use existing vocabulary in novel ways. The Confucian concept of heaven was indeed that of a creative impartial force, but it was not the same as either the Judeo-Christian or the deistic concept of a creator God. Nonetheless, while the concepts of equality and rights as Fukuzawa articulated them were generally new to the masses, they were by no means as alien and novel as one might assume. Patrimony—As mentioned, it was during the eighteenth century that new and in many ways the first well-developed understandings of Japaneseness emerge, in particular as a consequence of the activities of the nativist Kokugaku (国学) schools of Kamo no Mabuchi and Motoori Norinaga, but their constructions built crucially on the preceding century’s unprecedented interest in things Japanese, and its implications for what it meant to be Japanese and thereby an heir to a history and culture. This interest in history was a consequence of the ontological shift to Confucianism, which from the outset exhibited a historically minded concern with a correct understanding of the past, and this helps us to appreciate why there were more works written on Japanese history during the seventeenth century than in all of Japanese history before 1600. Within this cornucopia of seventeenth-century historical writing one finds explicit confidence in and gratitude for the stability of the Bakuhan state, and this confidence diffused first into popular culture and from there into popular consciousness.

Identity and Orientation  23 Writing in 1689, the writer of fiction Ihara Saikaku (井原西鶴 1642–93) opined: “Two million three hundred and thirty-six thousand two hundred and eighty-three years have passed since the time of the Sun Goddess Amaterasu, and for all these years our country has enjoyed great prosperity. But even more impressive is the way the pine tree that symbolizes our majesty’s rule goes on and on into the future” (Nosco 1980: 76). The hyperbole is as unmistakable today as it was then, but so too is the message of continuity and uninterrupted blessing. Confucian historical mindedness also contributed to an autobiographical impulse, which can be understood as the history of an individual self as opposed to the history of one’s collective. In China the history of autobiography is much older than in Japan, with the seventeenth century or late Ming being a Golden Age for the genre (Wu 1990: 235). In Japan, by contrast, it is generally acknowledged that if one discounts literary diaries, the first autobiography written in Japanese is Arai Hakuseki’s (新井白石 1657–1725) Oritaku shiba no ki (折たく柴の記 Told Round a Brushwood Fire), which dates from about 1716 (Ackroyd 1979: 17). Hakuseki was the Confucian mentor and policy advisor to the Sixth Tokugawa Shogun Ienobu (家宣 1662–1712, r. 1709–12), as well as de facto guardian to Ienobu’s successor, the sickly child Tokugawa Ietsugu (家継 1709–16, r. 1713–16), who died at the age of seven. A man of remarkably broad learning and a classical Confucian affiliated to no single school, Hakuseki was the most brilliant historian of his age. His many works included Tokushi yoron (読史余論 Lessons from Reading History, 1712) and Koshitsū (古史通 On Ancient History, 1716), both pathbreakers in Japanese historiography. Hakuseki’s autobiography and historical writings are all the more important for our concern with individuality when one considers that, in the words of Karl J. Weintraub, “It is only since 1800 [that] Western Man placed a premium on autobiography,” and Hakuseki’s achievement would thus seem to validate Weintraub’s thesis that “the autobiographical genre took on its full dimension and richness when Western Man acquired a thoroughly historical understanding of his existence” (1975: 821). The Tokugawa period construction of a canon of Japanese classics formed an important cultural counterpart to the historical patrimony of a collectively shared past. Here too, Confucian inspiration was prominent, since from its earliest inception Confucianism turned to literary and poetic sources as texts that encoded an ancient morality and were thus necessary components of a gentleman’s training. Epigraphy, textual criticism, exegesis, commentary, the construction of academic curricula, historical orthography (rekishiteki kanazukai 　歴史的仮名遣), authoritative antiquarianism with a focus on the correction of anachronism (yūsoku kojitsu 有職故実), construction of quasi-scriptural canons, and of course the construction of a canon of literary classics to accompany the already well-established canon of poetic classics became the stock-in-trade of Edo-period nativist scholars and their academic scholarship.

24  Identity and Orientation For example, regarding textual criticism and epigraphy, when Tokugawa Mitsukuni (徳川光圀 1628–1701) assigned two scholars in the employ of his domain to begin the preparation of a new commentary on the eighthcentury Man’yōshū (万葉集) poetry anthology, their first task was to arrive at an authoritative edition by comparing the four best extant manuscripts. Regarding exegesis and commentary, it is universally agreed that Kamo no Mabuchi’s and Motoori Norinaga’s crowning achievements were their commentaries on and philological analyses of the Man’yōshū and mythohistorical Kojiki (古事記 712), respectively. Fundamental to the private academies established by Keichū (契沖 1640–1701), Kada no Azumamaro (荷 田春満 1669–1736), Kamo no Mabuchi and Motoori Norinaga were the study of historical orthography, and a curriculum based on their new canon of prose “classics” including Tale of Ise, Tale of Genji, Pillow Book of Sei Shōnagon, and Essays in Idleness, the last of which became the single most reprinted classic of the Tokugawa period. Some of the classics acquired scriptural or quasi-scriptural status in the oeuvre of leading nativists: Mabuchi regarded poetic composition in imitation of the ancient Man’yōshū style to be essential for recapturing what he believed to be virtues of the ancient past; and Norinaga patterned his own writing on the style of Genji, eschewing extensive use of Chinese characters. Accompanying the seventeenth-century interest in Japan’s past was a concern with authoritative antiquarianism, and both Kada no Azumamaro and his adopted son Kada Arimaro (荷田在 満 1706–51) used their encyclopedic knowledge of antiquarian matters and mastery of ancient historical classics, especially the Nihon shoki (日本書紀 720), to ingratiate themselves and their academic projects to Daimyo and other military elites in Edo. And, in terms of the construction of scriptural and quasi-scriptural canons, Mabuchi exalted the Man’yōshū as the uniquely appropriate medium for reentry into the pre-Confucian past and recapture of its virtues; and Norinaga went well beyond even this by elevating the Kojiki to be the authoritative text—the True Book or makoto no fumi—on Japan’s mythological divine age and most ancient past. Indeed, such Tokugawa activities were fundamental to Meiji and subsequent canon formation in Japan.2 Related to the seventeenth-century explosion of historical writing, canon formation, and emergence of a sense of the collective past are Matsuo Bashō’s (松尾芭蕉 1644–94) references to past times and present places in his masterful travel diary and subsequent classic Narrow Road to Oku (Oku no hosomichi 奥の細道) completed in 1694 and first published in 1702. Bashō vicariously transported his readers to historically significant sites such as the once-magnificent Fujiwara stronghold at Hiraizumi, as well as to exemplary sites of natural beauty like the islands of Matsushima, as in the following description: Much praise had already been lavished on the wonders of the islands of Matsushima. Yet if further praise is possible, I would like to say that here is the most beautiful spot in the whole country of Japan, and that

Identity and Orientation  25 the beauty of these islands is not in the least inferior to the beauty of Lake Dōtei or Lake Seiko in China. (Matsuo 1966: 115) Bashō’s travel diaries made sites like these accessible to readers throughout Japan through a remapping of the cultural landscape (Shirane 1998: 231), and contributed to the subsequent development of a robust culture of travel that Laura Nenzi has styled a “cartography of self-assertion on the part of the individual” (2008: 2). But for our purposes, the greatest significance of Bashō’s travel diaries was their role as a medium for experiencing historical and natural sites as yet another dimension of the patrimony one inherits simply and equally by virtue of being Japanese. Note the comparison with China in the passage from Bashō just quoted above. For over a thousand years by 1690, China had been the principal point of comparison for Japan, but China the reality was being displaced by China the metaphor for things grandiose or exceptional decades after any Japanese person had left the country and actually visited China. Compare Bashō’s metaphorical use of China with the following contemporaneous description by Ihara Saikaku of an exceptionally honest, humble salt vendor: “He once found a wallet with some money in it and actually returned it to its rightful owner! I’ll wager you never heard of someone else doing that in or out of the Capital. Why you wouldn’t even find someone like that in all of China” (Nosco 1980: 110, emphasis added). A century after Bashō and Saikaku, the frame of comparison for Japan’s Other would expand once again in works like Norinaga’s Tamakushige (玉くしげ), published in 1789, to include Europe, the memory of which had receded under the proscription of writings in European languages and then returned after the 1720s as the prohibitions relaxed; and of course all of this contributed to an expanded geographic orientation and spatial consciousness. Orientation—Closely related to this construction of a sense of patrimony and in many ways the superstructure for the construction of identity was the positing of orientation—temporal, geographical, and social—as individuals acquired more sophisticated understandings of their place in a world beyond the horizons of their personal experience, their position in time relative to past and future, and their status in the minutely subdivided matrix of Tokugawa society. And here too, Confucianism played an important role. Historical writings contributed to the temporal orientation that included an appreciation of the present age and its characteristics known as kinsei (近 世 “recent time”), as well as to a nostalgic false memory of an idealized time and place to which we will turn later in this chapter. There was, however, little millenarian or future-oriented about Tokugawa social thought until the last decades of the period when the need to rescue the times (yonaoshi 世直し) became increasingly apparent, despite one of the hallmarks of Edo period historiography being that the way things are is the way it was assumed they would remain through the imaginable future.

26  Identity and Orientation Spatially, as demonstrated repeatedly in early modern Japanese maps of Japan, Japan’s territory included the main islands of Honshu, Kyushu, and Shikoku, as well as the many immediately proximate small islands, but not the near-periphery of the Ryukyu Islands or Hokkaido (Oda 1974; Kawamura 2010). This Japan also had a symbolic center located at Nihonbashi (日本橋), “The Japan Bridge” in Edo, from which all distances in Japan were measured, and which during the Edo period was the terminus of the Tōkaidō. Japan was also known by any number of names by 1690—Nihon, Dai Nihon (Great Japan), and Chūchō (中朝 Central Kingdom), as well as more traditional poetic names like Wa or Yamato (大和). But for the 80 percent of Japanese who were agriculturalists, the most proximate forms of spatial orientation in Genroku times would have been village, Daimyo domain, and province. A century later this realm—distinguished variously by its food, its polity, its deities, its location, its history, and its culture—had become “our country” (wagakuni わが国), or simply the “honorable country” (mikuni 御国), and thereby an eminently more collective and collectivized thing (Kobayashi Toshio 2010). The people who lived in this land were uniquely blessed. According to Kamo no Mabuchi’s idealization, this blessing came by virtue of their access to the primordial Elysian rhythms of heaven and earth, something to which others like Chinese Daoists and those uncontaminated by Confucian rationalism and ethical teachings also had theoretical access. According to Motoori Norinaga, this blessing was a narrower prerogative of being Japanese and having those True Hearts that linked Japanese people both physically and metaphysically ultimately to the sun itself. As noted, by the late eighteenth century, the Other against which Norinaga framed his Japan and Japanese had expanded far beyond Japan and even East Asia, so that according to Norinaga the world as a whole owed a debt of gratitude to Japan as its original ancestral country, and to the sun itself which shines its radiance upon Japanese and non-Japanese alike. In terms of societal orientation, throughout the Tokugawa period, the Bakufu used Buddhist temples as local registries for births, deaths, marriages, divorces, and denominational affiliation, making everyone in Japan nominally and legally Buddhist, but it is Confucianism that again looms large in the construction of the Tokugawa model of social order and orientation. Confucianism placed priority on households, which were understood to be the building blocks of society, as well as the laboratories in which growth in goodness takes its first steps. Thus, the emphasis on households had profound implications for one’s understanding of the polity as well as one’s identity as forged through domestic relationships. The locus classicus for this understanding of society is found in one of Confucianism’s core texts, the Great Learning (Jpn. Daigaku, Chin. Daxue 大 学), where the author explains that ancient sage rulers, wishing to order their states, first brought order to households. Extending this principle to

Identity and Orientation  27 jurisprudence, the Tokugawa Bakufu made households in groups of five or ten mutually responsible for each other’s surveillance, financial obligations, obedience to law, and submission to punishment in the so-called Five-household and Ten-household (goningumi 五人組, jūningumi 十人組 み) systems. Under the influence of Confucianism, an essentially organic (organismlike) understanding of society emerges, whereby the whole may be understood to be functioning well when each of its constituent parts is doing so. Each constituent part, in turn, was comprised of persons grouped according to their status, or mibun (身分). Commoners, who formed over 90 percent of the population, were organized into large classes of agriculturalists, artisans, and merchants, and each of these large groupings was itself divided minutely into endlessly refined subdivisions, with guilds (za 座) and villages adding additional levels of organizational and taxonomic precision. As significant as this mosaic of class, vocational, territorial, and social divisions was to social orientation, it is important to note that it was by no means static and was more rigidly fixed at the start of the Tokugawa period than toward its end. The greatest hereditary division was that between samurai and non-samurai commoners, though by the Edo period’s end it was possible for commoners with the right connections to purchase samurai status. The explanation for this stems from the fact that samurai faced a variety of financial strictures that were, ironically, related to their generally stable incomes, which tended to conflict with their inflated aspirations for the material trappings of their elevated status and their at times perilous pursuit of commodified pleasure. If in pursuit of these trappings or pleasures a samurai pawned or sold what he could to a merchant-class broker or collector—his presumed social inferior—something of an inversion took place, whereby the one who is ordinarily the benefactor has become the beneficiary. Other examples of such social inversion occurred whenever the specialized mortuary services of outcastes were called upon by those who were members of the conventional four classes of samurai, agriculturalists, artisans, and merchants (shinōkōshō 士農工商), or when samurai sought to bask in the celebrity of well-known entertainers, or when regardless of class the wealthy sought the prognostications of reputed diviners who fell outside the four-class system. A vivid example of the inversion of samurai-to-merchant status in practice can be observed in a letter written in 1750 by Tani Tannai (谷丹内 1729–97), a samurai who had successfully made the transition to scholar and teacher, but who was unsuccessful in the management of his growing household’s expenses while his income remained more or less stable. The letter is addressed to Saitaniya Hachirōbei Naomasu (才谷屋八郎兵衛直益), one of Tannai’s own students and a merchant moneylender who was thus Tannai’s social inferior as well as his pupil. Note that in the following passage, Tani Tannai was already financially indebted to his student at the time of his writing:

28  Identity and Orientation I am writing this letter to seek your advice. My household has benefited from your assistance for many years and thus somehow we have managed to get by. Our gratitude is such that I know I need not express it here. As you know, however, our expenses have gone up in recent years, forcing us to use the following year’s income in advance. If this state of affairs continues, the future looks bleak—and I believe that you will suffer loss as well. . . . All of this is clear to me. Somehow we must make do with our present yearly income. . . . I request that you prepare a monthly budget for my consideration. Both my mother and wife are in agreement with me about all of this. Once you have done this, I will know what I can spend in one year and will not ask you for more money. If I do, please do not lend it to me. Should there be particularly unforeseen circumstances, however, then a decision should be made on a case by case basis. (Vaporis 2000: 212) The language is piteous and not what one might expect from a seemingly successful mid-Tokugawa samurai-instructor. Tani repeatedly places himself in the role of supplicant (“I seek your advice”; my “gratitude is such”), which of course he is, though he is also not beyond a bit of a threat (“I believe that you will suffer loss as well”) when he reminds his student of the financial loss that will devolve if he is unable to repay. He feels the need to confirm his mother’s and wife’s approval—samurai women customarily managed their household’s finances—and concludes with the universally familiar promise that he will never ask to borrow money again, while perhaps prudently allowing that “a decision should be made on a case by case basis” if “particularly unforeseen circumstances” arise. Remarkably, Saitaniya Naomasu refused his teacher’s request, privileging the principles of his merchant moneylender’s vocation over those of his academic avocation. Writing several decades later in 1816, an Edo-based samurai opined, “Profit comes first and duty comes last. It is as though the differences between the four classes of people and between high and low no longer exist” (Teeuwen et al. 2014: 42). And, writing approximately a year later, c. 1817, Tadano Makuzu observed that while “people who make their living by engaging in trade may appear gentle, in their innermost being, they are heartless [and] take secret delight in the warriors’ descent into poverty” (Tadano 2001: 179). Both the unnamed samurai author and Tadano Makuzu were astute observers, as samurai status had become a commodity that could be purchased or sold, and, like any commodity, the more easily it became available, the more its value dropped. In this volume we are more concerned with non-samurai like Saitaniya than samurai like Tani, but it is important to realize that the boundaries between the two were not always clear. In eighteenth-century England, as in eighteenth-century Japan, a different sort of man was emerging out of the new world of commerce and finance.

Identity and Orientation  29 Known in England as tradesmen, these were individuals who learned how to acquire gentility through trade, and the previously hereditary status of a gentleman through a liberal education. This was so because if in England trade could produce wealth, and a liberal education could produce the equivalent of breeding, then there were new opportunities away from the battlefield for one to advance socially. A similar process was underway, as we have seen, in Japan, where the urban commoners known as chōnin (町人) or townsmen began similarly to acquire not just literacy but the trappings of elite education in the refined arts and pursuits of an earlier age. Learning of a sort that once required independent wealth or powerful patronage became commodified from the Genroku years on, when, improbably, Confucian learning took its place alongside other forms of popular culture in self-sustaining private academies. Funded by students’ tuition, these enterprises made it possible for first samurai and later commoners to make a living through the provision of instruction, while also contributing to a social transformation, one which was less extreme in Japan than its counterpart in contemporary England but nonetheless of a type. Reputation and making a name for oneself—At the very start of the Tokugawa period, it was not commoners but rather samurai who were most concerned with reputation, honor, status, and the preservation of face. During the Sengoku or Warring States period3 the culture of warfare provided the most obvious opportunity for personal advancement, and the boundary between peasant agriculturalist and soldier-warrior was porous. This meant that that when his martial services were needed, a farmer with his own weapons and armor could transition quickly into a mobilized fighter, and just as quickly transition back to his fields upon a battle’s conclusion. Success in combat was rewarded materially and with promotion through the military ranks. It was also the major way in which one could make a name for oneself and enrich one’s household in turbulent times. This changed when Toyotomi Hideyoshi (豊臣秀吉 d. 1598) conducted his celebrated “sword hunt” in 1588. Hideyoshi required all who possessed “swords, bows, spears, muskets or any other form of weapon” either to relinquish them if they wished to retain their lands and civil occupations, or to relinquish their lands and occupations if they wished to retain their swords and weapons and thereby embrace samurai status (Berry 1982: 102). The transition to the Pax Tokugawa was bumpy. After Hideyoshi’s death in 1598 and Tokugawa Ieyasu’s (徳川家康 1543–1616) victory at Sekigahara in 1600, the Tokugawa held the advantage, but in 1614 disgruntled masterless samurai (rōnin) began joining samurai loyalists to Hideyoshi’s son Hideyori (秀頼 b. 1593) inside Osaka Castle for their own final futile challenge to Japan’s new masters. Englishman Richard Cocks (1566–1624) arrived in Japan in 1613, fully thirteen years after Sekigahara and a decade after Ieyasu became Shogun, to establish and manage the British East India Company’s station in Japan. In 1616 he described the carnage of his first three years in Japan as follows:

30  Identity and Orientation Also we have had great troubles and wars in Japan since our arrival. . . two great cities being burned to the ground, each of them being almost as big as London and not one house left standing, the one called Osaka and the other Sakai; and, as it is reported, above 300,000 men have lost their lives on the one part or the other. (in Vaporis 2012: 63) Cocks overstates the damage to Osaka and totally misstates the destruction of Sakai, but even allowing for this, his description shows that samuraito-samurai violence did not suddenly end with either the Battle of Sekigahara in 1600 or Ieyasu’s acceptance of the title of Shogun and the attendant establishment of the Bakufu in 1603. Hideyoshi’s professionalization of the samurai class presented the most serious social problem of the Tokugawa period’s first decades, when as the level of violence declined, the demand decreased for the samurai’s martial services, resulting in financial distress for tens of thousands of those trained to be professional killers. After the fall of Osaka Castle in 1615, other rōnin, seeing their own destinies unfolding, rallied to the cause of disgruntled villagers in Shimabara whose rebellion in 1637–38 was the last significant military challenge to Tokugawa authority until Ōshio Heihachirō’s (大塩平 八郎 1793–1837) rebellion of 1837. Many military men had to change their ways in times of peace, but the fortunate ones were those who were able to retain their samurai status. Less so were those who were released from service to a specific lord and were ultimately unable to enter into the service of another. Some of these rōnin descended into banditry, others to pawning their swords and armor, not, like Tani Tannai, as a consequence of their inability to moderate their spending, but owing entirely to circumstances beyond their control and simply in order to feed themselves and their families. Many of those fortunate ones who retained their status were nonetheless civilianized, finding service within domainal bureaucracies or opportunities within the world of cultural pursuits. Resourceful samurai thus found ways to survive in radically changing times. How samurai were able to make names for themselves in times of peace is the subject of Eiko Ikegami’s The Taming of the Samurai, in which she argues that samurai were able “to construct a resilient sense of individuality through an explicit sensitizing of a socially embedded self” with the critical ingredient in this construction being the element of samurai honor (1995: 5). During the Tokugawa period when their violence was no longer acceptable outside service to the Bakuhan state, samurai developed a concern with their individual as well as collective reputations, and these reputations were fundamental to an individual samurai’s sense of self-esteem and personal dignity (ibid: 6). However, early modern samurai possessed more than specific forms of knowledge or stipend and became as well known in society

Identity and Orientation  31 for their dignity and stature as for their martial accomplishments. It was precisely this sense of self-esteem and personal dignity that disseminated downwards from samurai to commoner classes and outwards from urban to suburban settings. Like honor or status, individuality is inevitably a social concept. In much the same way that a samurai’s value or worth was inseparable from his reputation, a non-samurai commoner man’s or woman’s reputation had become the measure of their own worth. Note that this followed on the heels of early modern Japan’s most rapid period of urbanization, since the value of reputation correlates in this case with the possibility as well as the problem of anonymity. In other words, making a name for oneself was only a concern either when one did not have a name or when one was dissatisfied with the name one had. As in early modern England, this also followed a significant increase in the number of transactions that became part of everyday life, and the attendant complexity of individual and household life. Human nature and the construction of Japanese identity—Patrimony, orientation, and reputation were all key ingredients in the construction of individuality, but the remaining missing ingredient was a developed understanding of selfhood and human nature in the sense of disposition. During the seventeenth century, Neo-Confucianism went beyond the sociopolitical role described earlier by winning the hearts and minds of leading intellectuals as well as religious leaders within the Shinto community, which initially was a natural consequence of Confucianism’s growing acceptance, influence, and prestige at the level of the Bakufu as well as domain. From the time of its Daimyo, Tokugawa Mitsukuni, Mito (水戸) Domain became the paradigmatic Confucian realm, dedicating a third of its annual revenue to scholarly pursuits like the encyclopedic Dai-Nihonshi project (大日 本史 History of Great Japan). Leading authorities on Confucianism and its updated Neo-Confucian variations—men like Kumazawa Banzan (熊 沢蕃山 1619–91), who served Ikeda Mitsumasa (池田光政 1609–82) in Okayama, and Yamazaki Ansai (山崎闇斎 1619–82), who served Hoshina Masayuki (保科正之 1611–73) in Aizu—enjoyed official appointments in major domains. At the level of the Bakufu, first Shogun Tokugawa Ieyasu’s respect for Confucianism was demonstrated by the increasing presence in his administration of Hayashi Razan (林羅山 1583–1657), whose influence, facilitated by a long career, grew even stronger during the regimes of the following two Shoguns. During the reign of the fourth Shogun, Tokugawa Ietsuna (家綱 1641–80, r. 1651–80), Confucian ritual systems were instituted at the level of the Bakufu Court, and the fifth Shogun, Tokugawa Tsunayoshi (徳川綱 吉 1646–1709), aspired somewhat farcically to the role of a self-styled Confucian monarch, lecturing Daimyo on the Great Learning, confirming the Hayashi family as hereditary authorities on Confucian matters, and relocating their school to nearby Yushima (湯島). And Arai Hakuseki, mentor to

32  Identity and Orientation the sixth and seventh Shoguns, even tried unsuccessfully to transform the position of Shogun from that of military hegemon (Taikun 大君) to national monarch, or Kokuō (国王) (Tien 2012: 235–36). The prestige of Neo-Confucianism in intellectual arenas is further evidenced by the fact that leading mid-seventeenth-century Shinto theologians like Yoshikawa Koretaru (吉川惟足 1616–94) and Watarai Nobuyoshi (度 会延佳 1615–90) began to disentangle Shinto from the Buddhism which had for centuries provided much of the syncretic superstructure for belief in kami, and to replace the Buddhist elements with Neo-Confucian ones. Indeed, it can be said that every leading seventeenth-century Japanese Confucian demonstrated an interest in Shinto (Nosco 1996a). At the more intimate ceremonial level and extending outwards from rulers to intellectuals, one finds evidence of Confucian ritual in funerary and mourning practices, in Confucian household altars, and even in the study and performance of Confucian ritual music (Tien 2012: 238–39; Kojima 2013). Orthodox Neo-Confucianism offered an altogether new understanding of human nature, positing that all of humanity shared a common and originally good nature (honzen no sei 本然の性), which at least in theory provided a universal potential for sagehood. That people fell short of the mark of perfect goodness was owing to their inability to project this original nature outwards in their relationships. Orthodox Neo-Confucianism also explained that all persons had a physical nature (kishitsu no sei 気質 之性) that was uniquely their own and contained imperfections that inhibited perfect relationships and behavior. The Neo-Confucian good news was that one could learn to overcome these imperfections through selfcultivation, which included learning how to tranquilize the inherent turbulence of the physical nature and thus to harmonize oneself with the Way of Heaven. Perhaps the greatest difference with the pre-Tokugawa Buddhist understanding of humanity was Neo-Confucianism’s emphasis on human development through self-cultivation, something that medieval Buddhism would have regarded as almost preposterous and precariously selfish. We return to this new emphasis on self-cultivation and personal development later in this volume. The Neo-Confucian understanding of a bifurcated dual nature provided a metaphysical foundation for the subsequent development of individuality and collective identity within an initially Confucian context. Orthodox Neo-Confucians like Hayashi Razan and Yamazaki Ansai worked within this structure, but so too, though to a lesser degree, did such heterodox Confucians as Kumazawa Banzan, Yamaga Sokō (山鹿素行 1622–85), Itō Jinsai (伊藤 仁斎 1627–1705), and even Ogyū Sorai (荻生 徂徠 1666– 1728), who all accepted that humanity’s intrinsic pluralism trumped the horizontal equality rooted in the ontological link between human nature and heaven.4 Clearly, if we all equally share a common human nature, we are part of a common collective humanity. At the same time, if our specific physical natures, dispositions, destinies, and by extension our personal

Identity and Orientation  33 differences are infinitely variegated, therein lies the foundation for an ethical acceptance of individuality and individual difference. After 1700 Japanese studies followed the Confucian lead in establishing successful private academies where knowledge of Japanese history, prose and poetic classics, Shinto theology, antiquarian esoterica, and an idealized fictional past were purveyed to tuition-paying students eager to learn a subject that was at once both old and new. During the 1720s and 1730s, Kada no Azumamaro tried with only limited success to establish such a nativist academy on the grounds of the Inari Shrine (稲荷) in Fushimi (伏見), of which his family were hereditary wardens. During the 1740s, Azumamaro’s adopted son and protégé Kada Arimaro carried on his late father’s efforts in Edo to champion Japanese studies, but it was not until the highly successful private academies and writings of Kamo no Mabuchi and Motoori Norinaga that one finds well-developed competing visions of Japaneseness, i.e., Japanese collective identity. Regarding poetry as the single most transparent medium for the expression of authentic human emotion, Kamo no Mabuchi looked to Japan’s most ancient extant anthology of verse, the eighth-century Man’yōshū, for insight into what he believed constituted a pre-Confucian and pre-Buddhist Japanese character or spirit. Writing in 1760, Mabuchi concluded from his exploration of ancient Japan that: in revering the august and awe-inspiring emperor, one thinks of spreading order throughout the realm. By so thinking, one especially reveres those imperial reigns of the ancient past. From this reverence of the past, one proceeds to examine ancient writings, and when one reads them, one thinks of unraveling the words and spirit (kokoro 心) of the past. From this one moves directly to reciting ancient poetry, and to do so one turns to the Man’yōshū. Now one learns the words and spirit of the past, and next one learns of the sincerity (makoto 真), directness, vitality, manliness (ooshikushite 雄雄しくし、), and elegance of the hearts (kokoro) of ancient men. It is precisely by learning these things that one’s understanding of the ancient past becomes clear. (Man’yō kō 万葉考, quoted in Nosco 1990: 123) As already noted, the construction of identity, whether individual or collective, is always facilitated by the positing of an Other—something or someone against which to juxtapose oneself and one’s group—and for Mabuchi this Other was Chinese rationalism and morality as represented by Confucianism and Buddhism. Ancient Japan, according to Mabuchi, was governed well, but the sincerity and directness of ancient people— virtues that Mabuchi claimed as inherently Japanese—were “suddenly” changed as soon as these “convincing theories” were introduced. The prosperity that the country had enjoyed since high antiquity was replaced

34  Identity and Orientation with “chaos,” and instead of improving conduct, Confucianism just made people “crafty” (Kokui kō 国意考 quoted ibid: 147). The good news, according to Mabuchi, was that the ancient arcadia and its virtues are recoverable, and the key to this was to master the verses of the Man’yōshū and to take their spirit as one’s own. This, in turn, will reanimate the emotional legacy bequeathed by one’s ancient forebears, and restore one’s original Japanese character. The social stability of Mabuchi’s arcadia was premised not on homogeneity or docility but rather on transparency and mutual understanding. The inevitable disputes that would arise do not, he claimed, fester or grow because of the fundamental straightforwardness and emotional clarity that attend possession of True Hearts. Collective identity in Mabuchi’s writings is thus complemented by an appreciation of individual difference or individuality, perhaps because Mabuchi himself was a well-known antiquarian eccentric. As described by one of his students, Katō Chikage (加藤千蔭 1735–1808), he was “very different in appearance from ordinary men” and wore antiquarian clothing, ate off of antique plates, and even spoke in the Man’yō language of a thousand years before his time (quoted in Satow 1927: 175). Mabuchi’s eccentricity in fact was sufficient to earn him inclusion some twenty-three years after his death in Ban Kōkei’s (伴 蒿蹊 1733–1806) “Eccentrics of Our Times” (Kinsei kijinden 近世奇人伝).5 To some extent Mabuchi’s representation of the ancient past was constrained by his choice of a poetry anthology as his source text, but not so Motoori Norinaga, for whom the ultimate authority on the ancient past was not the Man’yōshū but the slightly older Kojiki or Record of Ancient Matters, Japan’s oldest extant mytho-history, dating from 712. Norinaga argued that it was a prerogative of being Japanese that one possesses a True Heart or magokoro, which would ordinarily be written with the characters 真心, but which Norinaga preferred writing in one of the kana syllabaries and without using Chinese characters. All Japanese equally possess this True Heart, which is the physical link binding those born in Japan to the kami, and ultimately through the royal family to the solar deity Amaterasu, and thus to the sun itself. However, instead of this element of equality effacing individual Japanese identity, Norinaga’s understanding of the infinite diversity of the 8,000,000 (yaoyorozu 八百 万) kami translated into an appreciation of human diversity, as in the following from 1780: The True Heart is that heart with which one is born by virtue of the Musubi gods. Within this concept of the True Heart are included wise hearts and clumsy ones, good ones and bad ones, and every possible variation thereon, since people in this world are not all the same. Thus, even the gods of the divine age were some good and some bad, for they all behaved in accordance with their individual True Hearts. (Norinaga’s Kuzubana, quoted in Nosco 1990: 210)

Identity and Orientation  35 Mabuchi believed in a pre-moral state of grace in which all humans—even Chinese—enjoy at birth hearts that are uncorrupted by Buddhist moralism or Confucian rationalism, and it is fundamentally their exposure to these destabilizing doctrines that generates a kind of craftiness (さかしら) and scheming. Ogyū Sorai’s student Dazai Shundai (太宰 春台 1680–1747) critiqued ancient Japanese society as untutored in morality on the grounds that the ancient Japanese language lacked a vocabulary for expressing ethical concepts. Mabuchi countered Shundai’s claims with the assertion that it was evidence of a country’s moral lassitude if it needed to invent ethical teachings, and that the absence of such teachings in ancient Japan was evidence of its intrinsic and natural superiority. Mabuchi argued that the effect of introducing Buddhist and moral teachings was akin to giving a healthy patient a dose of too-strong medicine that has the ironic effect of making the person ill instead of well. However, note that for both Kamo no Mabuchi and Motoori Norinaga, animation of one’s primordial Japaneseness did not necessarily imply ethical perfection, as it did for the Neo-Confucians, who believed in moral perfection through restoration of one’s originally good nature. In the case of Mabuchi, resurrection of an authentically Japanese repressed emotional legacy consistent with the very rhythms of heaven and earth restored a broader societal stability, since it mitigated contention through emotional transparency. Accordingly, if one were to use the verses of the Man’yōshū as a medium to reenter the ancient arcadia and thereby to resurrect its virtues, the principal characteristic of the new/ancient persona would not be ethical perfection but rather a kind of social harmony with misdemeanors devoid of felonious intent. In terms of ethics, this implies that a degree of mischief is both natural and inevitable. Similarly for Norinaga the diversity of individual True Hearts meant that a measure of contention was inevitable, but since each True Heart was entirely consistent with and determined by divine will, it was not something worthy of either concern or fear. If human dispositions are as variegated as the infinite variety of kami, some good and some bad and every variation in between, and if these kami are ultimately in control of all human behavior, then what is to stop one from saying a kind of Japanese exculpatory equivalent to what in a Judeo-Christian context would be “the devil made me do it”? Shimizu Masaaki sees this fundamentally as an issue of truth/sincerity (seijitsu 誠実) vs. lies/falsity (kyogi 虚偽). Please recall Takeuchi Seiichi’s aforementioned linguistic argument regarding the dual character of the Kanji for “self,” 自, which can be pronounced either onozukara or mizukara (おのずから vs. みずから), respectively meaning either (or both) “of itself” and “by oneself.” Shimizu regards this as inhibiting any doctrine of individual responsibility (Shimizu 2005: 155–60; Takeuchi 2010: 5–28) and argues that in this respect, one can observe in nativist constructions a disquieting gap (間) between individuality and individual responsibility of a

36  Identity and Orientation sort that does not have an analogue in the Confucianism with which nativism otherwise shared so much in common. Similarly, though two centuries earlier, from her more eclectic position informed by the writings of both Mabuchi and Norinaga but also with knowledge of traditional Confucian perspectives, Tadano Makuzu around 1817 opined that “people can be led astray because a single heart contains both good and evil” (adapted from Tadano 2001: 181). Note too that there were fundamental differences between Mabuchi’s and Norinaga’s depictions of the characteristics of idealized Japaneseness. Mabuchi proposed to recapture the core virtues and purity of a pre-Nara spirit, i.e., a spirit that predated the Nara period (710–84) and the Sinification that Mabuchi so deplored, and one that included masculinity, simplicity, and natural spontaneity (自然, read onozukara). Norinaga, by contrast, extolled the high Heian period (c. 950–1050), and the feminine elegance and refinement (miyabiyaka 雅やか) that he felt this age epitomized. Furthering the distinction with Mabuchi, for whom spontaneity and naturalness were the supreme desiderata, Norinaga also praised sophistication (aya あや) and conscious mastery of technique (waza 技), which would have been anathema to Mabuchi’s naturalism. It is an ironic feature of idealized constructions that they are inversely accurate indicators of sources of dissatisfaction or concern. In other words, if one wishes to know another’s—or one’s own, for that matter—specific sources of dissatisfaction, identify the individual’s idealized circumstances and then invert them. Thus, for Kamo no Mabuchi, the interest in straightforwardness was likely connected to the fact that during nearly the entirety of his fourteen-year service to Tayasu Munetake (田安宗武 1716–71), the regnant Shogun was Munetake’s elder brother Tokugawa Ieshige (徳川 家 重 1712–61, r. 1745–60), whose stammering rendered his speech so unintelligible that the reins of government were largely in the hands of his notoriously corrupt Chamberlain Ōoka Tadamitsu (大岡忠光 1709–60). The interest in food, as well as the trope of the excellence of Japan’s rice and the abundance of its foods that one finds in the writings of Motoori Norinaga and subsequent nativists, would have been similarly rooted in their experience of three horrific famines of 1732–33, the mid-1780s, and the mid-1830s. Indeed, compare Norinaga’s perspectives on food with Tadano Makuzu’s observation in Hitori kangae that “owing to Japan’s favorable climate in all four seasons, the five grains grow well, and because the sea is nearby, there is plenty of salt and a variety of fish. Since there is no shortage of food, people tend to spend their lives enjoying singing and dancing” (Tadano 2001: 174). One wonders how the memory of the Tenmei famine of 1783–84 could have receded so quickly for Makuzu, who would have been about 20 at the time.6 Makuzu was nothing if not resilient, since she wrote in the same work that “Japan is a country in which. . . the seasons change smoothly. . . the five grains ripen in abundance. . . [and] because there is plenty to eat, people have a cheerful outlook” (ibid: 184–5).

Identity and Orientation  37 To review, collective identity and individual identity develop in tandem during the Tokugawa period. Collective identity takes various forms: locale and household remain at the forefront, but new—and competing—ideas of Japan and Japaneseness emerge, creating a basso ostinato of the sort that Maruyama Masao (丸山真男, 1914-1996) imagined coursing through all of Japanese culture (Maruyama 1972: 5) but which actually represents an early modern construction. Notions of Japaneseness were constructed upon the foundation of a new sense of patrimony: a multifaceted cultural and historical legacy that represented one’s birthright as a person born in Japan. This new consciousness of Japan and oneself as Japanese required an orientation with temporal (historical), spatial (geographic), and social (status) dimensions to it. Knowing one’s place required knowing who one is, and vice versa. New ideas of the past of the sort that Bashō explored and the nativists subsequently developed became part of the literate culture of Japan, and as literacy spread, the texts that carried this culture followed. These texts also encoded the notion of a spiritual heritage, whereby to be Japanese was to partake on an equal footing and in an otherwise highly stratified society in the blessings and attributes of this identity. In other words, despite obvious differences between individuals, the nativist understanding of Japanese identity implied that all persons born in Japan are equally Japanese, and the nativist arguments regarding the revival of an ancient arcadia, as well as their speculations on the Japanese character, translated at the personal level into a Japanese horizontal fraternity with empowering consequences for the individual. The texts that the nativists produced were the primary medium for disseminating these radical ideas, but where one encountered the limits of literacy, and where orality remained king, nativists devised their own strategies for spreading what could be called the principles of their faith. At the same time, individual identity in early modern Japan was forged in a social furnace. The concerns over reputation, dignity, and the making of a name for oneself that were so prominent in upper-class social thought of the late medieval period in Japan had evolved into the same concerns of urban commoners by the end of the Genroku, and by the end of the Tokugawa these concerns were shared well beyond those who lived in the largest metropolises. This was a consequence of the networks which, like an arterial system, brought not just goods and services but also culture and ideas from their urban places of birth into their newfound semiurban and rural settings. In the chapters that follow, we will see evidence for this in expansive notions of self-interest, the underground embrace of proscribed religious practices, an awakened and widely shared interest in self-improvement, and understandings of both well-being as an entitlement and happiness as a legitimate goal. The contributions of religions and religious modes of thought to the construction of identity—Let us briefly and by way of conclusion to this chapter consider the extent to which early modern Japanese religions and religious thought contributed to the formation of identity and sense of agency in the

38  Identity and Orientation Edo period. Despite arguments to the contrary, such as those found in recent works by Jason Ānanda Josephson (2012) and Isomae Jun’ichi (2014) that rest largely on the fact that the Japanese word shūkyō (most commonly used to translate the word “religion”) was newly coined in the Meiji period,7 religions and religious thought—even as understood in a postcolonial and post-Enlightenment perspective—were alive and well during the Edo period. For proof of this, one need look no further than the fact that religions like Buddhism and Christianity, and religious thought like Confucianism and Kokugaku nativism, contributed directly and indirectly, institutionally and intellectually to the distinctive matrix that constitutes early modern Japanese orientation and identity. With its persistent denial of the existence of a permanent self or soul, it is difficult to argue that Buddhist understandings of humanity contributed in any significant doctrinal way to either identity or individuality in early modern Japan, but there still are points that deserve our attention. First, all ­Buddhists agreed that as sentient creatures, part of their endowment included a Buddha-nature or Buddha-mind (Busshō, Busshin 仏性, 仏心) that represented the dharma (仏法) within, and that made enlightenment possible. This common nature linked all persons into a single humanity, but one that also included heavenly beings like Buddhas and bodhisattvas (ashura 阿修 羅), as well as degraded beings like denizens of hell (jigoku 地獄) and hungry ghosts (gaki 餓鬼). Second, at the level of folk beliefs regarding ghosts and ancestral spirits, there may be an unexpected antecedent for individuality in this nether realm, since the spirit of one’s deceased grandmother would differ from the spirit of one’s deceased grandfather, and the spirits of one’s deceased grandparents would differ from those of one’s neighbor’s deceased grandparents.8 And third, looking specifically at what is sometimes styled “Kamakura Buddhism,” despite the Pure Land doctrinal emphasis on the denial of self-power (jiriki 自力) and reliance on supernatural power outside oneself (tariki 他力), it is clear that Pure Land believers, along with Nichiren followers, emphasized an individual responsibility to recite the nenbutsu (念仏) or daimoku (題目) invocations. With its emphasis on meditation, Zen Buddhism was likewise a form of Buddhism in (non)action with close connections to the warrior class. Zen’s highly Sinified Ōbaku (黄檗) variant was also an important contributor to the faddish interest in China as an exotic Other during the eighteenth century, and used its outré character to attract a following drawn substantially from those who chose not to follow the herd. But it was Buddhism’s institutional importance that is of greatest interest to our purposes. As noted, because of the use of local parish temples as community registrars of life-changes and movements, mandatory temple affiliation rendered all persons in Edo-period Japan to be formally Buddhists. One could certainly believe in other forms of spirituality, such as the Confucian-inspired mind- and self-cultivation teachings of Shingaku (心 学) or alternative spiritual practices like divination (uranai 占い), but one’s spiritual “ground bass” in Tokugawa Japan was always Buddhist even for

Identity and Orientation  39 as committed a nativist as Motoori Norinaga (Matsumoto Shigeru 1984: 211–20). Changing one’s affiliation from one denomination to another was notoriously difficult, but still possible under exceptional circumstances, and the arrangement of all Japanese temples into a main temple–branch temple (honji matsuji 本寺・末寺) network contributed to a spiritual arterial system that at least in theory allowed for close Bakufu oversight of temple affairs (Tamamuro 1971). This network also added a spatial dimension to the practice of one’s faith, as manifested in pilgrimages such as that to the circuit of eighty-eight temples, as well as a horizontal fraternity of those who shared the same denominational affiliation. In addition, the Bakufu appointed Commissioners for Temple and Shrine Affairs (Jisha Bugyō 寺 社奉行) who were responsible for enforcement of the Bakufu’s religious policies. Kurozumi Makoto (黒住真) has observed that the requirement to demonstrate with certainty and categorically that one is not a Christian contributed to an enduring and ironic Christian influence on early modern Japanese society (2006: 100), as has been confirmed more recently in Jan C. Leuchtenberger’s study of an enduring Christian presence in early modern Japanese literature (2013), and William Farge's study of the Christian samurai Baba Bunkō (2016). What Kurozumi and others neglected, however, is how the individual responsibility to perform one’s obedience to the decrees of the Bakuhan realm contributed to the nascent integrity of the individual. Consider, for example, the following contemporary description by a foreign observer, Engelbert Kaempfer (1651–1716), who was a German physician attached for the years 1690–92 to the Dutch trading post on the islet of Deshima in Nagasaki Harbor. Kaempfer wrote of how at the end of each year, the neighborhood liaison “for each street conducts the hito aratame, that is, the registration of all members of the household, including the children and old people, specifying their personal name, place of birth and the shū, or religious sect of the head of the household” (Bodart-Bailey 1999: 163). In areas like Nagasaki notorious for their experience with Christianity and Christians, the practice of the efumi (絵踏み) was used to sniff out practitioners of the proscribed faith. Kaempfer described how within days of this registration, local officials went street by street and house by house requiring all residents of a household to desecrate an “image of the crucified Christ and on another one of a saint to show that they renounce and curse Christ and his messengers.” Kaempfer wrote: After the inquisition council has sat down on a mat and everybody, young and old, as well as additional families lodged in the same house and the closest neighbors, if their house is not large enough to conduct the procedure there separately, have assembled and the cast images

40  Identity and Orientation have been placed on the bare floor, the scribe opens his inspection register and reads the names. As people’s names are read, they come forward and walk over the images or step on them. Small children who cannot yet walk are picked up by their mothers and have their feet placed on the images as expression of disdain. After that, the head of the household puts his seal at the bottom of the inspection register so that the inquisitors can prove to the magistrates that the inquisition has taken place in the house. (ibid, emphasis added) Note the overlapping levels of jurisdiction. The inquisition of the population is organized by household, and heads of household have responsibility for those who live under their roofs, regardless of kinship ties. However, the actual reckoning and demonstration of the efumi occurs one named person at a time, children and the elderly included, and is in this sense an individual as well as corporate responsibility. Further, even the inquisitors themselves are dependent on the head of household’s seal on their inspection register to demonstrate to their own minders that the inquisition has taken place. As I have argued elsewhere, enforcement of the Bakufu’s religious policies peaked during the 1660s. For their part violators of the Bakufu’s religious policies became increasingly practiced in concealing their victimless transgressions, and when taken together with the relaxed enforcement, one observes the emergence of what was functionally a limited sphere of privacy in the practice of one’s faith (Nosco 1996b). In this chapter we have examined Confucianism’s and nativism’s role in the fashioning of identity in some detail, but is it correct to regard Confucianism and Kokugaku as forms of religious thought? Max Müller (1823– 1900) ranked Confucianism’s core texts alongside those of Hinduism, Buddhism, Zoroastrianism, Jainism, and Islam in his monumental fifty-volume Sacred Books of the East (Oxford U.P. 1879–1904), and more recently Confucianism was reviled as a religion during China’s Cultural Revolution of 1966–69. Without wishing to reopen the perennial question of whether Confucianism or its Neo-Confucian variants are religions, I believe that they both have an unmistakable religious dimension rooted in their respective concerns with human transformation in the direction of a moral absolute, in this case heaven (天) (Taylor 1990). We have also observed that nativism in the form of Kokugaku similarly contributed significantly to the construction of early modern identity, but does it likewise have a religious dimension? Scholars writing on Kokugaku have approached this question in different ways, but on this point I have followed Hisamatsu Sen’ichi (久松潜一 1894–1976), who as long ago as 1927 in his Keichū-den (契沖伝 p. 227) wrote of there being two meanings of the word kokugaku and hence two dimensions to Japanese nativism. The first and broader of the two meanings would be to refer to any and all forms of study that took Japan as their primary focus instead of China or Chinese

Identity and Orientation  41 studies (Kangaku 漢学). But the second and narrower definition, according to Hisamatsu, would reference, first, the application of philology to Japan’s most ancient literary, poetic, and mytho-historical sources in order to elucidate from them an ancient Way (kodō 古道), and second, the attendant attempt to elevate that ancient Way to the status of a contemporary religion. It is this latter narrower sense that informs my characterization of Kokugaku as religious thought. Even Christianity played a role, albeit a negative one, in the construction of identity, as it was the persecution of Christians for their faith and practices and the attempt to eradicate believers wherever they were to be found that inspired inquisitional practices like the efumi, and the shūmon jinbetsuchō (宗門人別長) registries in which both individual and household temple-affiliations were formerly recorded. Spiritually resourceful underground Christians even devised liturgies for rituals like the kyōkeshi (経消 し) or “sutra-extinguishing” liturgy intended to expiate the sin of participation in such blasphemy as the mandatory Buddhist funeral. Whereas punishments for violations of any of the Bakufu’s laws were invariably collective, the responsibility to demonstrate compliance with the Bakufu’s religious laws was at the same time always individual. In the next chapter, we extend this investigation into the early modern roots of Japanese individuality by looking at self-interest and the sometimes violent strategies for effecting improvements to the world around one.

Notes 1  Brewer and Gardner 1996. 2 As the first six in his list of ten institutional practices that contribute to modern canon formation, Haruo Shirane identified the following: “(1) the preservation, collation, and transmission of a text or its variants, which was critical prior to printing in the seventeenth century; (2) extensive commentary, exegesis and criticism; (3) the use of a text in a school curriculum; (4) the employment of a text as a model for diction, style, or grammar, or as a source of allusion and reference. . . (5) the use of a text as a source for knowledge of historical and institutional precedents (yūsoku kojitsu), which was of critical importance for the Court and warrior administrations; [and] (6) the adoption of a text as the embodiment of a set of religious beliefs” (2000: 3). 3  A variously defined period, sometimes misleadingly called a “Century,” that extends roughly from the end of the Ōnin War in 1477 through Oda Nobunaga’s death in 1582. Some scholars extend the period through 1603 when Tokugawa Ieyasu assumed and redefined the title of Shogun. 4 Herman Ooms has succinctly, if somewhat whimsically, summarized the difference between Chinese and Japanese understandings of human nature, and the basis for this difference in differing interpretations of Confucianism, in the title of his essay, “Human Nature: Singular (China) and Plural (Japan)?” (2002). 5 Patti Kameya (2009: 9) has identified Kinsei kijinden as part of a larger body of work in the late eighteenth century that describes a community defined by a shared heritage between writer and reader, though Kameya defines Ban’s community temporally as “our times,” i.e., a time shared between himself and his readers.

42  Identity and Orientation 6 Following on the heels of a poor harvest in 1782, the Tenmei famine was provoked by the volcanic eruption of Mount Asama in the summer of 1783, resulting in a famine that reduced the Japanese population by close to a million, or roughly 4 percent, during the years 1780–86, with still more deaths to follow in 1787 as the famine continued its grisly toll (Totman 1993: 240). 7 Linguistic determinism argues that people who speak or think in different languages have different thought processes and thus experience the world differently. In support of this proposition, one might consider the extent to which one believes that one can express certain emotions such as romantic feelings in a different language such as French. It is a common saying in parts of Europe that as many languages as one speaks, so many times is one a human being. Linguistic relativity challenges this position by asking questions such as whether one can experience a shade of color for which one’s language lacks a specific name or term, to which the answer is clearly of course. While recognizing the validity of much linguistic determinism, the argument that follows assumes linguistic relativism. 8  I am indebted to Namiki Eiko, a specialist in shamanism, for this insight.

3 Self-Interest, Protest, and the Public Sphere

This chapter addresses the second of this volume’s major themes: self-interest and the public sphere, by which I mean the broad realm of contestation, including remonstrance, protest, political participation, societal critique, and limited civil society. The Tokugawa state was nothing if not authoritarian, and its aspirations were absolutist—what one scholar has styled “an ambition unrivaled since the formation of the classical state” (Berry 2012: 45)—as it sought to regulate the actions, expressions, and even thoughts of samurai and commoners alike. However, as is always the case, there were practical limits to the state’s authority, and despite the otherwise constrained political environment, one observes the emergence of a distinctive, albeit limited, public sphere in Tokugawa Japan (Berry 1998). Even non-samurai commoners who were formally disenfranchised could privately and legally express constructive criticism as well as personal grievance through remonstrance boxes that similarly elevated political consciousness and awareness, on the one hand, and notions of agency, on the other. Both remonstrance and protest, sporadic and limited for roughly the first half of the Tokugawa period, grew increasingly common, violent, and destabilizing. The government countered with policies based on conservative Confucian verities, but the widespread pursuit of individual interest resulted in levels of unrest unseen for two centuries. Private academies provided not just opportunities for self-betterment, but also the foundation for a nascent civil society through their relative freedom of association. Challenged by over 3,000 peasant rebellions and two major insurrections spaced two centuries apart, as well as by a number of failed “incidents” that sought to overthrow the state, the Tokugawa polity was anything but “two and a half centuries of peace,” as it has so often been characterized. Personal participation in such destabilizing events was emboldened by the collective nature of the action, but the decision whether to participate or not was always individual and inevitably reached after complex calculations of self-interest. Private academies, examined later in this volume, became liminal venues where conventional notions of status and propriety receded, and semi-private places where criticism of the status quo, typically veiled

44  Self-Interest, Protest, and the Public Sphere in historical metaphor, allowed for the germination of counter-ideological perspectives and on occasion even fomented violent public unrest. As we will see, the Japan of the second half of the Tokugawa had a relatively vibrant culture of protest and acceptance of remonstrance, as well as significant pockets of civil society in academic and salon culture. The degree of this is arguable, which is part of what makes such historical considerations so enticing, but I believe that we will find that these freedoms were not just greater than has heretofore been generally imagined, but in many ways more robust than what one finds in present-day Japan as well as in many of the nominally liberal societies in which readers of this volume work and live. Protest and insurrection—The relationship between politicized action and politicized collective identity is important for our study. Bernd Simon and Bert Klandermans have argued that “people evince politicized collective identity to the extent that they engage as self-conscious group members in a power struggle on behalf of their group knowing that it is the more inclusive societal context in which this struggle has to be fought out” (2001: 319). Early modern protest in Japan in fact increased as the carefully hewed distinctions separating social classes blurred in environments like private academies, pleasure quarters, bunjin (literati) salons, and similarly liminal spaces situated in Japan’s most urbanized environments. Simon and Klandermans also argue that preconditions or “antecedent stages” requisite for politicized collective identity include an “awareness of shared grievances, adversarial attributions, and involvement of society at large” (ibid). We observe this in early modern village protests, which are usually called hyakushō ikki (百姓一揆), or peasant uprisings, and have most commonly been represented as outbursts of collective anger in response to intolerably abusive conditions imposed by heartless overseers. Herbert Bix (1986: xxi) has analyzed the 3,001 ikki that are known to have occurred between 1570 and 1871, and has created a taxonomy based on escalating degrees of illegality. At the bottom of this scale are the least destabilizing and altogether legal forms of protest that include petitions (shūso 愁 訴) and forms of unrest such as non-violent disturbances to the status quo (fuon 不穏 and sōdō 騒動), which together represent roughly a third (32%) of the total. Next in escalation would come illegal and extralegal forms of struggle that include absconsion (deserting one’s village and fleeing from the authorities), as well as forceful appeals (gōso 強訴), which taken together constitute just over a half (52%) of the 3,001. But most serious of all were violent confrontations that included deliberate destruction of property and outright revolts representing the remaining sixth (16%). Ikki increase in frequency during the early modern period. According to Bix, these average 5.2/year during the first hundred and thirty years from 1590 to 1720; this doubles to 10.6/year for the next five decades, 1720–70; then it increases to 13.6 annually for the sixty years from 1770 to 1830; and it finally peaks at 24.4/year during the forty-one years from 1830 to 1871.1

Self-Interest, Protest, and the Public Sphere  45 As Bix notes, this reflects a socially and politically subversive consciousness of struggle, as agriculturalists were prepared to challenge the status quo and existing hierarchies with demands for greater freedom and retention of the fruits of their labor. That these peasants were unable to disenfranchise Daimyo from their positions of power and prestige does not mean that they were unable to influence the Bakuhan state’s policies, which were steadily, albeit slowly, modified if not rescinded altogether when they were found to be intolerable (Bix 1986: 137). Ikki were always forms of politicized identity and collectivized action, but with a critical element of individual commitment that has generally been overlooked. Prior to the Tokugawa and through roughly the first Tokugawa century, participants in village protests typically swore oaths to kami or hotoke (仏 Buddhist noumena) pledging their commitment to the grievance, and inviting divine retribution should their individual commitment waver. These kishōmon (起請文), or “divine oaths” as Minami Orihara has styled them, were transformed and secularized during the Tokugawa period, when they came to be known as tanomi shōmon (頼証文) or “bonds of trust” (2013). What distinguished these “bonds of trust” from “divine oaths” was the fact that solidarity was enforced not by fear of retribution by supernatural authority but rather by the horizontal collective suasion of those committed to the civil disobedience. Of the 656 surviving Edo-period tanomi shōmon, 93 percent were written after the Shōtoku (正徳) period (1711–16); i.e., during the last century and a half of the Tokugawa period, and as one would expect, there is a clear correlation between the frequency of tanomi shōmon and times of famine, epidemic, and sociopolitical turmoil, especially during the 1860s when their frequency spiked to more than ten per annum (ibid). For our purposes, the significance of these tanomi shōmon is the manner in which they facilitated the pursuit of individual self-interest through group action based on politicized collective identity. Bix has described the remarkable self-discipline of peasants participating in revolts as “essentially communitarian in nature” (1986: 144). Collectivized participation had the effect of lessening the likelihood of severe punishment, since those in all levels of authority had little incentive to execute or otherwise disable agriculturalists whose productive labor formed the heart of the early modern economy and in most cases their overseer’s primary source of revenue. Group solidarity thus reinforced boldness while also providing a measure of protection, and participation in all such forms of legal and extralegal protest was transformational in that it inscribed that consciousness of struggle on previously non-politicized peasants. Participants were radicalized: they “assumed a new identity, even donned a new outfit to symbolize their sharp break with the routine of daily life,” and “the rules of feudal civility turned, momentarily, upside down” (ibid). The village became an arena, a stage, even a playing field, and time itself ceased its regular rhythms. Each challenge to authority brought one deeper into these liminal zones, and each reentry into those zones became progressively easier.

46  Self-Interest, Protest, and the Public Sphere There of course were times when ikki uprisings enjoyed inspired leadership, as in the case of Buzaemon (武左衛門), who, beginning in 1787 and in response to unbearable suffering in rural southern Japan following years of famine and epidemic, went door-to-door in village after village in Iyo Yoshida (伊予吉田) Domain, organizing what in 1790 proved to be the largest peasant uprising of the Tokugawa period, with some 7,500 participants. Despite a promise of clemency offered because of the sheer size of the protest, Buzaemon was beheaded, becoming something of a legend in the process (Matsumoto Shin’hachirō 1977), but generally the leaders of these rebellions were effaced by the authorities and are thus lost to history, surviving principally in local legend. An interesting exception is Sakura Sōgorō (佐倉惣五郎 1605?–53?), a village headman who complained to no avail to the Shimōsa (下総) Sakura domainal authorities, Edo officials, and even the Bakufu Rōjū (Elders 老中) regarding the domainal Lord Hotta’s (堀田) tyranny and despotism (Tanaka Sōgorō 1977). For his efforts on behalf of his village, Sakura and his wife and son were crucified, and we would likely not know of his sacrifice were it not for his mention by Fukuzawa Yukichi, who singled Sakura out as a model of selfless sacrifice and martyrdom. In Fukuzawa’s words: From what I know, there was only one person from ancient times who advocated human rights (jinmin no kengi 人民の権義), who brought pressure to bear upon the government by championing the cause of justice (seiri 正理), and who remained steadfast and kept his integrity to the end, when he sacrificed his life. This was Sakura Sōgorō, whose biography is found only in popular fiction, but whose true story has still not been told by the historians. (Dilworth and Nishikawa 2012: 58; Komuro and Nishikawa 2002: 82) Fukuzawa’s only mistake was to believe that Sakura Gorō was unique. As mentioned previously, there is a misleading way of telling the Tokugawa story that suggests that after the Battle of Sekigahara (関が原) in 1600 uninterrupted peace descends like a veil upon Japan until it is lifted some 267 years later by the tumultuous events that culminate in the Meiji coup d’état of early 1868. Peasant rebellions undermine the historicity of this characterization, but so too did the nearly year-long siege of Osaka Castle from 1614 to 1615, which resulted in the deaths of tens of thousands of rōnin and enemies of the Tokugawa. Rōnin disgruntlement remained a serious problem for the early Bakufu as long as disenfranchised trained killers were unsuccessful at finding alternative vocations and turned to banditry and brigandage in order to feed themselves and their families. One indication of the lingering degree of rōnin disgruntlement was the 1651 uprising plotted by Marubashi Chūya (丸橋忠弥 d. 1651) and Yui Shōsetsu (由井正雪 1605–51) known as the Keian incident (慶安事件) after

Self-Interest, Protest, and the Public Sphere  47 the era name. Marubashi was a rōnin who made his living as a martial arts instructor, and though the identity of his father is uncertain, it is said that he perished at the hands of the Bakufu army during the siege of Osaka Castle. Yui was a commoner who was instructed in swordsmanship by rōnin, and whose skill was sufficient that he made an improbable living initially as an instructor in swordsmanship and subsequently as the proprietor of his own armaments shop. Their plot was to attack Edo Castle, overthrow the Bakufu, and then spread their insurrection to Kyoto and from there to the entire country. They planned to take advantage of what they assumed would be Bakufu disarray immediately following the anticipated death of the third Shogun, Tokugawa Iemitsu (徳川家光 1604–51, r. 1623–51), which was to serve as their signal. However, their plot was uncovered when Marubashi fell seriously ill and entered into a delirium in which he revealed the secrets of their strategy.2 Marubashi was arrested and executed, and Yui took his own life rather than be captured. Though their plot was a total disaster, it did indicate to those both in and out of authority the depth of hostility among at least some rōnin. Another explicitly political challenge to the Bakufu came in 1767. A few years earlier in 1764, the tenth Tokugawa Shogun, Ieharu (徳川家治 1737– 86, r. 1760–86), described by contemporary Dutch observer Jan Crans as “a lazy, lustful [and] stupid man” (quoted in Screech 2005: 18), had to cancel his plan to make a pilgrimage to Nikkō and the mausoleum of his ancestor Ieyasu owing to severe unrest along the way that was brought on by the increased burden of forced labor to prepare the official route. Hundreds of protesters and their leaders were arrested, both raising and revealing Bakufu sensibilities regarding even a whiff of insurrection. Confirmation of the Bakufu’s suspicions came in the Meiwa incident (明和事件), an alleged rōnin plot to overthrow the Bakufu with complex roots reaching back over a decade. The leaders were said to be Takenouchi Shikibu (竹内 式部 1712–67), Yamagata Daini (山県大弐 1725–67), and Fujii Naoaki (藤 井直明 1720–67, also known as Umon 右門), and their stories reveal a great deal about discontent and anti-Bakufu sentiment in some quarters. As early as 1756 Takenouchi had come under fire from senior court officials in Kyoto for teaching lower-ranking kuge (公家) courtiers that court officials were hampered in their work by their lack of appropriate training. No doubt insulted by this insinuation of lax oversight, senior court officials appealed to the Bakufu to discipline Takenouchi and to forbid kuge from attending Takenouchi’s lectures. This time the Bakufu declined, saying that they found no crime in Takenouchi’s activities. This changed two years later, however, when under interrogation by the Bakufu’s Kyoto magistrate (Shoshidai 所司代), Takenouchi is said to have explained, “When the country is in possession of the Way, rites, music, and punishments proceed from the sovereign. When the country lacks the Way, they proceed from the feudal lords. When they proceed from the feudal lords, it is rare that these do not lose their power in ten generations” (Webb 1968: 249–50). The reference

48  Self-Interest, Protest, and the Public Sphere to “feudal lords” could only mean the Bakufu, but lest the import were somehow missed, the reference to ten generations was conclusive, since the regnant Shogun was the ninth Tokugawa Shogun, Ieshige (r. 1745–60). Yamagata was the second son of a samurai physician, and in 1759 he authored the Ryūshi shinron (柳子新論) or “New Treatises of Master Ryū,” which criticized six centuries of Bakufu regimes going back to Minamoto Yoritomo (源頼朝 1147–89), founder of the first Kamakura Bakufu, for usurping the prerogatives of the Kyoto monarchy (Wakabayashi 1995: 33–37). The work drew little immediate attention so long as it circulated only in manuscript form, but this changed after it was published in 1763. Fujii Umon, the third alleged conspirator, was Yamagata’s student as well as an instructor in the Court’s academy, the Kōgakusho (皇学所), where notions of monarchical prerogatives would surely have proved attractive to restless younger kuge. At the same time, such ideas were just as surely anathema to the Bakufu, and a few years later in 1767, under the tenth Shogun, Ieharu, the Bakufu arraigned Takenouchi, Yamagata, and Fujii collectively for lèse-majesté toward the Bakufu. Yamagata and Fujii were beheaded, and Takenouchi died on route to his exile. As Warashina Teiyu (d. 1769) opined in a letter one year after these events, “This is indeed a time when the nation’s rulers must be alert” (Yasunaga 1992: 21). In order to glean a sense of how the nature of violent protest changed between the early and late Tokugawa, a comparison of the period’s two largest insurrections—the Shimabara Rebellion of 1637–38 and the 1837 insurrection led by Ōshio Heihachirō (大塩平八郎 1793–1837, also known as Ōshio Chūsai 大塩中祭)—is illustrative. First, a glance at what they shared. •

•

•

•

Both were led by highly charismatic figures: the teenager Amakusa Shirō (天草 四郎 1621?–38, original surname Masuda [益田], and also known by the given name Tokisada [時貞]); and the civil servant Ōshio, who was in his mid-40s. Both uprisings were responses to severely straitened economic circumstances: poor harvests in southwestern Japan during the mid-1630s, with the effects of famine exacerbated by extortionate strategies for tax collection; and suffering brought on by similarly poor harvests and attendant famine in 1833 and again in 1836, exacerbated by the refusal of Osaka authorities to share their stored rice with the most severely affected. They shared religious and ideological dimensions: Shimabara had been a center of Christian missionary activity, initially proscribed twentyfive years earlier, with rebels marching behind Christian banners; and Ōshio drawing his inspiration from the activism identified with the Wang Yangming (Ōyōmei 王陽明) school of Neo-Confucianism, which regarded action as the fulfillment of aspiration. Both were joined by individuals who surely felt that they had something to gain and little to lose in defying the authorities, even at the potential cost of their own lives.

Self-Interest, Protest, and the Public Sphere  49 •

And both provoked responses by the central government that changed the course of Japanese history: the expulsion of Portuguese from Japan in 1639, and the Tenpō reforms (天保の改革) of 1842.

As impressive as these similarities are, however, the differences between the two are even more illuminating, and let us begin by looking at the Shimabara Rebellion. The Shimabara peninsula and nearby island of Amakusa were remote regions with high concentrations of Christians even twenty-five years after Tokugawa Ieyasu’s definitive prohibition in 1612 and the commencement of efforts to expel all foreign priests. Ivan Morris (d. 1976) has written that in 1637 when the rebellion began in earnest, almost all who lived in Shimabara as well as the overwhelming majority of Amakusa inhabitants were Christian, and Morris estimates that just over half of Shimabara’s population of 45,000 and two-thirds of Amakusa’s 21,000 joined the struggle (1975: 147, 157). There is disagreement, however, over whether the primary factor behind an insurrection of such remarkable size and virulence was religious or economic. Most seventeenth-century Japanese accounts attribute the revolt to the Bakufu’s anti-Christian policies, but both contemporary European accounts and modern scholars’ interpretations see financial hardship as the catalytic factor. Duarte Correa (d. 1639), a Portuguese Jesuit who was in prison awaiting his own execution at the time of the rebellion, observed that “the rebellion could not be due to the rebels being Christians, since in times when there were many such, including famous [Daimyo], they never had rebelled” (Morris 1975: 150). As compelling as Duarte’s reasoning may be, there is at the same time no doubt regarding the religious character of the uprising. The Portuguese inscription on Amakusa Shirō’s battle banner read “LOVADD˚ SEIA O SACTISSIM˚ SACRAMENTO” (“Praised be the Most Holy Sacrament”), written in all caps so that it might more easily be read at a distance; most of the insurgents were believers from the start, and the evidence suggests that those who were not probably converted during the three months that the rebels used the abandoned Old Hara Castle as their fortress;3 and the insurgents were clearly emboldened by the spiritual promise of eternal life, as their communications to the siege forces invariably articulated their cause in religious terms (ibid: 178). Two European accounts contemporary to the siege—one by the French Protestant Jean Baptiste Tavernier (1605–89) and the other by the Dutch factor Nicholaes Koekebacker, chief of the Dutch trading factory at Hirado, who is notorious for acceding to Bakufu requests for cannon and naval support of the siege of the castle—describe how the rebellion’s leaders offered the Shogun their own apostasy and unconditional surrender if only their brethren’s lives might be spared (Keith 2006: 186n). This, I believe, indicates not shallowness of religious commitment, but rather solidarity with their fellow rebels to the point of risking their own damnation. Ivan Morris in fact concluded, “It would be a mistake. . . to identify any particular event as [the] decisive” factor behind the uprising (1975: 52), and surely religious

50  Self-Interest, Protest, and the Public Sphere and economic factors together provided the two most significant motives for participating in it. The active phase of the rebellion began in Shimabara in mid-December 1637 when the daughter of a village headman was seized and tortured with hot irons in order to extort payment of delinquent taxes from her family, leading her incensed father to summon his friends, together with whom he killed the local bailiff. Thereafter, the rebellion quickly spread “like a flame among dry kindling” (ibid: 153), but after initial success against the official forces raised against them, the rebels retreated into Hara Castle where, after being weakened by hunger after months of siege, some 37,000 men, women, and children were brutally slaughtered in mid-April 1638. By contrast, Ōshio Heihachirō’s rebellion was urban and could be measured in hours rather than months. Ōshio was a scholar-bureaucrat of a mold more common in China than Japan. Likely the foremost spokesman for Wang Yangming studies in Western Japan (Najita 1970: 157), he has aptly been described as “a sage who. . . became a rebel” (Craig 1970: 4), but his sagacity and idealism were ultimately insufficient to overcome his deficiencies as a tactician. Ōshio served for twenty years in Osaka as a police censor, or Ginmi Yoriki (吟味与力), in which capacity he acquired a degree of notoriety for his zeal at rooting out corruption and ferreting out violators of Bakufu religious policy. Distressed by the refusal of local merchant houses and government officials to divert their shipments of rice from Edo to those who were actually starving in the streets, Ōshio concocted a plan for a dramatic incendiary assault on the profiteers, which he hoped would trigger a much larger rebellion. As preparation, he sent a select core group of his most trusted followers, drawn largely from his private academy the Senshindō (洗心洞), into the provinces surrounding Osaka. There they were to liaise with village headmen and use them to instruct “all who were given birth by Heaven” to be on the lookout for the coming conflagration, which would serve as their signal to join the fray (de Bary 2008: 316). Ōshio sold his library and used the proceeds to purchase a cannon, perhaps a dozen rifles, and hundreds of swords, with which he planned to arm the expected peasant army. He also brushed a manifesto (gekibun 檄文) in which he exhorted villagers not to fear punishment by the authorities, and as added incentive encouraged them to destroy any written records of their personal indebtedness (Najita 1970). With the slogan on his banners poignantly proclaiming “save the people” (kyūmin 救民), the attack began in the morning, and by noon his core group of twenty fervent followers had grown to a ragtag militia some 300 strong. Over two days they attacked the homes and storehouses of wealthy merchants and Yoriki officials, and put fully one-fourth of Osaka to the torch, but by late afternoon of the first day official forces succeeded in dispersing the rebels, and within a few days virtually all the insurgents had either taken their own lives or been arrested. Of those taken into custody, all but one succumbed to their torture and the hellish conditions of their confinement.

Self-Interest, Protest, and the Public Sphere  51 As for Ōshio himself, a month later he was discovered hiding with his grievously wounded adopted son at the home of a wealthy sympathizer, where they committed suicide together once further flight became impossible. Why was Ōshio’s rebellion such a failure, when the suffering of commoners was so great? It appears that there was a fatal disjuncture between Ōshio and the bulk of his followers: Ōshio believed that with heaven’s support, the moral rectitude of his cause would prove invincible; but most of those who joined in the fray did so not in pursuit of a broader and nobler agenda but for more personal and ultimately materialistic ends. The majority of those in neighboring provinces to whom Ōshio addressed his appeals chose in the end to be spectators to the catastrophe rather than its victims. As Tetsuo Najita succinctly described the denouement: “[Ōshio’s] peasant army did not materialize. The wealth of large merchants he ‘confiscated’ was of such magnitude that it could not be carried away by his vanguard. . . . [And the] hundreds of swords he distributed to the townsfolk were used. . . to sack silk and saké shops rather than to support fully the battle against Bakufu troops” (Najita 1970: 174), making a sad end to an otherwise inspirational cause. The contrast between the two uprisings, however, goes beyond differences in duration, locale, and scale. The 37,000 who retreated into Hara Castle in January 1638 were desperate individuals who had been pushed past the breaking point. Their leadership largely comprised militarily trained rōnin and prominent peasant-landholders who had elected the path of agriculture rather than the sword when forced to make the choice decades earlier during the time of Hideyoshi. Again, the top leaders’ offer to apostatize and surrender unconditionally was motivated by their wish to see the lives of the majority of their brethren spared. There is no physical evidence of kishōmon or “divine oaths” among the insurgents, the majority of whom were likely illiterate, but their solidarity is difficult to fathom without placing it in the context of their shared religious faith. By contrast, though individual motives are always difficult to discern, the majority of those who joined Ōshio’s rebellion appear to have been motivated mostly by self-interest. There is no doubting Ōshio’s sincerity and the ideological inspiration he drew from his understanding of Wang Yangming–style Neo-Confucianism, and one may assume much the same for the roughly twenty fellow travelers who were drawn from the ranks of his Senshindō academy and formed the core of his support. Nonetheless these still constituted less than one-tenth of the insurgents’ ranks, and the others appear to have been drawn by mixed motives. Some may indeed have been driven by desperation, not unlike the Shimabara insurgents who truly had little to lose other than their lives, but some of the others clearly used the chaos to satisfy their appetites for silk and saké, while still others were likely attracted to the prospect of destroying the records of their indebtedness. One suspects that the anarchic circumstances may have also had their own intoxicating allure, but what are we to make of that silent majority in

52  Self-Interest, Protest, and the Public Sphere the neighboring provinces who chose not to join and to remain no more than spectators to the carnage? One suspects that they were anything but “incapable of knowing their own real interests,” as has at times been alleged regarding peasant protesters (Scheiner 1973: 579). Further, Ōshio’s rebellion of February 1837 inspired at least two other significant protests later that same year. In June 1837 Ikuta Yorozu (生田 万) led a half dozen like-minded samurai insurrectionists in a fatally outnumbered rebellion that lasted barely one night and day in Kashiwazaki (柏 崎). Yorozu was the son of a samurai retainer’s family in Ueno Province. He studied Confucianism at the domainal academy and subsequently moved to Edo where he learned the xenophobic Japanese nativism taught in Hirata Atsutane’s (平田篤胤 1776–1843) academy. He then opened an academy in Ota (太田) Domain (present Gunma Prefecture) from which he was expelled owing to his strident advocacy of domainal reform. He again moved, this time to Kashiwazaki, where he opened his academy called Ōenjuku (桜園 塾). Lacking both weapons and followers, Yorozu committed suicide rather than allow himself to be captured, as did his wife after strangling their two young children (Sōma 1929). More significant, however, was the rebellion led one month later by Yamadaya Daisuke (山田屋大介 1790?–1837) in Nose (能勢). Yamadaya worked in an Osaka apothecary and also taught martial arts. Similarly inspired by Ōshio’s rebellion but even more successful in attracting a substantial following, Yamadaya led a group in excess of 1,000, i.e., more than three times the size of Ōshio’s rebellion, drawn from dozens of nearby villages (600 from Mita [三田] alone) on what was intended to be a march to Kyoto, where the plan was to petition the Court for debt relief (tokusei 徳政) and the release of supplies of rice for those suffering from the prolonged famine. Yamadaya’s march lasted no more than four days before he was forced to flee to the Kōfukuji (興福寺) temple, where Yamadaya committed suicide to avoid capture. Remarkably, the majority of his followers were allowed to return unpunished to their own villages (Newmark 2014: 17), perhaps owing to the fact of their numbers as well as the far less destructive nature of their movement. Self-interest—Calculations of self-interest will inevitably be linked to one’s place in society, and when one thinks of the status system known as mibunsei (身分制) and the four-class system (shinōkōshō 士農工商, or samurai, agriculturalists, artisans, and merchants) that represented the great majority, and when one factors in the notorious difficulty during the first Tokugawa century of transitioning from one class to another, one can easily but erroneously conclude that there must have been little in the way of social competition or notions of ambition and advancement. In fact, Daimyo were in competition with other Daimyo for domainal and intramural political advancement, and samurai were in competition with other samurai for stipends and reputation, but from the Genroku years on the competition was increasingly among those in the other classes: merchants—both individually

Self-Interest, Protest, and the Public Sphere  53 and through their families—in competition with other merchants and merchant houses for profit and prestige; artisans competing with other artisans for local and even national reputation; agricultural villages competing with their neighbors for access to land and resources; large-scale landholders known as honbyakushō or “titled peasants” in competition with their peers for respect and privilege; and of course those outside the conventional four-class system, like male and female entertainers, priests and diviners, academicians, and so on, who were in equally intense though perhaps less visible forms of competition with their own peers (Hori and Fukaya 2010). From the late seventeenth century on, samurai and non-samurai alike engaged in unprecedented forms of competition in such venues as the academy, where social status mattered less and less in the practical task of explicating a text; in the public sphere, where individuals across classes became practiced in arguing their self- and collective interests; in public displays, where the material distinctions between classes diminished; and in the consumption of pleasure and other desirable experiences, where extravagant expenditure was the desideratum. While samurai were seeking fresh ways to prevail in a civilianized society, other members of society were actively seeking to acquire the cultural trappings of those whom society formally designated their betters, and by 1690 virtually anyone with the resources to pay for it could acquire private instruction, often from samurai, in a vast array of cultural pursuits. Arts and forms of knowledge that once required independent wealth, powerful patronage, or membership in a religious organization were from the Genroku on broadly accessible without regard to one’s class or social standing. For non-samurai commoners, material equity with those of higher status was for the first time becoming an aspirational quality (Fukaya 2006). This, in turn, suggests that a “radical” thinker like Kaiho Seiryō (海保青陵 1755–1817), whom Olivier Ansart has described as “probably the first Japanese thinker to proclaim the contractual nature of human relationships” (2006: 65), may not have been as radical as has generally been imagined. Seiryō wrote that “even though in terms of status the rich merchant houses are counted among the low people (shimobito 下人), as far as their clothes [and] food are concerned, there is no difference with those of the highest ranks (kijin 貴人)” (adapted from Ansart 2006: 78). Seiryō used the word taigan (大願) to refer to class-specific aspirations that transcended basic wishes for niceties like tasty food and warm clothes: for merchants, great wishes would be commercial expansion represented by more and more warehouses; for artisans, the desire to have more and more employees and to live in a large house; and so on (ibid: 79). His basic argument, however, was for deferred gratification: i.e., reining in the lesser desires, which are ultimately a hindrance, in order to achieve the “great wishes.” This, however, is scarcely different from Ihara Saikaku’s repeated admonitions to restrain one’s appetites for pleasure in the licensed quarters and not to try to live beyond one’s means, so as not to squander life’s hard-won gains. Seiryō

54  Self-Interest, Protest, and the Public Sphere recognized the commodification of individual work that is rewarded materially not as a consequence of birthright (status) but rather in proportion to one’s labor and service, but this too has its analogue in peasant protests that were rooted in peasant desires to retain a greater proportion of the fruits of their productive labor.4 Impartial justice and equality before the law have been underappreciated in analyses of mid-Tokugawa life. The Swedish botanist Carl Peter Thunberg (1743–1828) repeatedly commented on the impartiality of justice and equality before the law that he observed during his year’s residence in Japan in 1775–76, and Thunberg also noted that despite high rates of taxation on agricultural produce, Japanese peasants cultivate their plots “with greater freedom than the lord of a manor in Sweden” (Screech 2005: 75, 179, 228). Herbert Bix refers to the stylization and symbolic value of ikki, calling them “a ritual for keeping alive pre-feudal ideas of impartial justice, equality and equity in a society dominated by kinship, hierarchy and fixed statuses” (1986: 143). The point is obvious but needs to be repeated that justice, equality, and equity are typically compelling desiderata for those who see themselves to be underappreciated or in various ways insufficiently rewarded for what they believe that they contribute through their productive labor and service. That this sense of being deserving can also apply to those who enjoy positions of privilege suggests that this feeling of being more deserving and under-rewarded may be virtually a universal. There will always be the selfless—those exceptional renouncers who for religious or political reasons choose a life characterized by humility and humble station— but they will always be in the minority, and as the sense of selfhood strengthens and individuality becomes the norm, so too will the aspiration for advancement. Note, however, that aspiration for higher status differs from aspiration for self-betterment: The former is ambition, and the latter a quest for selfimprovement and cultivation. The Neo-Confucian Kaibara Ekiken (貝原 益軒 1630–1714), known to posterity for confessing his doubts regarding orthodox interpretations, would never have condoned ambition for personal advancement, and in his 1710 “Common Japanese Precepts” (Yamato zokkun 大和俗訓) he wrote, “The original meaning of learning is cultivating ourselves without concern for whether or not we are known by others. . . . Learning ought to be only for the sake of cultivating ourselves. It should not be in any way for the sake of making ourselves known to others” (Tucker, M.E. 1989: 153). A few years later in his 1713 “Lessons for Nurturing Life” (Yōjōkun 養生訓), written shortly before his death, he counseled the importance of controlling one’s innermost desires; exercising moderation in food and drink; and reining in one’s physical appetites, including sexual desires. This, however, was not for the empty purpose of prolonging a purposeless life, but rather a fundamental part of the universal obligation for filiality that all persons have to heaven and earth, certainly for the gift of life but even more for the privilege of birth as a human being.

Self-Interest, Protest, and the Public Sphere  55 Performance and the public sphere—In terms of the relationship between the Bakuhan state and the individual, Japanese religions also generated their own forms of defiance, which we touched on toward the end of the last chapter. Freelance religionists like Yin-yang diviners and those identified with the rigorous mountain-based spiritualities known as shugendō (修験 道) often resisted the requirement to be licensed by mainstream temples. Christianity was the first and perhaps best-known religion to be banned in Japan, but it was certainly not alone. The Bakufu refused to tolerate the separatist defiance of the fujufuse (不受不施) movement within Nichirenshū Buddhism, the subject of the following chapter, as well as what it perceived to be the destabilizing impact of Pure Land ecstatic dancing movements called odori nenbutsu (踊念仏). Once these religious prohibitions became a matter of law, the most straightforward way for the Bakufu to ensure compliance was to require all persons to register with a local temple belonging to one of the officially recognized denominations of Buddhism, a strategy that made everyone nominally Buddhist, as already noted, but the desecration of Christian images and symbols represented a second layer or screen in the government’s anti-Christian policies, especially in those regions that had earlier contained significant concentrations of Christians. Such demonstrations were a form of performance. In a study of the political spaces in Tokugawa Japan, Luke Roberts has observed that the “ability to command performance of duty—in the thespian sense when actual performance of duty might be lacking—was a crucial tool of Tokugawa power that effectively worked toward preserving the peace in the realm” (2012: 3). Public performance thus forms something of a binary with private conviction. One is reminded of the offer made in 1629 by Takenaka Uneme (竹中采女 d. 1634?), the Bakufu-appointed Commissioner (Bugyō 奉行) to Nagasaki, to Antonio Ishida (1570–1632), a Jesuit priest arrested for his activities on behalf of his Catholic faith. Uneme is said to have proposed to Ishida that if he would only formally acknowledge his obedience to the Shogun’s laws, he could “continue to believe what he pleased in his own heart” (quoted in Elison 1973: 189.) Uneme’s offer hints at the existence of a sphere of privacy, which allowed for liberty in matters of private personal beliefs, though not in the physical performance of one’s faith. Comparable forms of such spaces, i.e., the gap between what the law demanded and what was in reality allowed, existed at all levels of Tokugawa society—between Bakufu and Daimyo, Daimyo and village, village and household—but for our purposes it is the space between the state as public authority and the individual as semi-autonomous actor that stands out. Consider the following, written in 1759 by a common villager named Kihei to the eighth Daimyo of Tosa (土佐), Yamauchi Toyonobu (山内豊 敷 1712–67): Although I am of base birth and have never received your munificent bounty, I am nonetheless a man of this country. At a time when high

56  Self-Interest, Protest, and the Public Sphere and low will sink or swim together, I think it would be dishonest of me to hold back my criticism. This is not a time to stop being angry. As long as my spirit holds out, I will set my fear aside and tell you what I think of your government. (Roberts 1994: 423–24) Kihei was not punished for this otherwise brazen expression of personal opinion by a non-samurai commoner, and this because he submitted this opinion through the medium of a remonstrance box (sojōbako 訴状箱 or meyasubako 目安箱), a system established in Tosa that same year of 1759 enabling direct appeals to the Daimyo. This system continued until 1873 in the early Meiji, serving at least three purposes: to offer suggestions for social and political improvement; to relay complaints regarding officials and their policies; and to present appeals regarding perceived injustices in legal proceedings (ibid: 424). Remonstrance was a Confucian principle. In the Analects (4:18), Confucius comments on the qualified right of children to remonstrate with their parents: “In serving his parents, a man may remonstrate with them, but gently” (The Analects 2004: 28). Constituting yet further evidence of Confucian influence on early modern Japanese political culture, there were virtually no petition boxes before the Tokugawa, with the majority (twenty-eight of fifty) formed during the years 1711–59, and for the most part inspired by the decision of the eighth Tokugawa Shogun, Yoshimune (徳川吉宗 1684– 1751, r. 1716–45), to establish one in Edo in 1721 (Roberts 1994: 429). One of the problems with Bakufu laws was that their reach tended to exceed their grasp, and thus enforcement necessarily relaxed over time, as individuals became practiced in working around them. The Bakuhan state’s difficulty with enforcement was compounded by the sheer volume of rules with which one was expected to familiarize oneself, and by the excessive severity of many punishments, which taken together combined to create yet another separation between the law’s demands and society’s practical requirements. Commenting on this in 1833, J.F. Van Overmeer Fisscher, clerk in the Dutch trading post on the islet of Deshima in Nagasaki Harbor, wrote: The Japanese have a word for all the things carried out in secrecy— that is, as insider secrets. They call it naibun, which is translated into the Dutch as binnenkant (inside). This is because the laws are so severe that they cannot be applied to the letter, as actually carrying out the law would cause things to become great incidents. . . . When an incident is made public. . . then the legal case must be treated according to the public rules and it becomes impossible to lessen the punishments. (quoted in Roberts 2012: 19) Indeed, violators of the Bakufu’s religious policies grew increasingly practiced in evading detection, and the state accordingly grew less interested

Self-Interest, Protest, and the Public Sphere  57 in pressing its draconian regulations upon otherwise model tax-paying commoners. One feature of the early modern public sphere is revealed by the debate— yet another form of performance—which was initially institutionalized for specific contexts and subsequently accepted as a way of arriving at an informed and accepted course of action. In the next chapter, we examine how despite his reluctance to be drawn into what could be regarded as a matter internal to a single Buddhist denomination, at the very start of the Tokugawa period Tokugawa Ieyasu ordered the quarrelsome factions within Nichiren Buddhism to debate their differences before him at Osaka Castle, with the defeated faction’s leader being exiled to Tsushima (対馬) (Nosco 1996b: 140). Such religious debates were infrequent, but they confirm that religious matters enjoyed something of a privileged position within Japan’s limited public sphere, within which only samurai were formally entitled to express a political opinion publicly, and even among samurai prudence dictated that much opinion remain unexpressed. Private academies were a different matter altogether as far as the expression of non-political opinion was concerned. Initially staffed and attended principally by samurai, the academies of Tokugawa Japan evolved into liminal spaces where the “meeting to read” (kaidoku 会読) methodology of close reading undermined everyday notions of societal hierarchy and status. The relationship of this methodology to self-cultivation is discussed later in this volume, but here we are more interested in it as a means to express one’s individual opinions. At a venue like the Bakufu-sponsored Shōheikō (昌平黌) in Edo, samurai-class scholars from throughout Japan, including domains like Aizu (会津) and Saga (佐賀) that played prominent roles in the political debates of the late Tokugawa years, gathered three times a year for vigorous kaidoku where they learned to articulate and exchange their own opinions (Maeda 2009: 50). Kiri Paramore has even argued that state academicians at the Shōheikō played an important role there in reforming Tokugawa processes of governance and creating a new structural engagement between knowledge and power with surprisingly “modern” characteristics (2012). In many discussions public sphere is often conflated with civil society, but it is critical to maintain a distinction between the two in discussions of Edoperiod society. For our purposes, civil society is where individuals enter into voluntary associations, but the public sphere is the realm of contestation. Within the confines of the private academy one observes the social leveling that is characteristic of meritocratic academic environments, but also exceptional liberty in the discussion of controversial topics. That these discussions were often metaphorical, e.g., using a historical analogy to reflect on the present, does not invalidate the observation that the liberty to discuss “dangerous topics” seems to have been greater in private academies than in bunjin (literati) salons. This may be a reflection of the more broadly bohemian environment of Edo-period salon culture, but, either way, the liberty of opinion in private academies challenged the ever-present concern with

58  Self-Interest, Protest, and the Public Sphere censorship of written documents, and seems at times to come close without ever quite amounting to freedom of speech. Remarkably, Thunberg’s observation of Japan during his fifteen months of residence in 1775–76 led him to conclude, “Liberty is the soul of the Japanese” (quoted in Screech 2005: 179). But can we extrapolate from this to conclude that there were human rights during the Edo period? In European thought and jurisprudence, natural law—especially as formulated by John Locke (1632–1704)—provides a kind of conceptual foundation for human rights, though this foundation is not always clear. Legal rights are definable and enable an individual to appeal to the law for protection against injury to oneself or property. Yet, as distinguished an authority on the Japanese polity as Edwin Reischauer (1910–90) has written that there were “no inalienable rights” in Japan prior to the opening to the West (1981: 238). Reischauer’s assumption is basically correct in the sense that human rights do indeed imply guarantees of individual protection as well as subordination to universally accepted laws, but in other ways Reischauer underestimated the complexity of reasonable expectations supported by early modern Japanese social thought. A Tokugawa commoner would in general have rights to his property, but if for example he illegally possessed swords or other proscribed weapons, he would enjoy no legal remedy against their theft. Revenge was broadly condoned socially but not to a degree that would either undermine the public peace or challenge the state’s authority, the case of the forty-seven rōnin being the most famous example of the legal and moral complexity of Tokugawa acts of vengeance. If an individual person or household were wronged by, say, an act of theft, it would be natural to expect the state to intervene on one’s behalf and to exact restitution, and in this sense where there is law, one relinquishes to the state the right to proportionate vengeance (Russell 1946: 604–5). For our purposes, however, the problem is that samurai enjoyed rights that were generally not enjoyed by commoners, including most famously the right to carry two swords, and the rarely exercised right known as kirisute gomen (切捨御免) to cut down an offending commoner with impunity. If human rights are represented by reasonable expectations such as the aforementioned right of remonstrance, then there are additional important caveats. For example, as early as 1719, some fifteen years after Locke’s death, Ogyū Sorai dedicated a work called Seidan (政談) to the Shogun, Tokugawa Yoshimune (徳川吉宗 1684–1751, r. 1716–45). In this work, Sorai wrote that it is reasonable for individuals to expect to enjoy a sense of annon (安 穏), which he defined as freedom from hunger or cold, as well as the threat of robbers or insurgents; a sense of trust between neighbors, together with an understanding of how to live contentedly in one’s region as well as one’s world; taking pleasure in one’s vocation, and a lifelong sense of happiness (安穏ナラシムルト云ハ、飢寒盗賊ノ患モナク、隣里ノ間モ頼モシク、其 国 ソノ世界ニハ住ヨク覚ヘテ、其家業ヲ楽ミテ、民ノ一生ヲクラスヤウ

Self-Interest, Protest, and the Public Sphere  59 ニナスコトナリ).5 In a similar vein, though fully a century and a half later, Fukuzawa Yukichi wrote that, we humans, who are the highest of all creation, can use the myriad things of the world to satisfy our daily needs through the labors of our own bodies and minds and, as long as we do not infringe upon the rights (samatage 妨) of others, may pass our days in happiness (anraku 安楽) freely and independently (jiyūjizai 自由自在). (Dilworth and Nishikawa 2012: 3; Komuro and Nishikawa 2002: 6) We will return to this toward the end of this volume when we examine understandings of happiness and well-being, but here let us simply note the clear implication of Sorai’s remarks: All Tokugawa persons, regardless of status, gender, or class, enjoy a reasonable expectation of physical and emotional security and well-being to a degree that sounds much like what might today be styled a human right. So how are we to generalize about the Tokugawa polity and the limits of political participation and expression of opinion on public matters? One well-known taxonomy of political culture divides political consciousness and awareness into the three broad categories of participant, subject, and parochial: A participant is assumed to be aware of and informed about the political system in both its governmental and political aspects. A subject tends to be cognitively oriented primarily to the output side of government: the executive, bureaucracy, and judiciary. The parochial tends to be unaware, or only dimly aware, of the political system in all its aspects. (Almond and Verba 1963: 79) Rarely, if ever, do entire populations fit neatly into any single one of these categories and instead typically partake of some combination of two, if not all three, but the typology does provide a useful framework for considering the nature of the early modern public sphere examined in this chapter. Edo-period agricultural workers and other peasants were surely aware of their village’s hierarchy, and most likely the name of their Daimyo’s family, to whom opinion could be expressed through remonstrance boxes. It is also clear that persons generally either knew or became aware when necessary of the civic obligations that attend to such matters as births, marriages, divorces, deaths, temple registration, and changes of address. But it is unclear whether the majority of those who lived outside of Kyoto even knew of the existence of the monarch and his court in Kyoto, and the Shogun in Edo would have remained a remote and shadowy figure ordinarily unseen outside his castle. Indeed, a critical stage in the construction of the modern

60  Self-Interest, Protest, and the Public Sphere Japanese nation-state was the transferal of allegiance away from local barons and to the newly centralized Meiji polity. Samurai were integral members of a paramilitary state whose military character had steadily declined until its last years, when it revived too late in the face of domestic unrest and foreign threat. In a sense Tokugawa samurai were the only true citizens, with knowledge of national matters and eligible to have and express opinion publicly on domainal matters, but even Daimyo were not consulted on matters of national security until the Bakufu’s last years, when Senior Councillor Abe Masahiro (阿部正弘 1819–57), hoping in vain to forge a consensus, consulted both Daimyo and the Kyoto Court on the foreign policy crisis generated by Commodore Matthew Perry’s demands delivered as part of his flotilla’s uninvited visit in 1853. In this respect it would be accurate to generalize the Tokugawa polity as a subject political culture in which politics is something to which one is subjected rather than something that one influences, but we have nonetheless observed a number of features that speak to the vitality of the limited early modern public sphere in Japan. Commoners made increasing use of remonstrance boxes for the private but still formal expression of opinion. Extralegal protests occurred ever more frequently as persons individually and collectively became increasingly familiar with asserting what they believed to be their rights to retain a fair proportion of the fruits of their labor. Private academies became venues not just for voluntary associations but also for the discreet expression of opinions that at times were metaphorically critical of the status quo. Individuals across classes grew practiced in forms of prevarication and dissembling that made it possible to defy the state’s religious policies in private. And consciousness of both freedoms and reasonable expectations grew steadily to the point where they were just a few short steps away from what today would be styled human rights.

Notes 1  Bix’s charts are themselves adapted from Yokoyama Toshio’s (横山 十四男) Hyakushō ikki to gimin denshō (百姓一揆と義民伝承) (Kyōikusha Rekishi Shinsho 1977). 2 An alternative explanation for Marubashi Chūya’s indiscretion is that he shared news of his plan with a creditor named Toshiro in order to “buy” time for the repayment of his exorbitant debt. Toshiro, according to this version of events, wasted no time in disclosing the plot to the Edo authorities. See Titsingh 1822: 14. 3 Matthew Keith has argued that it was not until after the Shimabara Rebellion began that its religious character came into play as “a cohesive ideology” (2006: 24). 4  In the subtitle of his well-researched study, Tokumori Makoto (徳盛誠) has characterized Seiryō as a “Confucian who lived a life of Edo freedom,” and has compared what he regards as Kaiho Seiryō’s appreciation of self-interest and aspiration with that of Bernard Mandeville (1670–1733), especially as expressed in the latter’s The Fable of the Bees (2013: 220–24). 5  For a full translation of Seidan in English, see Lidin 1999.

4 Secrecy and Privacy in Religious Faith and Practice

Not only is there no religion without secrecy, but there is no human existence without it. Kees W. Bolle (1927–2012)

As among all other Asian nations and pagans, in this country also freedom of worship has always been permitted, as long as it does not obstruct secular government. Engelbert Kaempfer (1651–1716)1

In this chapter we continue our examination of individuality in early modern Japan by looking at the example of a distinctive fundamentalist strain of Nichiren Buddhism, one of the exceptions to the oft-repeated half-truth that aside from Christianity, there is no history of religious persecution in Japan. We begin by examining the origins of the fujufuse principle within the ­Nichiren denomination, and why its practitioners were viewed with such concern not just in the early Meiji period but also throughout most of the Tokugawa period. Of course, Christians are the best-known example of an Edo-period religious group being driven underground in the practice of their faith, and though less well known, practitioners of the ecstatic dancing known as the “dancing nenbutsu” (odori nenbutsu 踊念仏) were comparably scorned and persecuted. The absolutist aspirations of the Bakuhan state extended to the effort to control what individuals believed, and as we observed in Chapter 2 the state constructed mechanisms like the Shūmon aratame and efumi, which were intended to demonstrate compliance through various forms of performance. We examine these issues of enforcement, appearance, and performance as they applied to the fujufuse movement within Nichiren Buddhism, with the hope of shedding light on the complex relationship between the Bakuhan state and the denomination, as well as the state’s relationship with individual believer-practitioners in the domain of personal religious conviction.

62  Secrecy and Privacy in Religious Faith and Practice Secrecy—The keeping of a secret seems difficult enough for an individual, but for a community it seems almost impossible, because we recognize implicitly that we never know about secrets unless their secrecy has been compromised. Secrecy is universal and begins with childhood games: hide and seek; twenty questions to guess who I am; and secret clubs with their own rituals, passwords, and mutual identifiers. In young adulthood these metamorphose into fraternities/sororities and clubs with hazing rituals and punishments for indiscretions; and for adults these transform once again into fraternal associations, of which perhaps the best known is the Masons with its quasi-religious secret practices. Secrecy, of course, can also be a defensive strategy, a way of protecting oneself against social approbation and/or the wrath of the state. In an earlier time secrecy was embraced by many for sexual preferences that have since become legitimized, but there remain places in the world where the practice of a particular faith, embrace of a certain creed, and exercise of a certain preference can subject one to harm. All religions require at least some measure of secrecy, as Kees Bolle (1987) has observed. Except for the rare exceptions like Bahai for which exclusivity becomes its own means of attraction, most religions choose to disclose sufficient amounts about themselves and their promises to make membership attractive; at the same time they must limit what they disclose by having membership require some form of initiation that becomes the gateway to otherwise esoteric knowledge. But whether the secrecy is playful, defensive, or strategic, secrecy also generates tension. As Georg Simmel (1858–1918) observed, the dynamics of a secret-bearing community are fundamentally different from those of a secret-bearing individual: As long as the existence, the activities, and the possessions of an individual are secret, the general sociological significance of the secret is isolation, contrast, and egoistic individuation. The sociological significance of the secret is external, namely, the relationship between the one that has the secret and another who does not. But, as soon as a whole group uses secrecy as its form of existence, the significance becomes internal: the secret determines the reciprocal relations among those who share it in common. (1950: 345) In other words, with individual secrecy, the secret is always present as the individual negotiates her/his relationship with the outside world; but in group secrecy the secret colors every aspect of the internal dynamics of the group. Further, there is always an ironic sense of relief when one’s secret is uncovered and one no longer feels obliged to maintain the responsibility. Again quoting Simmel, the “secret contains a tension that is resolved in the moment of its revelation” (ibid: 333). Researching and writing about those

Secrecy and Privacy in Religious Faith and Practice  63 who choose to keep a secret and conceal their practices poses distinct challenges for the historian, since one can only begin to do so once the secret has been revealed and the tension resolved. Fujufuse—In 1870, the third year of Meiji, a certain Sakamoto Shinraku (坂本真楽) of present-day Okayama (　岡山) was sentenced to exile for having invited a fujufuse priest of the Nichiren denomination to join him in secret meetings that took place in Ekihara (益原) village of the Wake district (和気町) in Bizen (備前). Sakamoto’s offense was viewed as particularly serious, as he had been censured the previous year for his fujufuse beliefs and was clearly unrepentant. Okayama, and in particular its Wake district, was in fact a long-standing center of the clandestine and proscribed fujufuse practices, and it was said that as late as 1875, so many local fujufuse practitioners had been arrested and ordered imprisoned that it required the construction of a new prison, posing a considerable drain on the local treasury. In the aftermath of Sakamoto’s arrest, numerous testimonials on fujufuse circulated within the Nichiren denomination, and treatises pro and con were also exchanged with the new Meiji government’s Ministry of Education (the Kyōbushō [教部省], later renamed Monbushō [文部省]). Both the arguments supporting and those condemning fujufuse practices bore a striking resemblance to arguments that had been raised some two and a half centuries earlier, and seemed oddly anachronistic in view of the fact that it was also in 1875 that the Meiji government issued its decree on religious freedom.2 Fujufuse proponents claim that the principle is as old as Nichiren (日蓮 1222–82), the thirteenth-century religious pioneer who is known in the history of Japanese religion as an intolerant zealot who rejected all Buddhist teachings except those of the Lotus Sutra, a text to which he attributed salvific properties.3 Nichiren did castigate as hōbō (謗法), literally, “dharma slanderers” or “revilers,” those who did not accord his same priority to the Lotus Sutra. To Nichiren they were the moral equivalent of issendai (一闡 提, also abbreviated as sendai), or, in Sanskrit, icchantika, meaning someone having no goodness in his nature and hence no potential for attaining Buddhahood (Inagaki 1984; Stone 2012). Nichiren believed that it was necessary to confront an unbelieving evil world through various practices collectively known as shakubuku (折伏), literally “to break and suppress” devils and other opponents of Buddhism along with their heresies, and the fujufuse principle was believed by some within the Nichiren denomination to be integral to this effort. This principle, which for the most part developed within the denomination after the founder’s death, meant that one was neither to receive alms or offerings from (fuju) nor to give alms or offerings to (fuse) non-believers, i.e., one was to have no intercourse with them. The fuse principle rested upon stronger evidence within Nichiren’s writings than did the fuju principle. Nichiren asserted the fuse principle in his Risshō ankokuron (立正安国論 Establishing the Orthodox and

64  Secrecy and Privacy in Religious Faith and Practice Pacifying the State), a major doctrinal work written in 1260. According to Nichiren: If we accept the words of the Lotus Sutra, then we must understand that slandering the Mahayana scriptures is more serious than committing the five cardinal sins.4 Therefore, one who does so will be confined in the great fortress of Avîci Hell and cannot hope for release for countless eons. According to the Nirvana Sutra, even though you may give alms to a person who has committed one of the five cardinal sins, you must never give alms to a person who has slandered the dharma. (Nichiren Daishonin 1984: 37–38) By contrast, Nichiren’s only statement of the fuju dictum not to receive alms from those outside the fold is found in a letter of 1280 addressed to his disciple Niike Saemon (新池左衛門), in which Nichiren wrote the following: “Neither Buddhas nor gods would ever accept contributions from those who slander the Dharma. Then how can we human beings accept them? . . . Nor should you associate with slanderers, for if you do, you will share the same guilt as they” (Nichiren Daishonin 1979: 258). The fujufuse principle was clear: One is not to accept alms from, give alms to, or associate with anyone who slanders the dharma. What remained open to interpretation were what constituted the giving or receiving of alms, who was to be regarded as a slanderer of the dharma, what association with a dharma slanderer entailed, and whether there were circumstances under which such otherwise forbidden practices might be condoned as “expedient means” (Jpn. 方便 hōben, Skt. upāya), i.e., an ordinarily undesirable means toward a desirable end. After Nichiren’s death, his major disciples undertook the work of organizing their master’s teachings and founding temples, some of which upheld the fujufuse principle as a cardinal tenet, and others that embraced the more liberal interpretation that the principle did not preclude cooperation with political authorities or representatives of other denominations. For this latter group of “accommodationists,” the two most prominent early centers were in Kyoto—the Myōkenji (妙顕寺) and the Honkokuji (本圀 寺)—both of which had considerable incentive to compromise the fujufuse principle: In 1334, the Myōkenji was designated a chokuganji (勅願寺), a temple erected by imperial decree, a signal event marking the first official recognition of the Nichiren denomination; and during the 1330s and 1340s both temples were designated kiganji (祈願寺 official prayer halls) by the Ashikaga Bakufu (Miyazaki 1969: 104–6). Jeffrey Robert Hunter explained the temples’ decisions: The acceptance of the ranks of chokuganji and kiganji [was] in clear violation of Nichiren’s prohibition against offering religious services to nonbelievers. But Myōkenji and Honkokuji saw their mission as

Secrecy and Privacy in Religious Faith and Practice  65 establishing a link with the imperial family, and presumably through that connection, spreading Nichiren’s teachings throughout the nation. (1969: 92) The Myōkakuji (妙覚寺), founded in Kyoto in 1378 by Nichijitsu (日 実), who had left the accommodationist Myōkenji, served as the spiritual center for those who upheld an uncompromising literal interpretation of the fujufuse principle, and whom I style the “fundamentalists.” The first three articles of Nichijitsu’s nine-article Regulations (hosshiki 法式) of Myōkakuji affirm the doctrinal centrality of the fujufuse principle and read as follows: 1) It is forbidden to worship at shrines [attached to] dharma-slandering temples (except for sightseeing or on an official mission). 2) It is forbidden to make an offering to a dharma-slandering monk. 3) Even as an expedient to draw another [into the ranks], it is forbidden to receive directly the offerings of dharma slanderers. (Miyazaki 1969: 125) That the fundamentalists enjoyed the high ground on doctrinal issues is attested to by the fact that in the Kanshō Meiyaku (寛正盟約 Pledge) of 1466, a six-article accord endorsed by all but one of the Nichiren temples in Kyoto, two of the articles echo the Myōkakuji’s Regulations concerning the making of visits to temples and shrines outside the denomination, and the acceptance of offerings from those outside the fold, while making an exception when necessary to conform oneself to secular virtues (Miyazaki 1969: 157). Indeed, during roughly the century following the Ōnin War, the fujufuse principle appears to have been broadly acknowledged within the leading temples of the Nichiren denomination, and the denomination even enjoyed official exemption by the Ashikaga Bakufu from the requirement to accept offerings from secular authorities. Defiance—It was during the rule of Toyotomi Hideyoshi that the issue of fujufuse first pitted the Nichiren church against the political authority of the nascent early modern state. Where the warlord Oda Nobunaga had been more concerned with achieving military control of religious institutions, Hideyoshi began the effort to exercise political and economic control over the ecclesiastic realm, and it was to this end that he appointed Maeda Gen’i (前田玄以 1539–1602) to the position of Civil Magistrate (Minbu Hōin 民部法印) with authority over the affairs of shrines and temples. This was the de facto start of the early modern Japanese state’s attempt to control religious institutions, responsibilities that in the Tokugawa period were assigned to the reinvigorated Jisha Bugyō (寺社奉行), or Commissioner for Temples and Shrines, an office with precedents extending as far back as the Kamakura period (1185–1333). In 1589 Maeda Gen’i reaffirmed the special status of the Nichiren denomination on the basis of its fujufuse principle as follows:

66  Secrecy and Privacy in Religious Faith and Practice Concerning the Lotus denomination, since their regulations have forbidden them ever since the time of their founder from either accepting alms from or giving alms to [those of] other denominations, and in particular as they do not participate in the various fund-raising (kanjin 勧 進) campaigns [of the other denominations], even though the principle should apply [uniformly] throughout the capital, this denomination is exempted from such activities. (Miyazaki 1969: 204) Such assurances notwithstanding, Toyotomi Hideyoshi vacillated notoriously in his policies toward religious bodies, particularly during the last years of his life, with serious consequence for fujufuse practitioners as well as Christians. The problem arose in late 1595 upon the completion of the Myōhōin (妙法院), a hall commissioned by Hideyoshi to be constructed within the Tendai Hōkōji (方広寺) complex in order to house a Daibutsu, or large statue of the Buddha. On the tenth day of the ninth month of 1595, Maeda Gen’i sent each of the major Buddhist denominations—Tendai (天 台宗), Shingon (真言宗), Ritsu (律宗), Zen (禅宗), Jōdo (浄土宗), Nichiren (日蓮宗), Ji (時宗), and Ikkō (一向宗)—the following directive on behalf of Hideyoshi: The Taikō directs that for the sake of his ancestors each denomination is to send one hundred [of its monks] to participate in a monthly service at the Daibutsuden of the Myōhōin and to eat a meal [there]. This participation is to occur from the 22nd of this month. Temples that do not have one hundred [monks to participate] are to send written notification. (Miyazaki 1969: 204) Maeda Gen’i’s missive was received by the Nichiren denomination two days later, on the twelfth, and recognizing the problematic nature of participation in such an interdenominational event, the leaders of the six major Nichiren lineages quickly agreed to convene at the Honkokuji. Nisshin (日親), the abbot of Honkokuji, presided at the meeting and argued the accommodationist case, asserting that since Hideyoshi would likely destroy the denomination’s temples if they refused to participate, it would be prudent to participate on a one-time-only basis and then to apply the next day for exemption from further participation. This position had considerable merit, since Hideyoshi had until now been regarded as more sympathetic to the denomination than Nobunaga before him. For example, as a result of their “defeat” in a debate ordered by Oda Nobunaga in 1579 to resolve differences between the denominations, Nichiren monks had been ordered to pay damages and to submit an “admission of defeat” document to their Pure Land rivals. Hideyoshi ordered the Pure Land “victors” to return the embarrassing document. Note

Secrecy and Privacy in Religious Faith and Practice  67 also that Hideyoshi’s reversal on the question of Nichirenshū participation in interdenominational activities was not unlike his inconsistency toward the Christians, and thus the heretofore sympathetic treatment of the Nichiren denomination was uncertain. Nichiō (日奥 1565–1630), the young recently appointed (1592) abbot of the Myōkakuji, acted as spokesman for the fundamentalists. Born in Kyoto to a family of textile merchants, Nichiō regarded the fujufuse principle as a cardinal teaching of the denomination and argued that participation in any interdenominational event that involved the sharing of a meal represented an abomination akin to apostasy and would never have been condoned by Nichiren. Despite the cogency of Nichiō’s arguments and over his vigorous objections, the view of the accommodationists prevailed, and two months later Nichiō resigned from the Myōkakuji (Miyazaki 1969: 221). Despite the accommodationists’ assurance that participation would be a singular event, monthly participation by the Nichiren denomination actually continued until 1614 when the services themselves were finally discontinued. The participation of other denominations was incomplete and sporadic at best, magnifying the fundamentalists’ sense of betrayal (Hunter 1969: 143). In 1599, one year after Hideyoshi’s death, the accommodationist temples in Kyoto appealed to Ieyasu to resolve their dispute with the fundamentalists, who continued to resist participation in the memorial services. In response to their request, Ieyasu ordered the disputants to appear at Osaka Castle in late 1599 and to resolve their differences through the hallowed format of a debate. Clearly eager to settle the matter without confrontation, Ieyasu offered Nichiō remarkably generous terms in exchange for his participation: to allow Nichiō to participate in the [memorial] service once and only once; to provide Nichiō with an official document explaining that he only participated under the severest duress, and to allow Nichiō to compose the document to his own liking; to permit Nichiō to worship in a separate room, so that he would not be guilty of participation with the monks of other sects; and if Nichiō did not wish to partake of the proffered meal, to permit him to simply lift his chopsticks and bow in the direction of the meal tray. (ibid: 176–77) Remarkably, Nichiō rejected Ieyasu’s attempt at compromise. At the subsequent debate Nichiō was declared to be the loser and as punishment was exiled to Tsushima from mid-1600 until 1612, when he was pardoned by Itakura Katsushige (板倉勝重 1545–1624), Ieyasu’s deputy (Shoshidai 所司 代) in Kyoto. The next year Nichiō was granted an audience with Ieyasu, who by all indications was more interested in the political and economic control of religious institutions than in what he regarded as internal matters of doctrine.

68  Secrecy and Privacy in Religious Faith and Practice During the years 1615–16, the dispute between the Nichirenshū fundamentalists and accommodationists flared anew in the form of treatises and rebuttals exchanged between Nichiō and the new spokesman for the accommodationists, Jakushōin Nichiken Shōnin (寂照院日乾上人 1560–1635), but even this seems not to have provoked a rupture among the major Nichiren temples, and the disputants reconciled in 1616 at the Myōkenji.5 This reconciliation, in turn, set the stage for the official recognition of the fujufuse principle in 1623 by Itakura Katsushige, which allowed the Nichiren denomination to decline the offerings of those from other denominations, and to not participate in kanjin fundraising campaigns. As Nichiō summarized the issues upon which there was both intradenominational agreement as well as renewed official recognition, “The regulations (hosshiki) of our sect are detailed and complete. Among them, the first three are the core. The first prohibits visits to Shinto shrines, the second prohibits making offerings to those who slander the dharma, and the third prohibits accepting offerings from those who slander the dharma” (Hunter 1969: 211). Again, the accord proved to be short-lived. During the 1620s the arena of controversy shifted from Kyoto eastwards as the battle was joined by the Kuonji on Mount Minobu (身延山久遠寺), as headquarters of the accommodationists, and the Ikegami Honmonji (池上本門寺) just south of Edo, as the new spiritual center of the fundamentalists, whose principal spokesman after Nichiō was Nichiju (日樹 1574–1631). In 1629 the abbot of Minobu filed charges with the Jisha Bugyō against Ikegami and Nichiju, and in response to his charges yet another “debate” was staged in early 1630 between the two temples and their factions. The Minobu accommodationists were again declared to be winners; Nichiō was exiled to Tsushima in an exquisitely ironic punishment, as he had died a month earlier; and Nichiju and his followers were expelled from their temples, which were transferred to accommodationist control. In 1631, as part of what is commonly understood to have been an effort to eradicate Christianity, the Bakufu ordered main temples throughout Japan to submit updated lists of all their branch temples, and though evidence suggests that compliance with this directive was slow and that the lists themselves were incomplete, one may equally regard this as part of a concurrent and ongoing effort to uncover and eradicate fujufuse activity. The Minobu Kuonji submitted the Nichiren denomination’s list in early 1633, showing a total of 1,075 temples, of which 420 were branch temples of Minobu Kuonji and 165 were branch temples of Ikegami Honmonji; of these latter, most were located in or near Edo, and 134 (81%) were suspected of harboring fujufuse affiliation (Tamamuro 1974: 167). The Minobu accommodationists petitioned the Bakufu anew in 1661 and again in 1663, seeking its assistance in exposing fujufuse activity, and justifying their request on the grounds that fundamentalist priests had refused to participate in the twelfth anniversary memorial services following the death of the third Tokugawa Shogun Iemitsu in 1651. In the ninth month of 1663,

Secrecy and Privacy in Religious Faith and Practice  69 Minobu furthered its fratricidal anti-fujufuse effort by writing to the Jisha Bugyō Inoue Masatoshi (井上正利 1606–75), “respectfully informing” him of its eagerness to confront the fundamentalists, and then two days later by sending a “deposition” (kōjōgaki 口上書) to the Rōjū informing them of the unwillingness of three Nichiren temples to submit to their authority, and calling their attention to the fact that the fujufuse faction was regaining strength under what they asserted to be the relatively lax enforcement of religious policy under the regnant Shogun Ietsuna (r. 1651–80). The Bakufu’s response came two years later in the form of a prohibition of Nichiren confraternities (kō 講) and a new insistence on obtaining receipts whenever Bakufu largesse in the form of jiryō (寺領 temple lands) was conferred upon Nichiren temples, the obvious intent being to drive a wedge between the accommodationists and the fundamentalists, whose doctrine obliged them to reject such largesse, and thereby to expose the latter (Tamamuro 1974: 172–73). Persecution—In 1669, the Bakufu furthered its effort to rein in the fujufuse movement by promulgating a law that excluded fujufuse temples from issuing the terauke registration documents that served as the equivalent of household identity registries during the Edo period. As Tamamuro Fumio has noted, this brought the level of Bakufu oppression of the movement for the first time down to the level of the individual believer, who needed such documentation to rent lodgings or land, or to change his goningumi (Fivehousehold) affiliation. The significance from the point of view of the relationship between church and state and the Bakuhan state’s efforts to control religious activities is that prior to 1669 the state’s efforts had been directed principally against temples suspected of either harboring or supporting fujufuse activities, whereas after 1669 an individual could be punished simply for being identified as a follower of the fujufuse principle (Tamamuro 1974: 184–85). Recalling the secrecy in which they enveloped their ritual practices, it is impossible to estimate with confidence how many lay followers of Nichiren embraced the fujufuse principle, nor is it possible to state with precision just how many Nichiren temples either concealed within their precincts or locally subsidized the proscribed fujufuse activity, but the Fujufuse jiinchō (不受不施寺院帳 Registry of Fujufuse Temples), a remarkable document submitted to the Bakufu by the Minobu Kuonji in 1667, gives some suggestion of the level of intradenominational institutional support. According to the Registry, of forty-nine Nichiren temples accused of strongly promoting the fujufuse principle, twenty-four were identified as “ringleaders” (chōhonjin 張本人); of these twenty-four, thirteen were located in the three Kantō provinces of Musashi (武蔵), Shimōsa (下総), and Awa (安房), i.e., under the very nose of the Bakufu, and another seven were to be found in the nearby provinces of Echigo (越後), Sado (佐渡), Kaga (加賀), and Etchū (越中). In other words, the nucleus of the movement’s strength was in and near Edo.6 Further, though the Bakufu’s pressure succeeded in closing down

70  Secrecy and Privacy in Religious Faith and Practice a number of fujufuse temples, 70 percent of those temples suspected in 1633 of harboring fujufuse activity were believed thirty-four years later of having continued the practice clandestinely. And, if one examines the leadership of new branch temples within the Ikegami orbit with the roster of the disciples of Nichiju, the fujufuse principle’s foremost spokesman after Nichiō, one can only conclude that the fujufuse movement was actually gathering strength during this thirty-four-year interval (Tamamuro 1974: 179–83). It is also possible to glean some sense of how the movement functioned by examining contemporary descriptions of the investigations and trials of fujufuse practitioners. Of these narratives, the fullest is the Namekawa hōnanki (滑川法難記 Record of the Namekawa Persecution).7 Written just a few months after the events of 1718 that it describes, the work tells the story of the persecution of fujufuse practitioners in the village of Namekawa (滑川) in Kazusa (上総), which was believed to have been a long-standing center of fujufuse activity. The Record traces the genesis of fujufuse activity there back to 1665 when two Nichiren fundamentalist priests, Yōshin’in Nichikyō (要心院日鏡) and Sonryōin Nichiryō (尊了院日了), came to Namekawa in order to open a temple at which the forbidden principles were to be secretly taught and practiced. The fundamentalist movement in Namekawa was further consolidated through the ministry of a certain Enjōin (遠成院) who came to the village in 1705 and organized an “underground” fujufuse community that is said to have grown steadily. A catalytic event in the Namekawa fujufuse community occurred in 1716 on the occasion of a visit by the charismatic fundamentalist Shōjun’in Nichikin (清順院日近). Wishing that he could spend even a single night in the village but fearful of the consequences for the villagers were he to be discovered, Nichikin cut his visit short, but his stay was still long enough for his message to reach a certain Kosaburō (小三郎), who was well known locally as both a leper and an outspoken opponent of Buddhism. After listening to Nichikin, Kosaburō had a startling conversion experience and became a fervent believer in Nichiren Buddhism; no less remarkably, he experienced what many believed to be a miraculous healing of his leprosy in response to prayer. Nichikin’s visit was followed nearly a year later in 8/1717 by that of the renowned proselytizer Nichikyū (日休). It was said that as a result of the month Nichikyū spent in Namekawa, more than 200 believers were added in less than one year to the fujufuse community there. It is perhaps not surprising that such evangelistic success provoked the resentment of local priests from other denominations, and in 10/1717 the head priests of the rival Myōsenji (妙泉寺) and Honjakuji (本寂寺) threatened to go to the authorities to report on fujufuse activities in Namekawa, but were apparently dissuaded from doing so by the intervention of some of the local practitioners. By 2/1718, however, the two prelates were beyond appeasement, and the Myōsenji priest reported his suspicions in a complaint to the local Bakufu steward (Edo Jitō 江戸地頭), Kakedoi Hanshirō (掛樋半四朗). As a result of his complaint, some fourteen individuals from

Secrecy and Privacy in Religious Faith and Practice  71 Namekawa were apprehended and handed over to Kakedoi’s custody on 29/v/1718. Kakedoi investigated the circumstances surrounding the arrests but declined to pronounce judgment himself and instead sought the counsel of the Rōjū, on whose advice he had the fourteen transferred to the Superintendent of Shrines and Temples, Andō Ukyōnosuke Shigeyuki (安藤右京 亮重之).8 On 7/vi/1718 one of the fourteen in custody confessed and led investigators to the Namekawa villa of Kojima Mouemon (小島茂右衛門), where he was prepared to identify two clerical leaders of the fujufuse community, Taiun Nichiin (体運日因) and Fusen’in Esshin Nichizen (不染院悦心日然). Both Nichiin and Nichizen, however, had already fled Namekawa, seeking safe haven in Osaka. When questioned, the landlord Kojima Mouemon professed ignorance concerning the religious activities of his tenants and protested that as the fujufuse evangelist Shōjun’in Nichikin was a relative of his, he would like to have an opportunity to question Nichikin concerning the various allegations. Presumably unbeknownst to Kojima Mouemon, Nichikin had in fact likewise already fled the region for Akasaka in Edo, but at his appearance at the Jisha Bugyō’s offices the next day, Kojima Mouemon pledged that he would turn Nichikin in if he were to appear at his villa. During the hours shortly after midnight on the eleventh, Nichikin— accompanied by Kojima Mouemon and Mouemon’s housekeeper Jirōuemon (次郎右門), as well as the Namekawa nanushi (名主 headman) and toshiyori (年寄り elders)—presented himself at the genkan (玄関) entrance to the residence of Andō, the Jisha Bugyō. Nichikin began by proclaiming loudly that he alone among Nichiren priests upheld the principles of Nichiren in all their purity, and that he was thus a solitary “pillar of the polity” (Nihonkoku no hashira 日本国の柱), as Nichiren had styled himself centuries earlier. Nichikin explained the fujufuse principle to Andō as one that had been upheld since the time of Nichiren, and he related the history of the issue within the denomination up to and through the Ikegami–Minobu debates. Andō inquired whether the villagers of Namekawa were supporters of Nichikin’s activities, to which Nichikin responded that despite the fact that the region was one in which the fujufuse movement had been particularly active, none of the current villagers had made donations supporting his activities. When Andō then inquired how Nichikin had been able to support himself, Nichikin replied that he had been receiving support from the wife of a certain unnamed Daimyo, a response that Andō prudently chose not to explore further. However, no sooner had Nichikin absolved the Namekawa villagers of responsibility for or complicity in his activities, the housekeeper, Jirōuemon, stood up and in a powerful voice declared it untrue that Nichikin had no supporters in Namekawa. He confessed that Kojima Mouemon’s villa was where Nichikin had secretly lodged; that both Nichiin and Nichizen had likewise lived in the villa until their flight to Osaka the previous month; and that there were two additional fujufuse acolytes, one aged 18 and the other

72  Secrecy and Privacy in Religious Faith and Practice 16, of whom Andō was yet unaware. Perhaps moved by the confession of his housekeeper, and certainly implicated by it, Kojima Mouemon likewise proclaimed his own unwavering commitment to the fujufuse principle. Punishment for the clandestine religionists was swift and brutal. Within hours of their confessions both Nichikin and Kojima were imprisoned, and over the next few days not fewer than six additional lay fujufuse followers were apprehended or surrendered themselves; additionally, two fujufuse priests, Josen’in Nichiyū (恕宣院日融) and Ryōun’in Nichiyō (了運院日曜), surrendered themselves to the Jisha Bugyō, confessed their fujufuse principles, and were immediately imprisoned. Prisons in Tokugawa Japan must have been horrific places, since incarceration for even relatively brief periods was frequently lethal. Nichikin died in prison some three weeks later, and three weeks after his death, Kojima Mouemon recanted his fujufuse affiliation and became an informant. Both Nichiyū and Nichiyō also perished in prison, surviving roughly one and three months in incarceration respectively. Later still, on 23/viii/1718 Nichiin and Nichizen, who had both fled to Osaka, surrendered themselves to the Jisha Bugyō, asserted the fujufuse principle, and were imprisoned the same day. Of the fourteen Namekawa villagers and four priests who were imprisoned while awaiting sentencing, seven villagers died in prison, as did three of the priests. Sentencing of the eight survivors followed on 26/x/1718 from a Bakufu tribunal comprised of the Rōjū, Jisha Bugyō, Machi (町 Municipal) Bugyō, and others. Nichiin and Nichizen were exiled to Izu Ōshima (伊豆大 島), and two other priests were exiled to Miyakejima (三宅島). Tamamuro Fumio believes that the relative leniency in the sentencing of the surviving fujufuse priests is attributable to the Bakufu’s concern over further arousing public opinion, which probably regarded the deaths that had occurred in prison as sufficient punishment (1974: 194–96). Of the seven surviving Namekawa villagers, all recanted and were released. The Bakufu may indeed have felt that the deaths of so many fujufuse proponents and practitioners in prison, particularly in Edo where the movement was accurately suspected of being strong, might provoke anti-Bakufu feeling. Another chronicle, the Shimōsa hōnanki (下総法難記 Records of the Shimōsa Persecutions), sheds additional light on both the organizational structure of the fujufuse movement and the wretchedness of prison conditions during the Edo period (Tanikawa 1972: 242–46). The first Shimōsa persecution occurred in 1794 in some six villages in Katori (香取) in present-day Chiba (千葉県) Prefecture. Acting on information provided by a priest named Eison (英存), twelve priests and seven landlords were arrested, and the circumstances surrounding the arrests of the landlords shed light on how the movement structured itself in Katori. Apparently, fujufuse priests removed themselves from the temples with which they had formal affiliation and entered an “underground” existence in which they were housed and otherwise supported by the villagers to whom they ministered.

Secrecy and Privacy in Religious Faith and Practice  73 In the case of the Katori arrests, the crime of the landlords was twofold: first, they rented lodgings to fujufuse priests, and second, they were themselves practitioners of the proscribed principle. This may explain why essentially the same sentence was meted to the landlords as to the priests: each of the twelve priests and seven landlords was sentenced to prison in Edo, where eighteen of the nineteen perished, fourteen within one month of when their incarceration commenced. Some fifty-four suspected collaborators were also arrested in connection with the Katori incident. Each of the fifty-four was initially imprisoned but then quickly released and given a lesser sentence: five were exiled for having rented land to fujufuse priests without adding their names to the Shūmon jinbetsuchō Registry; one was sentenced to house arrest for having had a fujufuse priest on her premises; two were expelled 10 ri (里; 25 miles) from Edo for making false statements to the authorities; ten were fined amounts ranging from 3–10 kanmon (貫文); fifteen were stripped of their official posts in their respective villages; and twenty-one were publicly censured. Despite the severity of the 1794 persecution of the fujufuse movement in Katori, it succeeded in rebuilding its underground network and organizational structure, as evidenced by yet another persecution there in 1839–40. This persecution was actually part of a nationwide effort, prompted by a complaint submitted to the Jisha Bugyō by a disgruntled fujufuse practitioner from Osaka. In the Katori district of Shimōsa, the second persecution began with an 1838 visit of inspection by Harado Ichirō (原戸一浪), the Kantō Torishibari (関東取縛 Sheriff) of Tako (多古) village in Katori district. Harado’s questioning of seven villagers suspected of fujufuse activity resulted in the imprisonment of five and the acquittal of two; of the five who were imprisoned, one died while incarcerated and another two passed away shortly after their release. Though the sentencing was severe, Harado’s inquisition proved to be superficial, for in 1839 following a change in Jisha Bugyō, the new Kantō Torishibari Nakayama Seiichirō (中山誠一郎) revisited the area, this time questioning priests, village officials, and peasants from twenty villages in Shimōsa and Kazusa. When he issued his findings some eight months later, 143 individuals were found guilty of knowingly violating the Bakufu’s policies regarding fujufuse. Despite the rigor of his inquisition, however, the punishments were remarkably light, suggesting that there was diminishing interest in the last decades of the Edo period in enforcing the prohibition of this victimless crime: of the 143, those who submitted statements of contrition and renunciation were acquitted; the nanushi, or village headmen, of the various offending villages were fined 3 kanmon each; the kumigashira ( 組頭) or leaders of the relevant local neighborhood associations were reprimanded; and even the forty-seven priests, all of whom professed ignorance concerning the religious activities of their parishioners, were all treated lightly. The sentences of the nanushi and kumigashira are particularly

74  Secrecy and Privacy in Religious Faith and Practice striking for their perfunctory quality, which I interpret as tacit acknowledgment by the state that those who failed to enforce Bakuhan religious policies at the most local level were not engaged in what could be construed as a subversive activity. The Shimōsa hōnanki indicates the difficulties faced by local authorities in ferreting out the proscribed fujufuse practice, especially their dependence on informants and confessions, which formed the cornerstones of Tokugawaperiod jurisprudence. At the local level there was little incentive for one to disclose to the authorities the illegal activities of an otherwise ideal neighbor, so long as those activities were victimless and confined to the private sphere. In this respect, the circumstances of underground fujufuse practitioners were similar to those of the underground Christians, who likewise found safety by adopting the disguise of ideal citizenship (Nosco 1993). Another contemporary record that focuses on Bizen reinforces the impression that local authorities were frequently less than zealous in prosecuting transgressors of Bakuhan religious policy. The Jisha kyūki (寺社旧記 Old Records of Temples and Shrines) describes what happened in 1753 when a stone monument representing the fujufuse patriarch Nichiō was exhibited at a memorial service attended by six priests and numerous laypersons in Bizen’s Kamimichi (上道) district. The event was clearly an embarrassment for the three local Nichiren temples and their priests who, despite not having sponsored or condoned the memorial service, feared that it suggested their own indifference toward the prohibition of the fujufuse principle. Accordingly, they undertook to report it to the local authorities, who, in turn, questioned the mason who chiseled the image, the benefactor who sponsored the project, and the main temples of which the local Nichiren temples were branches, but none of these queries shed light on just who had either led or participated in the movement. The queries did, however, result in an estimate of some 4,500 fujufuse practitioners in Bizen, a remarkably large figure that was accounted for by the remoteness of the main temples, which made local practices that much harder to supervise. That Bizen retained pockets of fujufuse activity on a significant scale is borne out by the same document’s description of the 1813 fujufuse inquisition in Masuhara village (増原) of Wake (和気) district. Of some 150 households in the village, 144 (96%) were found to contain fujufuse practitioners, each of whom brazenly joined in submitting a statement attesting to the accuracy of the charge. The local Nichiren temple was a branch of the fundamentalist Myōkokuji (妙国寺) in Sakai, which ostensibly threatened to withhold funeral and other services in an effort to regain some measure of control over the spiritual practices of its parishioners, but the locals remained defiant. The situation was only resolved when Okayama domainal officials entered into the negotiations between Myōkokuji and the villagers, and the latter allowed the temple to submit a document on their behalf containing the patently untrue assertion that the villagers’ religious practices were once again under control (Tanikawa 1972: 290–91). I interpret the

Secrecy and Privacy in Religious Faith and Practice  75 domainal acceptance of the document as evidence that the domainal authorities likewise had no interest in further investigating or prosecuting individuals whose only offense was violation of the Bakufu’s religious policies, with no subversive implications and without provoking public disorder. Perhaps the most remarkable perspective on the attitude of local officials in Bizen toward the fujufuse is offered by the Mitsui kyōdensho (密意共伝 書 The Secret Compact), which suggests that village authorities there may even have colluded in actively concealing fujufuse activity from the central government (Tanikawa 1972: 267–76). The work tells of a peasant named Mitsuyoshi (光吉), also from Wake village in Wake district, who died in 1848. Funerals were difficult occasions for those who followed the fujufuse principle, since one of the ways in which the Bakufu enforced its religious policies was by requiring all individuals to have a Buddhist funeral. It is said that like the “underground” Christians who developed their own liturgies for abbreviated Christian funerals performed either immediately before or after the compulsory Buddhist rites, fujufuse practitioners likewise had their own tradition of a private fujufuse funeral immediately following the orthodox public ceremony. Prior to his death, Mitsuyoshi had arranged for the required funeral ceremony to be performed by priests from his local Nichiren temple, Rengenji (蓮現寺), but while he was still in his coffin, it was discovered that a small paper package had been sewn into the back seam of his robe. When a priest from the Rengenji noticed and tried to retrieve the package, it was confiscated by one of the guests, whereupon the priest informed the village headman of what he suspected to be evidence of fujufuse activity. During the course of the ensuing inquiry, it was learned that Mitsuyoshi had an elder brother named Tadayoshi (忠吉) who lived in the neighboring village of Kuroda (黒田) and was himself suspected of being a local spiritual leader of the fujufuse. Realizing that the situation was expanding in a potentially dangerous manner, and perhaps being themselves sympathizers with, if not actual participants in, the fujufuse movement, the village headmen of Wake and Kuroda concocted the story that Mitsuyoshi had entrusted a fujufuse scroll into the care of his brother with the request that it be buried with him, and that this request was innocently carried out without the knowledge of either brother’s family. As Mitsuyoshi was dead, there was thus no one else to prosecute and nothing left to do, other than to complete his burial, thanks to what appears to have been the nimble prevarication of the local nanushi. When one compares this incident with that of Masuhara village in the same district of Wake, where 96 percent of the households openly admitted their fujufuse allegiance, one begins to understand the predicament of local authorities in areas of high concentration of fujufuse practitioners. Early modern ideology reinforced the view that such local authorities as village headmen (nanushi), village elders (toshiyori), and heads of neighborhood associations (kumigashira) were extensions of the Bakufu’s central authority,

76  Secrecy and Privacy in Religious Faith and Practice and as such were responsible for the enforcement of such national policies as those pertaining to religious activity. Such justification notwithstanding, the rationale for local enforcement of central policies was always articulated in terms of the need to preserve public order and to provide for the well-being of those within the jurisdictions of local authorities. This ideology, however, was at odds throughout the Edo period with the countervailing tradition of maximizing local autonomy, and it is clear that at the enforcement level of the village or district, individuality trumped ideology, and the prosecution of large numbers of fujufuse practitioners was fundamentally incompatible with the state’s rationale. Further, there is every reason to assume that commoner village authorities saw it as in their own interest to avoid embarrassment by concealing wrongdoing within their communities from those in external authority over them. Secrets acquire a life of their own for those who choose to keep them, a life that far outlives whatever genesis an “underground” community identifies for itself, and it is important to recall Georg Simmel’s observations regarding the profound impact of group secrecy on the group’s individual members. This makes the efficiency of the “underground” structure of the fujufuse all the more comprehensible. On the one hand, the movement could survive as a substratum within the labyrinthine network of aboveground Nichiren temples, especially those branch temples of the Ikegami Honmonji lineage, in which the “disguise” was the best imaginable, namely, that of invisibility. On the other hand, fujufuse communities, from the macro level of the village to the micro level of a single dwelling, could conspire to house, support, and conceal those fundamentalist priests who served as their spiritual links to such clandestine centers as the Ikegami Honmonji. As mentioned, keeping a secret is not easy and is in some ways unnatural, which helps us to understand the apparent boldness of the 96 percent of Masuhara villagers who in 1813 brazenly submitted documents attesting to their practice of the forbidden fujufuse principle: on the one hand, the revelation resolves the tension sustained by the secrecy, and on the other hand, and again consistent with Tokugawa jurisprudence, the confession includes an unstated appeal for clemency. We see this same tension no less emphatically—though certainly with less consistency—in the transformation experienced by the initially timid Kojima Mouemon in Namekawa in 1718. As will be recalled, Kojima initially prevaricated when questioned and denied knowledge of the movement. Then, emboldened by the confessions of others, he joined his brethren in confessing his forbidden faith; but once imprisoned in the lethal confines of the Tokugawa criminal justice system, Kojima recanted and turned informant. Group secrecy empowers its individual members, but this power typically dissipates with the isolation of the group’s members, and in Kojima’s case self-interest seems likewise to have been served by the course of confession. Certainly, the brutality of treatment meted out to fujufuse practitioners must have mitigated any impulse on the part of local authorities to

Secrecy and Privacy in Religious Faith and Practice  77 prosecute violators of the state’s policies regarding fujufuse. When incarceration for more than a few weeks becomes tantamount to capital punishment, and when capital punishment so clearly exceeds the proportions of the crime, then the state ironically finds its penal options to have narrowed. The remaining sentencing options of public censure, monetary fine, or exile would surely have seemed of relatively little consequence for those whose commitment to a religious principle was so strong that they were at least in theory willing to risk their lives in order to practice what they believed. A second dilemma for local authorities in regions with significant concentrations of fujufuse practitioners was posed by the obvious fact that such communities did not arise overnight: again as one observes in an examination of the underground Christians, unless the “discovery” of an underground community came at the beginning of a local official’s term, the existence of any sizable community would call into question the competence of that official’s supervision and oversight up to the point of “discovery” (Nosco 1993). This may help to explain the circumstances of the second inquisition in Katori. Recall that the persecution began with a complaint from a disgruntled fujufuse practitioner who turned informant in 1838, but that the initial inquisition was apparently perfunctory; it was only with the change of both the local Kantō administrator and the Jisha Bugyō that a more rigorous investigation in 1839 “revealed” some 143 heretofore unknown violators of the policy. Perhaps the greatest problem faced by the local authorities, however, was that the “crime” of fujufuse activity was such that it defied forensic investigation. Georg Simmel observed this point in the context of the danger of possessing incriminating documents, noting that “writing is opposed to all secrecy” (Simmel 1950: 352). In other words, for those who collectively possess a secret, the greatest danger (short of a breakdown in internal discipline) is disclosure of material evidence of the secret activity. It is for this reason that incriminating evidence of fujufuse activity was always less likely to surface—the case of Mitsuyoshi’s funeral being the exception rather than the rule—and so prosecutions of the fujufuse overwhelmingly depended on either information provided by informants or on an individual’s confession. Secrecy, privacy, and individuality—To be an informant on the activities of one’s neighbors was an inherently antisocial activity in Tokugawa Japan, as in most places, and despite the examples discussed in this chapter, one finds remarkably few instances of such willful disclosures. Similarly, one can understand the circumstances of a religionist who, once implicated by another, openly confesses his or her faith when queried by the authorities, since to do otherwise would represent a repudiation of the very principles for which an individual has all along risked his or her well-being, and since, as already observed, the confession implies a veiled appeal for clemency. But to confess without the provocation of external implication was utterly contrary to both the self-interest of the individual and the inherently defensive impulse of secrecy.

78  Secrecy and Privacy in Religious Faith and Practice When one considers the predicament of local authorities charged with enforcing the state’s religious policies, one arrives at the cusp of secrecy and privacy. Secrecy in the examples we have examined is a defensive practice, in which one either individually or in concert with others uses the practice of secrecy to defend oneself against a state that enjoys a monopoly on the legitimate use of force. Secrecy is thus, in the words of Carol Warren and Barbara Laslett, an attempt “to avert the full wrath of whatever powerful groups are in control of the definition of ‘undesirable elements’ ” (1980: 29). But as Norman MacKenzie has observed, secrecy is always “only partial” (1967: 299), and there is thus always an element of community consent and acknowledgment wherever secrecy is present. We observe in our own day that, as in the world of early modern Japan, the shared value of privacy demands that one not act on every suspicion, and that beyond the antisocial qualities attached to acting as an informant, there are indeed times when informing on one’s neighbor is contrary to one’s own self-interest, especially if the act is to serve as a precedent for others in one’s community. It is this degree of the consensual—this wedge between the defensive practice of secrecy and the accorded qualities of privacy—that ultimately distinguishes secrecy from privacy. As Alida Brill points out, privacy “exists only when others let you have it” (1990: xii). On one side of this cusp, we thus have the practitioners of the fujufuse principle who adopted the veil of secrecy in order to defend themselves against the wrath of the Bakuhan state, but who as a consequence of their secrecy also experienced enhanced senses of identity and individuality. In a recent study of secrecy and concealment among Shin Buddhists, Clark Chilson has written that “secrecy above all separates. . . . [and] thus creates a clear discussion between ‘us’ and ‘them,’ the ‘us’ being those who both know and conceal from others and the ‘them’ being either those who do not know, or, if they somehow do know, do not conceal” (2014: xi). We have examined and analyzed fujufuse practitioners as a group, but their stories are in every instance about individuals prepared to defy authority and to risk their personal welfare in order to preserve their religious practices and convictions and their attendant apartness. On the other side we find the local community and its authorities, for whom it was a matter of their own ironic self-interest to feign ignorance concerning what were surely at least in some instances the transparently illegal practices of their neighbors. Once this space between the ideological imperatives of the state on the one hand, and the self-interest of individuals and communities on the other has been opened, we then find allowance made for privacy in the area of religious practice and conviction. We can thus perhaps better understand the circumstances surrounding the case with which we began this chapter: the arrest of Sakamoto Shinraku in 1870 in that same district of Wake in Bizen where the local authorities conspired to contain the damage from the hapless Mitsuyoshi’s funeral, and which was such a stronghold of the forbidden fujufuse. By 1870, there were

Secrecy and Privacy in Religious Faith and Practice  79 surely few in the nascent Meiji state who cared about enforcing a religious policy that had its genesis in a controversy nearly three centuries earlier surrounding memorial services for the ancestors of Toyotomi Hideyoshi. By 1870, in fact, it is likely that the matter was principally of interest only to those within the Nichiren denomination itself, or at least to those with sufficient doctrinal sophistication even to know of the issue. This helps us to understand the oddly anachronistic quality of the arguments pro and con that swirled concerning whether or not punishment and further persecution of Sakamoto and his brethren were appropriate. Fortunately for Sakamoto and the others, the new state had far more pressing matters with which to concern itself, and it is in this context that we can imagine the relief of all concerned when the 1875 decree on religious freedom put an apparent end to the issue—though not exactly once and for all, as we shall see in the Afterword.

Notes 1  Bodart-Bailey 1999: 103. 2 The relevant documents may be found in the Honpa saikō ganjo rokutsū (本派再 興願書六通 The Six Transcendent Qualities of the Prayer for the Revival of the Original Sect), which is in Tanikawa Ken’ichi 1972. 3  Engelbert Kaempfer recognized the importance of the Lotus Sutra in late ­seventeenth-century Japan, maintaining that “it serves all pagan teachers east of the river Ganges as a general Bible” (Bodart-Bailey 1999: 129). 4 The five cardinal sins (gogyakuzai 五逆罪) included killing one’s parent or a ­Buddhist “worthy” (arhat), wounding a Buddha, or harming the monastic order (sangha). 5 Nichiō’s Shūgi seihōron (宗義制法論 1616) summarized the reasons for non-­ participation in the memorial services as follows: 1) it is forbidden to worship in front of the Buddha of another denomination; 2) it is wrong that the Nichiren denomination has been assigned a lower place (fifth) than the Pure Land denomination; 3) Hideyoshi was never a believer in the Lotus Sutra; and 4) the Nichiren denomination had received the good offices of the Kyoto Deputy (Kyōto Shoshidai) upholding their right to practice their faith in the manner of their own choosing. See Tamamuro 1974: 140. 6  One section of the Registry identifying Ikegami branch temples showed that of 124 Ikegami branch temples, 46 were in Musashi, 35 in Kazusa, and 33 in ­Sagami, again revealing an overwhelming concentration (94%) in and near Edo. 7 Also known as the Gohōnankisha, the work is found in Tanikawa 1972: 205–13. 8 Following Tamamuro Fumio’s identification (1974: 188) of the Superintendent, who is identified in the Namekawa hōnanki (行川法難記) as Andō Sakyōdono.

5 Self-Cultivation, Salon Culture, and the Private Academy

The Master said, “In ancient times learning was for the sake of oneself, whereas now learning is for the sake of others.” Confucius (d. 479 BCE), Analects 14:25 (Irene Bloom trans.)1

As we broadly survey the human scene, there are the wise and stupid, the rich and poor, the noble and lowly, whose conditions seem to differ as greatly as the clouds and the mud. Why is this? The reason is clear. . . [and] is traceable to the degree of learning. Fukuzawa Yukichi, Gakumon no susume2

In the thoroughly middle-class neighborhood in Queens, New York, where I lived in the early 1980s, almost all my neighbors took their daughters to ballet class and their sons to piano lessons (we examine some related statistics for Japan in the Afterword). It was explained to me many times that ballet would teach one’s daughters graceful movement, and that piano would teach one’s sons music appreciation. However, the obvious truth was that this only occurred in a minority of instances, which begs the question of why loving parents would perpetuate this expensive and often humiliating torture. I suspect that there was on the parents’ part an unconscious impulse to acquire for their children forms of learning to which they themselves would have been denied access just a few centuries earlier, either for reasons of class background or for lack of resources. We all experience education both collectively and individually, sometimes for vocational advantage, but often justified by idealistic rationales: one studies medicine to heal others; law to defend the helpless, support justice, or remove malefactors from our midst; doctoral studies in order to advance the frontiers of knowledge; and so on. All of this can be seen in the epigraph by Confucius above, that there was a time when one studied for oneself, but “now,” i.e., more than twenty centuries before the Tokugawa, learning was intended to serve others.

82  Self-Cultivation, Salon Culture, and the Private Academy In a similar vein, in the second epigraph Fukuzawa opines that human differences are not preordained or destined but are the natural outcome of differences in education. At one level this is a truism regarding the process of change, but it nonetheless seems undeniable that education has a way of accelerating this process. At every level, learning is transformational: It may not make one more capable of goodness as Xunzi (荀子) argued in the third century BCE, but it leaves no one unaffected. Most of my schooling and most of my career have been spent in private institutions where parents like my own give of their limited resources to fund education that they believe will in some fundamental sense pay dividends and will in this sense pay for itself. For this same reason societies—states, provinces, countries, municipalities, and even international organizations—recognize education as a worthwhile investment and subsidize it to remarkable degrees. Education is a form of self-improvement, which is not the same as selfcultivation though there is an obvious sibling resemblance between the two. This relationship, in fact, is similar to the family resemblance we have already observed between individuality and individual identity, and again between collective identity and equality. Walk into a branch of any chain of bookstores, and one will find a section called “self-improvement”: books on carpentry, grooming, weight gain/loss, cooking, playing musical instruments, test taking, and on and on. Books on self-cultivation, by contrast, appear more commonly in bookstores under designations like “spirituality” or “religions.” In the metaphor of carpentry, self-improvement is about increasing the quality and quantity of tools in one’s toolbox; but self-cultivation is about becoming a better carpenter. Individuals with distinctive skills and accomplishments, or those aspiring to learn, have always sought each other out, forming both real and virtual communities—voluntary associations—that are a hallmark of contemporary civil society. Similarly, improving oneself by learning new skills, training in polite arts, and self-cultivation were likewise divided in the Japan of two to three hundred years ago between private academies on the one hand, and new religions and modes of religious thought on the other. As I suggested earlier, the places where these associations took place remained liminal and full of contradictions. They were highly egalitarian and meritocratic spaces that operated according to rules all their own: places of freedom of inquiry and opinion. However, at the same time, society—that Edo world outside the schoolhouse walls—was never totally left behind. *** In every period of Japanese history, one can find explorations into and even debates over the constitution and character of the self and the individual person. Japan’s medieval period was a Buddhist age. To be sure, there were always independent heterodox thinkers and contrarians, like Yoshida Kanetomo (吉田兼倶 1435–1511), who went against the grain of his times, challenging the traditional spiritual order by arguing for the priority of Shinto

Self-Cultivation, Salon Culture, and the Private Academy  83 over Buddhist noumena. But figures like Kanetomo were exceptional, and prior to the introduction of Christianity during the 1550s, the Buddhist worldview was completely dominant. Buddhists and Buddhism almost always found ingenious ways to coexist from their position of strength with every manner of localized spirituality and religious practitioner, from mountain hermits to Kyoto-based diviners, but while individual spiritual and soteriological pursuits were varied, they were also generically limited. Some pursued enlightenment, which was understood as an extinguishing of the self as a consequence of a long period of training within one of the great monastic centers, or perhaps through spiritual praxes like meditation, or even through chanting sacred syllables as a concession to what were widely regarded as apocalyptic times. Others sought to negotiate their own salvation through actions individually and collectively intended to lead to rebirth in one or another paradise, the best known of which was the Pure Land of Amida. Nowhere in the medieval spiritual landscape, however, does one encounter an effort to change the world as a whole, to improve society, or even to better oneself at a time when Buddhism inveighed against wealth and fame as ephemera and dangerous expressions of the flawed premise that self-advancement can be accomplished without karmic consequences. During the early decades of the Tokugawa period, Buddhist, Shinto, and even Christian scholars and theologians debated these subjects with ideas ranging from the non-abiding nature of the self associated most commonly with Buddhism, to the divinely originated spirit of the human person in a natural state of grace so fundamental to Christianity’s appeal, and on to the socially and hierarchically imbricated subject that we have linked most closely in this volume with Confucianism. Indeed, it was during the Tokugawa, and in particular under the influence of the newest strains of Confucianism, that the quest for more precise and sustained articulations of the nature and meaning of the individual as social, juridical, and political actor took on a new urgency (Nosco and Ketelaar 2015: 22). Self-improvement—During the Tokugawa period, both the intellectual world of the academy and the spiritual world of the temple came to be filled with any number of options for individual self-improvement and selfcultivation. Though these were richly variegated, what they typically shared was a daily effort to nurture and transform oneself in the pursuit of a specific goal and in the direction of an idealized absolute. Note the difference between this early modern emphasis on self-improvement and self-cultivation on the one hand, and the medieval emphasis on salvation and enlightenment on the other. Note too our distinction between self-cultivation and self-improvement, the former having a greater spiritual dimension and the latter a more aspirational and practical quality. In its most typical form during the Tokugawa, self-cultivation entailed the acquisition of an understanding and attendant recapturing of that part of one’s original endowment known variously as the True Mind (honshin o shiru 本心を知る), something

84  Self-Cultivation, Salon Culture, and the Private Academy that Janine Sawada has characterized as a “religious quest” and a “path to human perfection” (1993: 1). By the end of the Genroku period, popular writings reflect a widespread interest in self-improvement. In a short story included in a work published posthumously in 1694, Ihara Saikaku listed various forms of training by named masters and leading schools lavished by a merchant household on an otherwise wayward son with no skill in the ways of commerce. These included singing as accompaniment to musical performance; Noh-style chanting; composition of linked verse and haiku; flower arrangement; kemari (蹴鞠) football; tea ceremony; lectures on the Confucian Way and the monoyomi (物読, later styled as sodoku 素読) manner of reading classics; go; archery; distinguishing incenses; antiques and antiquarian matters; and training in other musical instruments including Biwa, Koto, and Taiko drums (Noma 1960: 323). Saikaku’s intention in this list of polite accomplishments was to amuse and satirize, but the list is nonetheless formidable as a veritable catalog of the richly variegated forms of self-improvement available to a merchantclass townsman in the Genroku period. A century earlier, polite arts like poetry, painting, calligraphy, music, and kemari were the prerogative of the upper class, but during the Tokugawa they were also a source of income for males from the nobility who were able to use what they had learned as boys in order to instruct samurai in the polite arts. In turn, samurai later learned to use their training in these accomplishments to train still others and thus as supplementary sources of income in a more peaceful age (Rowley 2013: 16–17).3 With the civilianization of the samurai class as it transitioned to an age of relative peace, the honorific valor that had once been part of the reward for success in combat was attained through other means, and one of these was the ability to demonstrate—and note again the requirement of performance—one’s knowledge of Confucianism (Ikegami 1995). For roughly the first Tokugawa century, progressive domains thus hired their own Confucian scholars, men like Kumazawa Banzan or Yamazaki Ansai, to train samurai in ways that would render them of more use to domainal administration while at the same time reinforcing those values deemed most appropriate to their respective forms of service, like loyalty (shin 信) and reverence (kei 敬). Leading authorities on the history of Tokugawa education have written that “no area of life benefitted more from the civilizing effects of two-and-ahalf centuries of peace. . . and the moderate economic growth that accompanied it, than did formal education” (Beauchamp and Rubinger 1989: 22). It is indeed critical for us to recognize this importance of economic growth to Tokugawa education. Both the rapidly growing publication industry and the educational opportunities discussed in this chapter would not have been possible without the expansion of the economy and the availability of surpluses in increasing numbers of households. All of the forms of training mentioned by Saikaku represent popular culture in the sense that they were forms of

Self-Cultivation, Salon Culture, and the Private Academy  85 culture that paid for themselves, i.e., the tuition paid by their students— willing consumers—provided a livelihood to their master purveyors. In this regard, note especially the inclusion of hearing lectures on the Confucian Way by Utsunomiya Ton’an (宇都宮遯庵 1633–1707), better known in his own age than to posterity as an authority on the Confucian Way, and experiencing the monoyomi (later known as sodoku) manner of reading the classics aloud. Literacy became a sine qua non for those seeking access to commercial opportunities, whether in cities or among propertied elites within villages, and by the end of the Tokugawa period there were some 15,000 of the spontaneously established “little red schoolhouses” known as terakoya (寺子屋) throughout Japan, with as many as 4,000 established between 1856 and 1867 alone (Beauchamp and Rubinger 1989: 22). Richard Rubinger has observed that by “the end of the seventeenth century, a high degree of literacy was expected of the samurai and advanced study in Confucian classics had become part of their training for leadership” (1982: 50). However, even a century earlier it would have been considered “humiliating [for a noblewoman] not to know how to write,” as Luis Frois observed in 1585 while at the same time noting that in the Europe of his day “literate women are not so prevalent” as in Japan (Rowley 2013: 35). And by the late eighteenth century, to neglect the education of one’s children was to invite approbation, as Carl Peter Thunberg observed after a year’s residence in Japan in 1775–76 (Screech 2005: 223) In Japan there was no civil service examination based on mastery of core Confucian texts and commentaries as there was in China and to a lesser degree in Korea, and so mastery of this knowledge in Japan did not in the same way or degree conduce to personal success or professional advancement, but it nonetheless did find other ways to do so. The conventional view has been to see the goal of formal education as primarily moral training intended to improve the character of Bakufu vassals (Beauchamp and Rubinger 1989: 24; Backus 1974: 97), but this is in need of reconsideration, as it likely represents a projection of Japan’s contemporary present onto its early modern past. That the majority of the 260 domains as well as the Bakufu itself were willing to commit always limited resources to samurai education speaks to the assumption that such learning will contribute to a more effective bureaucracy staffed by samurai possessed of a broad range of useful skills, which in turn should contribute toward a more robust polity. But the ideological idealism that proposed that instruction in morality would translate into a more moral and ethical officialdom was as misplaced in Japan as in China whence it originated. Confucianism’s attraction—Decades ago I attempted to explain the attraction of Neo-Confucianism to Tokugawa intellectuals in terms of its dual intellectual and spiritual appeal (Nosco 1984: 3–26). My reasoning was that Neo-Confucianism provided an intellectually satisfying, rational, and humanistic alternative to Buddhist ontology and metaphysics, while at

86  Self-Cultivation, Salon Culture, and the Private Academy the same time addressing more spiritual questions related to cosmogony and cosmology. I do not believe that this was erroneous insofar as it explains what made Neo-Confucianism doctrinally and metaphysically attractive, but it is in retrospect unsatisfactory as an explanation of either why so many turned to the study of Neo-Confucianism, or why its core texts became central to Tokugawa curricula at all levels. These questions require more nuanced answers. Maeda Tsutomu (前田勉) has gone so far as to style it a “great mystery” (daimondai 大問題) why anyone in Japan would study Confucian texts, but he has at the same time also provided considerable insight into some possible answers (2012: 24). Maeda identifies two goals in traditional Confucianism: the path of self-control or mastery (shūko 修己), and the path of governing others (chimin 治民), and of these two only the former had relevance to Edo-period urban townsmen who were formally excluded from publicly expressing political opinions, let alone putting them into practice. Many townsmen of course did have opinions, and some even shared them either metaphorically or directly, but Maeda is correct in pointing out that from the time of the Wang Yangming follower Nakae Tōjū (中江藤樹 1608– 48) up to (but not including) the time of Ogyū Sorai’s ascendance c. 1717, the universal potential for attainment of sagehood was a goal for townsmen, to whom it was represented as a realizable ideal, as for example in the eclectic writings of an Ishida Baigan (石田梅岩 1685–1744)—striving to perfect oneself had become a way of proving oneself.4 Anna Beerens’ statistical (prosopographical) analysis of 173 intellectuals active in the last quarter of the eighteenth century sheds further light on the intriguing question of why individuals studied Confucianism and other seemingly arcane subjects. Looking narrowly at those in her sample who studied Kangaku (漢学 Chinese studies) and/or Kanshi (漢詩 Chinese verse), one might expect that if the purpose of such instruction was to improve one’s position in domainal bureaucracies, then these students would be mainly drawn from the ranks of samurai. However, Beerens’ analysis suggests that no more than 20 percent of these students were active samurai or rōnin, and an even smaller fraction (six of forty-three) were the actual instructors. Further, almost nine in ten (89%) of these students of Sinology were also students of some other non-Sinological field, suggesting a heretofore unobserved catholicity of academic interests (Beerens 2006: 239). As Beerens concludes, there had been times when the sociopolitical elite comprised of samurai, kuge courtiers, and members of the Kyoto monarchy were likewise the cultural elite, but “the prosopography clearly demonstrates that [by the late eighteenth century] this was no longer the case,” and that for samurai as well as non-samurai commoners, “making use of one’s talents for art, literature, and/or learning was one way to improve one’s circumstances both materially and socially” (ibid: 270, 276). As we will observe shortly when we turn to salon culture, knowledge of diverse fields was a mark of status,

Self-Cultivation, Salon Culture, and the Private Academy  87 especially for those who had once been excluded from it for reasons of social class or status. For most of the eighteenth century ideological orthodoxy in Confucian instruction was of no concern to the Bakufu so long as it could not be regarded as destabilizing of the status quo. Even within the academy it sponsored, the Bakufu was generally indifferent to the educational function of and curriculum within the Sage’s Hall (Seidō 聖堂), led by the Hayashi family, after the death of Hayashi Hōkō (林鳳岡 1645–1732). This academic laissez-faire prevailed until the Bakufu’s abrupt volte-face represented by Senior Bakufu Counselor Matsudaira Sadanobu’s (松平定信 1759–1829) autocratic 1790 edict demanding higher levels of fidelity to the Cheng-Zhu (程朱) interpretations of Confucianism within the renamed Shōheizaka Gakumonjo (昌平坂学問所) (Backus 1974: 115–16). These were the interpretations that were accepted as correct for the civil service exams in China and Korea, but which had largely fallen into desuetude in the absence of such exams in Japan. This reversal by the Bakufu, however, was part of a broader set of ideological reforms intended to return the Bakuhan state to the vigor and vitality that were believed two centuries later to have characterized the Bakufu during the years of leadership by Ieyasu and his immediate Shogunal successors. Returning to the question of what might have made the study of Confucianism attractive, in the monoyomi (sodoku) method mentioned above by Saikaku, students learned to read Chinese characters aloud without regard to meaning, and in a manner akin to that whereby persons might learn through repetition to sing a song in a language unknown to them. But there were two other prominent pedagogical approaches to the “reading” of Confucian and other texts in common academic use across intellectual and spiritual traditions: kōshaku (講釈), where students would passively listen to a master’s expostulations, and kaidoku (会読), which was the most interactive of the three. In a typical kaidoku format, students would draw lots to determine the order of questions, and after a brief presentation by the master, students would take turns asking each other questions under the master’s guidance (Maeda 2012: 46–47). Maeda lists three guiding principles embraced in kaidoku-style gatherings: Students were expected to interact positively with and to exhort each other in debate; they were to interact with each other without regard for wealth or status; and everyone within the group was to submit to the same rules of behavior and procedure (ibid: 55–64). The goal throughout was thus individual self-improvement and growth (jiko shūyō 自 己修養) attained through mutual interaction and respect. Literacy—As for the literacy that made this academic activity possible, what is remarkable about Tokugawa society is not that the ruling class was literate but rather the manner in which literacy expanded among nonsamurai commoners. Consider the fictional testament cited previously in which Saikaku’s merchant bemoans his son’s infelicity in business despite

88  Self-Cultivation, Salon Culture, and the Private Academy the training by experts in various arts and fields squandered upon him. Such testaments (isho 遺書) and family or household codes (kakun 家訓) had a history in Japan stretching back a thousand years before Saikaku’s times, but in those earliest days they were the exclusive preserve of courtly aristocrats. During the subsequent medieval centuries, warrior households devised their own codes and precepts, but it was not until the seventeenth century that merchant house codes became common and non-samurai commoners constructed testaments for their progeny (Rubinger 2007: 91). In the same collection, Saikaku tells of the owner of a pawnshop who began what proved to be the lucrative practice of having courtesans pawn their personal love letters addressed to him. Since disclosing these private documents would undermine the courtesans’ profession as well as their hopes for future matrimony, Saikaku writes that in not a single instance did one of these courtesans fail to repay her loan in order to redeem her love letter (Nosco 1980). In both stories, however, what is remarkable is how unremarkable it was either that a merchant might write his own will or that a courtesan might brush her own love letter. From such admittedly anecdotal and circumstantial evidence, I agree with Richard Rubinger’s conclusion that there were high levels of functional literacy to be found not just among prosperous urban merchants such as the one just described, but also among the leadership of seventeenth-century Japanese farming villages, and that during the Genroku years, “the literate culture of the samurai first moved ‘down’ to urban commoners and then ‘out’ from the major cities to provincial towns and eventually to villages as well” (2007: 41, 81). The rise of urban print culture went hand in hand with this development, contributing to the spread of education in general and literacy in particular, one indication of this being the radical seventeenthcentury increase in the publication of such comparatively arcane publications as commentaries on the nascent canon and curriculum of Japanese as well as Chinese classics (Suzuki 2013: 1–21). Consider too the petitions, remonstrances, pronouncements, and formal resolutions that we examined as part of the early modern limited public sphere in Japan. None of these would have been possible without requisite levels of literacy, which were empowering for all who possessed such skills: In a nutshell, literacy became central not just to commerce and participation in the robust print culture, but also to Edo-period conflict resolution and its legal and extralegal communications, both upwards as appeals and downwards as ideology. Engelbert Kaempfer recorded that each street in Nagasaki during the 1690s employed a hissha or scribe (Bodart-Bailey 1999: 159): He writes the orders of the otona [ward headman or mayor of his street], testimonials, discharges, and passes. He sets out requests, contracts, and oaths and keeps a variety of books for the ward on behalf of the otona, such as a register of all dwellings and their inhabitants, with

Self-Cultivation, Salon Culture, and the Private Academy  89 the latter’s name, age, and religion, a list of all deaths together with testimonials that the person came to a natural, non-Christian end, a record of all passes issued, together with detailed notes stating reasons and times of departure and return, as well as a diary of daily occurrences in the street. In a similar vein one might look to the evidence of the use of calling cards that were commonly exchanged by the end of the Tokugawa, as the GermanAmerican official artist of the Perry expedition Wilhelm Heine observed in 1854 during his time in Shimoda (Heine 1990: 137). Allowing for hyperbole, note likewise the observation of Lieut. J.M.W. Silver, attached to the Royal Battalion of Marines in Edo in 1864–65, that “with regard to education, it is rare to meet with a Japanese who cannot read, write and cipher” (Silver 1867: 13). It is thus not surprising that the best estimates of literacy in Japan on the eve of the Meiji contend that some 40 percent of males and 15 percent of females were receiving some form of schooling outside their homes (Rubinger 2007: 23), making Japan as accomplished in this realm as its most literate contemporary European counterparts. Demand for literacy and especially knowledge of Confucianism grew as the value of such knowledge and skill increased for those who possessed it, creating an opening for the development of the private academy in which the instructor was compensated by the tuition of his students. The pioneer of the private Confucian academy was Itō Jinsai. He went against the wishes of his merchant-class parents, who wanted him to study medicine, and instead followed his heart by starting a reading group, the Dōshikai (同志会), or Society of the Like-Minded, which gathered regularly under his leadership to read, study, and discuss the classic works of Confucianism. This neighborhood study group grew to the point where it transitioned naturally into a fully self-sustaining private academy, the Kogidō (古義堂), or Hall of Ancient Meaning, which attracted hundreds of paying students during Jinsai’s lifetime and thousands more after his death. The principal activity in Jinsai’s academy and the many others that followed it was the aforementioned reading and discussion strategy called kaidoku, or “gathering to read,” in which students would interrogate a text collectively under the leadership of a master, but in a manner that involved vigorous mutual interaction. Maeda Tsutomu has argued that far from a passive activity, kaidoku developed into an accepted way of expressing individual opinion and thereby came to promote individual personal development through debate and academic inquiry (2009: 21, 45). Descartes’ acknowledgment of individual perspective as the basis for differing but equally valid individual opinions has an analogue here. If within the confines of the academy someone of lower status could correct the work of a social superior, one can discern in this a basis for both civility and meritocracy of a sort that could only spread in tandem with the proliferation of academic culture and society.

90  Self-Cultivation, Salon Culture, and the Private Academy To be sure, some academies were clearly more egalitarian than others. Prof. Kojima Yasunori has compared images of Kondō Shūzō (近藤重蔵 1771–1829), lecturing at the Shōheikō Bakufu academy in Edo in the early nineteenth century, with Ogyū Sorai lecturing roughly a century earlier to his own students, noting that Kondō is seated on a plane with those to whom he is lecturing, while Sorai is seated on a dais well above his students (2013: 313). Sorai was a notorious snob, intellectually elitist through and through, and the Shōheikō was intended for an elite audience of high-ranking Bakufu civil servants as well as those appointed by their domains, but the contrast between these environments is still striking. That non-samurai commoners could express opinions and engage in intellectual disagreements with samurai within the confines of private academies other than Sorai’s confirms these as venues where individuals could interact with fellow classmates as well as their teachers in ways that would have been unlikely, if not unthinkable, in more public surroundings. The salon—During the eighteenth century one observes the emergence of an important variant of this new academic culture in the form of the salon, defined by Lawrence Marceau (2004: 9–10) as a venue where similarly minded individuals would meet regularly to engage in the pursuit of refinement, and particularly in the composition and appreciation of each other’s compositions of Chinese verse. Marceau cites the work of Teruoka Yasutaka (暉峻康隆) in identifying seven such salons founded during the eighteenth century: three in Kyoto, two in Edo, and one each in Osaka and Nagasaki. In Marceau’s words, it was during the eighteenth century that: a crucial shift occurred in attitudes. . . . [and] well-educated, talented, and socially aware individuals were the first to explore this change in perspective. Both men and women came to interact in new and loosely organized artistic communities. . . . These nonconformists aspired to lead productive lives with a minimum of self-compromise, often in an ideological climate all too directed toward keeping people in their respective places. (2004: 10) Indeed, one of the fascinating aspects of this salon culture is the manner in which, like literacy and the private academy, it can be said to reflect the changed times while also contributing to them. As we have noted, the civilianization of the samurai class—a process that was already well advanced by Genroku times—was fundamental to an environment in which academic culture could facilitate career advancement for samurai, and personal enrichment for non-samurai commoners. Salons took this a step further by providing comparably liminal spaces where non-political opinions could be shared and bohemian forms of culture experienced. In all likelihood, Vienna was home to the world’s first coffee house, founded in 1685 by Johannes Theodat (also known as Johannes Diodato, 1640–1725), which would make him contemporary with the playwright

Self-Cultivation, Salon Culture, and the Private Academy  91 Chikamatsu Monzaemon (近松門左衛門 1653–1725) and political philosopher Ogyū Sorai (d. 1728). Ibi Takashi (揖斐高) has noted the nearcontemporaneous rise of salon culture in Japan with the emergence of a comparable salon culture in Paris, as well as the culture of coffee houses in London. In Japan, most likely the first major salon was the Kenkadōkai in Osaka founded c. 1758 by Kimura Kenkadō (木村蒹葭堂 1736–1802), a well-known collector of curios and jewelry boxes, who was also an intellectual omnivore, having studied botany and physics, embraced Ōbaku Zen, and acquired proficiency in both Dutch and Latin. One can also see the mid-eighteenth century in Japan and Europe as when a distinctive class of intellectuals emerges, but Ibi is careful to note the important differences: Unlike salons in London or elsewhere in Europe, Japanese salons were not places where one could freely discuss politics, foreign relations, or economic issues, and they did not include women as either proprietors or members (2009: 2–3). These differences notwithstanding, the participants in Japanese salon culture were members of a horizontal fraternity of literate, highly cultured individuals who disdained conventional values and chose instead to explore their individual interiority and to pursue spiritual fulfillment (Ibi 2009: 2–4). Salons in Japan were places that replaced conventional notions of status, hierarchy, and wealth with new forms of community where playful comradery and association (kōyū 交遊) were key features and core values. Two additional features of the demimonde salon subculture included, first, the astonishing range of topics around which salon aficionados gathered for discussion and mutual edification. Chinese poetry, painting, and calligraphy were central to the earliest salons in Japan, but specialized salons subsequently emerged for such diverse topics for discussion as kyōka (狂歌 comic tanka), gesaku (戯作 parodic and satirical literature), curios (kibutsu 奇物), supernatural phenomena (kidan 奇談), and European subjects (Rangaku 蘭学), and as gathering places for all manner of self-styled chisha (痴者 beatniks) and their rancorous exchanges (Ibi 2009). And second, Nakamura Yukihiko (中村幸彦) identified kokōsei (孤高性) as one of the defining characteristics of this new bunjin (文人) or literati culture (Nakamura 1982). A perversely difficult term to translate,5 kokōsei for Nakamura refers to a quality of refinement or majesté that enables those who possess it to set themselves apart from the run-of-the-mill. Note that kokōsei has nothing at all to do with class or gender—in their respective liminal realms kokōsei could as easily be an attribute of the highest-ranking courtesan as a celebrated actor—and this in the otherwise highly stratified and gendered society of mid-Tokugawa Japan. That so much of this salon culture focused on chinoiserie simply enhanced its outré character, and was itself a reflection of the renewed fascination with things Chinese, as witnessed in the Sorai school’s concern with the contemporary Chinese pronunciation of Kanji used to write Japanese, as well as in the popularity of Ōbaku Zen, which turned its Chinese origins and Nagasaki roots into an exotic asset.

92  Self-Cultivation, Salon Culture, and the Private Academy Self-cultivation, self-centeredness, and individual perspective—The relative egalitarianism of salon culture and that of private academies can also be observed in the self-funded Shingaku communities organized by Teshima Toan (手島堵菴 1718–86), who believed that there should not be sharp distinctions between instructional leaders and spiritual adherents, who together formed a community of “friends” striving collectively toward a selfless and better way of life. In her study of Sekimon Shingaku (石門心学), Janine Sawada has described how under the leadership of Teshima Toan, Sekimon Shingaku enjoyed a spiritual heyday during the eighteenth century. Proceeding from the premise that “human beings can reach moral perfection by experiencing the true nature of the mind,” Toan created “a practicable system of self-improvement from the existing matrix of ideas about the mind” (Sawada 1993: 44). Self-cultivation partook of both self-improvement and self-determination in that it was a narrow and distinctive form of self-improvement that drew the self-determined into its practice and fold. Neo-Confucian spiritual practices like abiding in seriousness or reverence (kyokei 居敬) and quiet sitting (seiza 静坐) were widely believed during the seventeenth century to be fundamental to learning how to master oneself and to acquire control over those turbulent emotional responses that distracted one from the true Way and were thus obstacles to sagehood. However, even such quasi-scientific Neo-Confucian practices as investigating things (kakubutsu 格物) in order to plumb their principle(s) (kyūri 窮理) could contribute to self-cultivation by providing insight into one’s true original nature. These practices were part and parcel of the humanistic transformation that accompanied the advent of Neo-Confucianism in the Tokugawa period. Even divination came to enjoy the status of a mode of self-improvement during the nineteenth century, though not without controversy. Divination based on the hexagrams of the Yijing (Jpn. Ekikyō 易経) was a hallowed practice within the Confucian tradition, as it reflected the fundamental belief in an intimately integrated cosmos, whose nature was such that correct understanding of such small matters as the sequence of tossed coins could be used to glean insight into life’s larger rhythms and phenomena. The value of awareness of these larger patterns, however, was not for prognostication, though they were often used for such by aristocrats during the Heian period, but rather to facilitate one’s capacity to harmonize and attune oneself to these very rhythms and phenomena and thereby to better integrate oneself into the Way. This appreciation for divination practices was closely related to the archaic belief in a personal destiny or fate. Upon the introduction of Buddhism into the East Asian orbit first in China and later in Korea and Japan, this fatalistic understanding of destiny came to be aligned with the notion of karmic causation or inga (因果), but during the Tokugawa period a distinction came to be drawn between kōun (幸運), which was a kind of good fortune or luck unrelated to either karmic factors or personal effort, and kaiun

Self-Cultivation, Salon Culture, and the Private Academy  93 (開運), which was “luck affected and even created by morality and religious ritual” (Reader and Tanabe 1998: 110). In the case of kaiun, the belief came to be that one could affect and actually shift one’s destiny or fate through specific divinatory practices like physiognomy, geomancy, astrology, character-stroke divination, hexagram interpretation, and general fortune-telling. The net effect of the latter was an improvement to one’s circumstances as a consequence of personal effort. Unlike salon culture, whose bohemian elitism seemed to generate no obvious resentment or approbation, the problem with self-cultivation was its transparent self-centeredness, which made it prone to the criticism of being self-ish. Early modern forms of self-cultivation thus required apologetics, which almost universally emphasized the possibility of creating a perfect society for everyone by perfecting one individual at a time. One can find precedents in Chinese Confucianism, most notably in the Great Learning, for this notion of bringing a measure of peace to the world by first harmonizing individuals, en route to bringing order to their households and eventually the world at large, but these would not enter the discourse of Tokugawa Japan until orthodox Neo-Confucianism was separated from the Buddhist superstructure in which it had been institutionally housed in Japan prior to the Tokugawa. Yet, by the end of the Tokugawa period, one could argue, as Yokoi Shōnan (横井小南 1809–69) did in 1852, that one’s primary activity should be study, and that there was no separation between the pursuit of knowledge and the pursuit of virtue: From the feudal lords (君公) to their officials (大夫) to the offspring of the samurai, if one has time to do so, it should be spent in study in some cases to heal unwellness of mind or body, in other cases to analyze the effect of emotions and political affairs, in still other cases to detect heterodoxy and false teachings, and yet again to learn the import of the classics. Whether at the Court or in the academy, there have never been separate paths for training in virtue and the pursuit of knowledge. (quoted in Maeda 2009, emphasis added) An equally interesting and even slightly earlier example of this reasoning can be found in the writings of Nyūi Mitsugu (乳井貢 1712–92), the Bakufuappointed comptroller (Kanjō Bugyō 勘定奉行) assigned to Hirosaki (弘前) domain. Perhaps reflecting his accountant’s mentality, Nyūi was a utilitarian pragmatist who wrestled with the question of how one’s individual work contributes to the common good. But Nyūi was much more than a keeper of financial records and he thought deeply about what it means to be a man in the world. He wrote, “Kō (the civil) is what we call it when each person exhausts himself on behalf of the common good (kōyōichi 功用一). For this reason, even heaven cannot produce without me; earth too cannot do its part without me; and the sage likewise benefits the world through my presence” (Kojima 2011: 283). As Kojima Yasunori has glossed Nyūi’s dictum,

94  Self-Cultivation, Salon Culture, and the Private Academy in this respect not only do they all dwell in me, but there is also a bit of myself in heaven, in earth, and in the sage, since without me, none of the three can be fully efficacious (ibid). Writing in a similar vein, Shiba Kōkan (司馬江漢 1747–1818), an intellectual skilled in Dutch styles of painting and in Western astronomy, likewise addressed the problem of how one can be an individual while at the same time conscientiously being a good family member, that is to say, a parent or child, or an older or younger sibling. His answer was that we each have a certain individual skill (gei 芸), and that by means of this skill one is able to establish a household (ie 家), which in turn enables one to leave a legacy (mei 名) to posterity. In other words, the skill exists for the benefit of both the individual and the country (Maeda 2009: 222–23). Western learning, condoned after the 1720s so long as it included no mention of the proscribed Christianity, did indeed play a role that went beyond Shiba Kōkan in these new notions of the self and its relation to society. Ōtsuki Gentaku’s (大槻玄沢 1757–1827) Ladder to Dutch Studies (Rangaku kaitei 蘭学階梯) of 1788 included and introduced Socrates’ saying that one should eat to live and not live to eat. This was picked up by Watanabe Kazan (渡辺崋山 1793–1841), a European-style painter of the self-styled Bansha (蛮社), or “Barbarian Group,” who applied this to the notions of individual endowment or potential as the wherewithal to make one’s living (Maeda 2009: 251). There was thus a new consciousness not just of the integrity of the individual self and perspective, but also of the individual body and the egalitarian need for food, as one can observe in the oeuvre of Shiba Kōkan, who late in his life wrote: From the Son of Heaven and Shogun above to the four classes and outcastes (hinin) below, when it comes to eating (shoku 食), all human beings need this to live. . . . Everything that lives on the earth or in the seas has its own mind, its own skeletal structure, and it is the same for people: we all live for food; we all have desires and thoughts. . . . People have wisdom and get in trouble because of it, whether rich or poor, or high or low, it is all the same. (Maeda 2009: 220, emphasis added) That Shiba Kōkan and Watanabe Kazan were painters trained and practiced in Western-style single-point perspective is also significant for our argument regarding individuality, since their perspective as painters resonates with Descartes’ appreciation for individual perspective, which (like shading) shifts as the viewer moves.6 In Watanabe Kazan’s case, his independent perspectives in both painting and politics—Kazan was opposed to the Bakufu’s strict anti-foreignism—earned him the punishment of exile to his home province.

Self-Cultivation, Salon Culture, and the Private Academy  95 Civil society—Let us by way of conclusion return to the subject of civil society and its relation to the private academy, and the question of whether one can find evidence of civil society in the second half of the Edo period. If we understand civil society as the realm of voluntary associations, then it is important to acknowledge that in virtually all societies one can find evidence of such associations in both the marketplace and in places of worship. The second half of the Tokugawa period was replete with new religions and religious movements that existed outside the mainstream denominations of Buddhism endorsed by the Shūmon aratame system and hence were attractive as possible loci of voluntary associations. Examples of these that we have already touched on in this chapter would include Teshima Toan’s development of Sekimon Shingaku in the mid-eighteenth century and Ōbaku Zen, whose exotic appeal seems to have peaked at about the same time. Other new religions founded during the late Tokugawa period with roots in Shinto and outside the mainstream Buddhist denominations include Tenrikyō (天 理教), a form of monotheistic Shinto that began to take shape after 1838; Kurozumikyō (黒住教), established in 1846 as a consequence of what its founder claimed to have been his mystical union with the solar deity Amaterasu; and Konkōkyō (金光教), founded as a response to what was believed to be an act of supernatural healing. These all enjoyed the sort of growth consistent with a modern understanding of voluntary associations, but it is their very popularity and rapid growth that render them less useful for distinguishing the features of civil society. For comparison, consider contemporary examples from other East Asian societies where new religious movements often had subversive properties, such as Ch’ŏndogyo (天道教) in Korea and the millenarian Taiping (太平) movement in China. The market provides comparable problems for those searching for examples of civil society in Tokugawa Japan, again principally because of the ubiquity of market squares, and the steady economic growth that characterized Tokugawa society and was the underlying factor behind the proliferation of such markets. If we for these reasons exclude both markets and new religions and look elsewhere for evidence of civil society in early modern Japan, narrowing our quest in this way, the private academy is likely the best place to find it (Nosco 2002). Confucian ideology contested the legitimacy of any form of private sphere, either for individuals within households or between households and the state, and we recall that unlike secrecy, which is a defensive strategy, privacy is an accorded privilege and not something that can be claimed as a right. The respect generally accorded to the confines of private academies thus made these the most fertile grounds for the kinds of voluntary associations characteristic of civil society, at least in our narrower definition. As it happens, this civil-societal dimension of Tokugawa private academies may have an analogue in the modern private academy and thus provide something of a ground bass for civil society in today’s Japan, which we touch on in this volume’s Afterword.

96  Self-Cultivation, Salon Culture, and the Private Academy

Notes 1  de Bary 2008: 38. 2  Dilworth and Nishikawa 2012: 3. 3 Regarding the role of the traditional elites (Kyoto nobility, Buddhist clergy, and bushi) in the dissemination of knowledge to commoners, Matthias Hayek and Annick Horiuchi have concluded that they “did not play an essential role” (2014: 2). This depends on one’s understanding of “essential.” I would maintain that their role was foundational, but that their importance to the ongoing dissemination diminished over the course of the seventeenth century. 4 Ogyū Sorai discounted sagehood as a realizable goal, but at the same time his historicist perspectives on ancient society and the power of words and literary culture were inspirational to many, and proved directly and indirectly influential in private and domainal academies during the decades following his death in 1728, i.e., through the mid-eighteenth century. 5  Marceau 2004 translates it as “aloof idealism.” 6 Shiba Kōkan’s 1788 painting of Mimeguri Inari Shrine is often referenced as the first by a Japanese painter to use single-point perspective.

6 Well-Being and the Pursuit of Happiness

The interest in quality of life (QL) seems to be a universal among those of us in modern and postmodern societies. QL is much broader and more nuanced than “standard of living,” which is most commonly associated with income. By contrast, QL typically includes such variables as good physical and mental health, a feeling of security and safety, access to a quality education, a meaningful degree of leisure time, the resources to enjoy it, a sense of belonging and purpose, satisfying employment, and the income and degree of wealth that devolve from this employment. Though the specific details of and priorities among these variables may differ from one interpretation to another, this general understanding of QL has a distinctly utilitarian dimension with philosophic, economic, social, political, medical, and psychological aspects to it. One of the most insightful studies of quality of life is that by Martha C. Nussbaum and Amartya Sen in their eponymous co-edited 1993 volume. Among the factors that they identify in their introduction to the subject and under the rubric of how one is able to conduct one’s life are life expectancy; access to health care and other medical services; education, including its quality and availability; the degree to which one finds one’s work rewarding; the measure of dignity that one experiences through this work and one’s control over its execution; political and legal privileges; freedoms, especially in social and political relations; and coherent structure in family as well as intimate relationships. In their words: We need, perhaps above all, to know how people are enabled by the society in question to imagine, to wonder, to feel emotions such as life and gratitude, that presuppose that life is more than a set of commercial relations, and that human feeling—unlike the steam engines of Coketown—is an unfathomable mystery not completely to be set forth in tabular form. (Nussbaum and Sen 1993: 1–2)

98  Well-Being and the Pursuit of Happiness If we were examining these issues in the Japan of the present day, our first concern would be with the problems of measurement and assessment. How do we frame the questions in our questionnaire? How much weight does one index carry relative to the others? How do we construct our sample so as to be broadly representative, and so on? To engage issues like these in the present would surely be challenge enough,1 and to attempt to do so for the Japan of two or more centuries ago may seem like folly, yet the questions are of such intrinsic interest that I will pose them nonetheless, not in their modern context of quality of life but rather in their early modern manifestations as happiness and well-being. Happiness and well-being—Let us begin by revisiting the words of Fukuzawa Yukichi, writing in 1872: We humans, who are the highest of all creation, can use the myriad things of the world to satisfy our daily needs through the labors of our own bodies and minds and, as long as we do not infringe upon the rights (samatage 妨) of others, may pass our days in happiness (anraku 安楽) freely and independently (jiyūjizai 自由自在). (Dilworth and Nishikawa 2012: 3; Komuro and Nishikawa 2002: 6) Here again, the contrast with Japan’s medieval period could scarcely be greater, nor the difference between early modern and modern understandings of well-being and happiness more subtle. Writing in 1212, Kamo no Chōmei (鴨長明 1155–1216) described in Hōjōki (方丈記) the pleasures of living without a multiplicity of objects, and a little over a century later, in about 1331, Yoshida Kenkō (吉田兼好 1283–1350) extolled a life of restraint in all matters. In Chōmei’s case, he intended his austerity to serve as a buttress against the vicissitudes of the times and the pain that attaches to the loss of cherished possessions and persons. In Kenkō’s case, he regarded material as well as emotional restraint to be the epitome of well-bred demeanor and conduct. Nonetheless, one finds little before the Tokugawa on the conditions for either well-being or happiness, which makes the early modern fascination with these topics all the more striking. Though the distinction between happiness and well-being is often blurred, there are important differences and ironies. A person can be perfectly happy in a potentially or even actually harmful situation, and one can contribute to another’s well-being without necessarily affecting their happiness (Brandt 1967). Happiness is essentially a positive emotional response to one’s sense of the conditions and pattern of one’s life, including not just how one views the present but also one’s expected prospects for the future as well as one’s memories of the past. Happiness is not an absolute, since one person can be happier than another, though the explanations for this become as much psychological as philosophical. European and North American philosophers tend to agree that an upright life not given to excesses and enhanced

Well-Being and the Pursuit of Happiness  99 by a sympathetic understanding of life will contribute to happiness (Kenny 1965–66; Brandt 1967). Though we will note exceptions to this generalization, I argue that the early modern Japanese understanding of happiness develops initially in material aspects and transitions gradually to include the more experiential and less austere. In various ways, once it moves beyond its initially material connotations, happiness appears to be more contingent, subjective, and contextual than well-being, which has been understood in remarkably consistent fashion across both centuries and continents. In European and North American thought, the understanding of wellbeing extends beyond the provision of physical conditions to include an affirmative appreciation of one’s environment, along with meaningful interpersonal relationships (Griffin 1987). I follow this understanding, which is consistent with Confucian thought generally and also conforms to what one observes in early modern Japanese discourse. Note that there was no developed discourse on the conditions of well-being either within the library of classic texts of Buddhism or in medieval Japanese culture as a whole, making the interest in these matters yet another distinctively early modern feature of Tokugawa society. Though Engelbert Kaempfer, writing in the late seventeenth century, equated Shinto with a belief in a life “spent on this earth in a state of well-being” (Bodart-Bailey 1999: 103), the extended discourse on well-being that becomes prominent during the Tokugawa emerges from the shift to a Confucian worldview, with implications for our understanding of self and individuality, and what might be styled the “new Tokugawa person,” aware of self-interest and the strategies for its pursuit. Confucianism has always been interested in the conditions of well-being, and like many traditions it postulated the existence of an idealized timebefore-time when life’s most basic needs were met. The locus classicus within the tradition is the beautiful depiction of life in illo tempore, i.e., in that first Golden Age, that one finds in Chapter 7 of the Book of Rites: When the Great Way was pursued, a public and common spirit ruled all under the sky; they chose men of talents, virtue, and ability; their words were sincere, and what they cultivated was harmony. Thus men did not love their parents only, nor treat as children only their own sons. A competent provision was secured for the aged till their death, employment for the able-bodied, and the means of growing up to the young. They showed kindness and compassion to widows, orphans, childless men, and those who were disabled by disease, so that they were all sufficiently maintained. Males had their proper work, and females had their homes. They accumulated articles of value, disliking that they should be thrown away upon the ground, but not wishing to keep them for their own gratification. People laboured with their strength, disliking that it should not be exerted, but not with a view only to their own advantage. In this way selfish schemings were repressed and found no development. Robbers, filchers, and rebellious traitors did not show themselves, and

100  Well-Being and the Pursuit of Happiness hence the outer doors remained open, and were not shut. This was the period of what we call the Great Unity. (adapted from James Legge 1885) Here we see the broad outlines of the ancient arcadia as postulated by the Confucian tradition. Government is competent and trustworthy, entrusted to those who are morally and professionally qualified to rule; the collective good trumps private or individual pursuit of gratification; there is a quality of sincerity in communications; households enjoy security from external threats to the extent that doors need not be locked; those who are disprivileged by events beyond their control, like orphans, widows, the disabled, and the elderly, especially those without offspring to care for them, are all provided for; the young are blessed with an environment in which they can grow in stature as well as in goodness; and the able-bodied have suitable employment, for which they are appreciative. Note especially two features of the Confucian arcadia. First, despite the many points of tangency with what today would be styled quality of life— good government, personal security, rewarding work, harmonious relationships, and so on—there is no mention of happiness, which is almost conspicuous by its absence. And second, that by situating this earthly paradise in the ancient past, i.e., in a time and place removed from the here and now temporally but not spatially, the aspiration to resurrect these conditions within a Confucian context is to hope to resurrect the past. This renders the goal nostalgic but still realistic despite the obviously idealistic contours. Confucius, in fact, believed that the finest historically verifiable example of excellent rule was to be found in the time of the Duke of Zhou (周公), i.e., some five centuries before his own time (Analects 7:5 and 8:20). For Confucius and Confucians, good government was paramount, and they maintained that the confidence and trust of the people that derive from good rule should be an even higher priority for rulers than either provision of food or national defense. In Confucius’ words, “Death has always been with us, but a state cannot stand once it has lost the confidence of the people” (Slingerland 2003: 128). Confucius’ follower and, by tradition, most faithful interpreter, Mencius, went so far as to assert famously—except in Japan, where his argument was omitted from published versions of his text and was known only within the discreet confines of private academies— that there is a “right of revolution” when one is saddled with a king who harms humanity, since such a fellow is no true king and is no better than a bandit, thus deserving of punishment (Mencius 1B:8). The opening words of Mencius’ text set the tone for this concern with good government, with Mencius chastising a king for naively asking about what might profit him or his kingdom, rather than showing concern for humanity and righteousness (Mencius 1A:1). Mencius was an elitist who maintained that there is the work of great men who work with their minds and small men who labor physically (Mencius

Well-Being and the Pursuit of Happiness  101 3A:4), but despite such inequalities, poverty was fundamentally unnatural in the Confucian worldview: a symptom of a damaged society and a consequence of poor government as much as climatic irregularity. In terms of Confucianism’s interest in the physical signs of well-being and its link to good government, note that Mencius proclaimed that conclusive evidence of a truly legitimate monarch is when men of 70 have silk to wear and meat to eat, and when the common people suffer neither from hunger nor cold (Mencius 1A:7). Traditional Confucianism reinforced the pre-Confucian Chinese belief that each person has a destiny (ming, Jpn. mei 命), and thus to pursue one’s destiny is more a matter of self-fulfillment than self-determination. One’s primary freedom was to do the tasks to which one was born and hence destined, and consistent with the priority placed on good government, traditional Confucianism believed that the greatest honor was to dedicate oneself to the service of others through participation in government. As expressed by the eleventh-century Confucian Fan Zhongyan (范仲淹 982–1052), it was the responsibility of the privileged to be the first to concern themselves with the world’s troubles and the last to enjoy its pleasures. Happiness in translation—Traditional Confucianism provided a welldeveloped discourse on the conditions for individual and collective wellbeing, but also reflected from the outset a dour tone regarding raku (楽), or happiness as pleasure. In the Analects (16:5), Confucius is quoted as saying that there are three forms of beneficial pleasure and three forms of harmful pleasure. The three beneficial forms of pleasure derive from correctly ordered rituals and music, from singing others’ praises, and from having wise friends; but the three harmful forms of pleasure stem from ostentation, idle dissolution, and indulgence of the appetites. In general, the early modern discourse on raku that we encounter in Japanese popular culture champions precisely what Confucius cautioned against, whereas the philosophic discourse on happiness accepts Confucius’ distinction between beneficial and harmful pleasures while also affirming the affective and emotional realms of personal experience on which traditional Confucianism was generally silent Japanese Confucian discourse on raku appears in the early eighteenth century in the writings of Kaibara Ekiken and Ogyū Sorai. A Confucian naturalist, Ekiken wrote of what his translators have deemed happiness in at least three contexts. First, as raku (楽), happiness is part of heaven’s endowment to individuals, and is in this sense part and parcel of one’s disposition or nature. As such, the traditional characteristics of a pleasurable life (yorokobi tanoshimi o nasan koto 喜び楽みをなさん事) when interpreted through the prism of Confucian morality are that it stems from conformity to the Confucian Way, accompanies the blessing of good health, and conduces to a long life, to which Ekiken added a fourth element of living without conflict in the present peaceful age. Second, Ekiken also referenced the Five Forms of Happiness (gofuku 五福) that are cited in a Confucian classic, the Book of Documents (尚書)—longevity (寿 ju), prosperity (富

102  Well-Being and the Pursuit of Happiness 貴 fūki), good health (庚寧 kōnei), love of virtue (好徳 kōtoku), and a good ending (善終 zenshū)—prizing longevity as the greatest of these blessings (Ekiken 1911: 476–77). And third, using the character pronounced saiwai (幸), Ekiken also interpreted happiness as a felicitous boon or blessing from heaven bestowed as a reward for one’s goodness toward others (Tucker, M. 1989: 192). Thinking of happiness as 福 (fuku) had distinctly Chinese antecedents in the late seventeenth century, as one can see in Huang Liu-hung’s (黄六鴻 1633–?) Fu-hui ch’üan-shu (福恵全書 A Complete Book Concerning Happiness and Benevolence), which he intended as a manual for district magistrates. In his 1694 Preface to the work, Huang explained the rationale for titling his monumental discourse on government and administration under the rubric of 福 (fuku) by connecting it to a “magistrate’s intention of bringing happiness to the people. . . . A magistrate will need to cultivate his intention to bring happiness to the people under his jurisdiction” (Huang 1984: 53). Works like Huang’s entered Japan via Nagasaki and enjoyed a certain currency among Japanese intellectual Sinophiles but never affected the mainstream political culture of Tokugawa Japan. Nonetheless, Huang’s tome does affirm a more physical and less metaphysical understanding of the conditions for happiness, bringing it close to our understanding of well-being. Probably no early modern Japanese philosopher, however, was more concerned with the subject of happiness and well-being than Ogyū Sorai, for these were part and parcel of Sorai’s concern with the critical issue of how to balance personal interests and principles with the interests and principles of society and the state. This was a prominent theme in the plays of Sorai’s slightly older contemporary Chikamatsu Monzaemon (1653–1725), who, without exactly using the terms giri (義理) and ninjō (人情), repeatedly depicted situations in which one’s feelings or emotions (ninjō) brought one into conflict with what one knew to be one’s duty or obligation (giri). We examine conflicted values more closely in the next chapter, but in the case of Sorai, his concerns are more political but no less principled: Sorai’s issue is the potential damage to the polity and social order that could accrue from the pursuit of individual honor at the expense of social order, as he argued in his analysis for the Bakufu of the vendetta of the forty-seven rōnin. Though many regarded a principled vendetta to be the consummate fulfillment of samurai honor, for the Bakuhan state it represented a dangerous and seditious disturbance of the peace, as both Ekiken and Sorai argued (Tucker, J. 1999). Sorai also wrote what is probably the most comprehensive description of the conditions of well-being and happiness that one will find among any Tokugawa Confucian writings, and this is to be found in his Seidan (政談 Discourse on Administration) of 1726–27, where Sorai introduced the term annon:

Well-Being and the Pursuit of Happiness  103 Annon (peace and contentment 安穏) means that [the people] should be free from cold and famine and from molestation by robbers, that they should have feelings of trust in their neighbors, that they should be content to live in their country and their age, that they should find enjoyment in their various occupations, and [that they] should spend the whole of their lives in happiness (raku 楽). (McEwan 1962: 9) In Sorai’s depiction of annon, we find the essential conditions for well-being: security of one’s person, good relationships, satisfaction in one’s occupation, and of course freedom from hunger or the elements. But to this familiar list, Sorai adds the condition of happiness, though without actually defining its conditions. The careful reader will have already noticed a problem. Kaibara Ekiken and Ogyū Sorai both write of happiness using the character pronounced raku, but Ekiken also wrote of happiness using the word saiwai, which has connotations of felicity and good fortune. Happiness truly is elusive and, as mentioned at the outset, highly subjective. Along with the values discussed in the next chapter, happiness surely represents the most elusive aspect of this book’s project, so before going further, let us consider the issues and challenges of our inquiry. To begin, it is a truism that happiness, like beauty, abides in the eye of the beholder, and so our understanding of happiness will be conditioned by where we look for it, making methodological issues especially critical for this part of my project. An obvious first step would be to see if there are words in addition to raku or saiwai that connoted happiness in early modern Japan. Most present-day English–Japanese dictionaries would list words like kōfuku (幸福), manzoku (満足), and yukai (愉快) as possible translations of happiness, with their respective connotations of felicity, satiety, and pleasurable feelings, but one cannot assume one-to-one correspondences for these approximate equivalencies, especially when examining the written language of two to three hundred years ago. Despite high levels of literacy during the Tokugawa period, our restriction to the written language itself conditions this to be an exercise in discerning how principally adult males understood the conditions of happiness. Further, as interesting as it is to examine how philosophers and thinkers from various camps engaged these questions, will we not learn more by examining how happiness is depicted in the popular literature of the age? This, in fact, is how Tsuda Sōkichi (津田左右吉 1873–1961) engaged his own quest for values a century ago (Tsuda 1970), but his advantage was using works in Japanese to write a study in Japanese, and so we again return to the problem of language and translation. My admittedly imperfect solution is to analyze expressions of happiness where others have found it, i.e., by scouring nine published (including one

104  Well-Being and the Pursuit of Happiness PhD dissertation) book-length English-language translations of the popular early modern prose fiction by six writers, and analyzing the context of each occasion that the words happy or happiness appear. The authors (listed in order of their birth years) and their translators are Ihara Saikaku (井原西 鶴 1642–93), translated by Ben Befu, Ivan Morris, G.W. Sargent, and Peter Nosco; Ejima Kiseki (江島奇跡 1667–1736), translated by Howard Hibbett; Ueda Akinari (上田秋成 1734–1809), translated by Kengi Hamada; Santō Kyōden (山東京伝 1761–1816), translated by Jo Nobuko Martin; Jippensha Ikku (十返舎一九 1765–1831), translated by Thomas Satchell; and Shikitei Sanba (式亭三馬 1776–1822), translated by Robert W. Leutner. As we shall see, happiness appears within a variety of guises within this popular fiction, and several interesting patterns emerge. Translators of Ihara Saikaku, that paragon of Genroku popular culture, have most commonly associated happiness with variations on the word ureshi (嬉し), with its connotation of the experience of something delightful. The translator of Ueda Akinari, by contrast, links happiness to the word yorokobi (喜び), which connotes felicitous joy and recurs most frequently in the experience of emotionally satisfying personal relationships. The translator of Santō Kyōden, in turn, most commonly translates the word tanoshimi (楽しみ), which connotes pleasurable, as happiness, no doubt reflecting the fact that Santō Kyōden idealized the world of the licensed pleasure quarters. As if there were any doubt that happiness is subjective, there are even examples of translators finding happiness in passages where there is no word that corresponds loosely or otherwise to the concept. Two of these are in Hamada’s translation of Ueda Akinari, where in the first instance an elderly woman’s life will be extended owing to how “happy” she has been made by her son’s newfound friendship (Hamada 1971: 101), and in the second instance, being “happy” is epitomized by the thought of being reborn in Paradise (ibid: 133). A third instance is found in Sargent’s translation of Saikaku, where the reader is told that some days can be “happier” than others (Sargent 1959: 132), and a fourth comes when Martin has Santō Kyōden observe that at times it seems as if we all “keep on living for these rare happy days” (Martin 1979: 186–87). Conversely, though in the same vein, there is no Japanese word in the original corresponding to the unhappy in Leutner’s translation of Shikitei Sanba, where the author observes, “You never get anywhere being unhappy” (Leutner 1985: 178). Though happiness is more commonly depicted as fleeting, Saikaku wrote of the many “happy” (kokoro yoki) springtimes that a man enjoyed in his new home (Nosco 1980: 38), and of how even the sun goddess Amaterasu could be made “happy (ureshiku)” (Befu 1976: 78). In a passage to which we will return in the next chapter, Jippensha Ikku linked happiness with freedom from restraint, acting freely, and blessing (fuki jizai myōga 不羈, 自 在, 冥加), as examples of life’s good fortune (Satchell 1960: 23). Reflecting the proliferation of transactions in the everyday lives of commoners and the prevalence of modest surpluses in the households of many, the acquisition of wealth is one of the most common contexts for happiness

Well-Being and the Pursuit of Happiness  105 in the popular literature, and this is especially so in those instances when the wealth comes unexpectedly. Consider the following three examples from the writings of Saikaku. In one work, an impoverished hunter exclaims, “How happy (ureshiya) you’ve made us” when he and his wife are rewarded with an antique hilt by a monkey whose life the hunter has spared (Nosco 1980: 82). Similarly an unexpected gift of a packet of silver from an ordinarily miserly sister provokes one of Saikaku’s characters to declaim, “I was so happy (ureshiku)” (Befu 1976: 47). And still elsewhere in this same work, Saikaku has a woman “happily” (to ureshiku) cry out upon unexpectedly receiving a pile of coins in a dream (ibid: 78). Note that in each of these instances, the “happiness” is distinctively material and is expressed in variations of the word ureshi. An analogue from a century earlier can be found in Shakespeare’s 1591 Two Gentlemen of Verona (1/1) when Proteus says to Valentine, “Wish me partaker in thy happiness, when thou do’st meet good hap.” There is a conspicuous concern with freedom from financial anxiety in Saikaku’s writings, as reflected in his approving depiction of a woman whose “idea of happiness (ureshiya) was to keep herself ever free of visits from men with bills at New Year,” when it was customary to settle all of one’s remaining outstanding accounts (Sargent 1959: 43). Such liberation from financial concerns can come from a lifestyle based on simple self-sufficiency just as readily as from acquiring exceptional wealth, as one observes in a short story devoted entirely to “Mr. Happiness” (Rakusuke 楽介), a salt vendor who through his life of hard work, simple pleasures, and freedom from debt serves as a veritable personification of happiness (Nosco 1980: 103ff). In this same vein Saikaku wrote elsewhere that “the ancients wasted no words when they proclaimed ‘Happy are the poor’ (tanoshimi ha hinsen ni ari 楽し みは貧賤にあり)” because their freedom from debt and its attendant worries, as well as their owing no one an apology, renders them impervious to intimidation (Befu 1976: 38). In this regard, we recall the aforementioned piteous circumstances of the samurai scholar Tani Tannai, who was financially indebted and ultimately beholden to his own merchant-class student. According to Saikaku, even grumbling over one’s lot can conduce toward happiness, as in the case of a man who ironically is able to be “happy in his daily labours and travails (ichinichi wo tanoshimi 一日を楽しみ)” owing to the satisfaction he derives from grumbling over life’s unfairness (Sargent 1959: 43). Financial anxieties and concerns that were part of the “new normal” in urban environments from the Genroku period on have an interesting counterpart in Sir Walter Raleigh’s (1554–1618) writing in 1614: “This was also a part of her happiness; that she was neuer ouer-laied with too great warres at once” (The History of the World II:E:1). Such anxieties also offer us an instance of practical convergence between the more austere Confucian understanding of happiness and its more popular counterpart. Saikaku’s understanding of happiness would have appealed to (　嬉し) non-samurai urban commoners and in various ways sets the tone for any number of popular evocations of happiness through his focus on sexual

106  Well-Being and the Pursuit of Happiness intimacy, satisfying interpersonal relationships, acquiring wealth, and then spending it indulgently and extravagantly. Of course the licensed pleasure quarters were the arena for much of this hedonistic activity. For example, in one work he describes the “happiness” (yorokobi) that just the sight of two well-known big spenders could bring to the brothel keepers of Kyoto’s Higashiyama district (Sargent 1959: 95), and in another work how professional entertainers of the licensed quarters would “happily” (ureshigaru hodo) cry out “He’s back!” upon the return of a particularly high-rolling customer (Nosco 1980: 36). In Saikaku’s prose fiction, sexual intimacy is as conducive to happiness of this ureshi style as are the acquisition of wealth and its spending. Consider the courtesan who “shares a happy pillow (ureshiku)” with a particularly favored customer (Morris 1963: 136), or the unforgettable words of Osan, who, while fleeing for her life with her hapless seducer Moemon, upon learning that an opportunity for more intimacy awaits the pair at the next village, exclaims, “What happy (ureshiya) words!” (ibid: 91). However, lest one think that Saikaku preferred extramarital intimacy as the physical path to happiness, he also wrote of how marriage and the household can likewise provide opportunities for conjugal happiness of a different sort. For example, in one instance Saikaku has a married couple remark how they can hope for “a happy (medetaku or “felicitous”) New Year’s in the future” even if they are still impoverished so long as their affections for one another remain constant (Befu 1976: 79). And in another example from the same work, a husband remarks how he “would be happy (tanoshimi, i.e., find it pleasant) just being together” with his wife even if all they had was tea with which to celebrate the New Year (ibid: 80). In yet another work, Saikaku wrote of how even a prosperous household’s happiness is incomplete if it lacks an heir to secure its future, though in this instance the translator read “happiness” into the translation (Sargent 1959: 145). For the most part and excepting those immediately above, the examples of happiness that we have examined thus far have had a strongly material quality to them and are immediately familiar to us. If we skip to representations of happiness in popular literature from roughly a century after Saikaku’s death, we find that these familiar material forms endure but that they no longer enjoy pride of place and coexist alongside a new emphasis on companionship, friendship, and warm interpersonal relations. Santō Kyōden echoed a familiar theme when, regarding the pleasure quarters, he remarked in 1788 that unless one is prepared to spend a great deal of money, one will be unable to enter the “realm of happiness (kakyō 佳境),” but his depictions are more nuanced, as when he remarks that the tsūjin (通人), or connoisseur of the licensed demimonde, “shares happiness (tomo ni tanoshimi 友に楽し み) as well as sadness with his courtesan” (Martin 1979: 106). No less familiarly, Jippensha Ikku’s ne’er-do-well protagonists enjoy a windfall as much as any character from Saikaku when, for example, Ikku writes about how one may be “as happy (kokochi shite yorokobi 心地して 喜び)” as someone who has just dug up a pot of gold (Satchell 1960: 369),

Well-Being and the Pursuit of Happiness  107 and elsewhere in the same work Ikku writes about how the mere anticipation of a windfall of a hundred gold coins causes one of the protagonists (Yaji) to “feel quite happy (gōtekini omoshiroku natta)” (ibid: 330). In both of these instances the emphasis is on happiness as a personal feeling that includes excitement, expectation, and grandiosity. Similarly, the unexpected good fortune of learning that they need not pay for their lodgings made Ikku’s two protagonists understandably “happy (saiwai no kotonari to)” (ibid: 350). This relatively new emphasis in the popular literature on interiority and subjectivity is evident in the writings of Ueda Akinari (1734–1809), a slightly younger contemporary of Motoori Norinaga (1730–1801). At times Akinari writes of happiness using the word saiwai with its traditional connotations of good fortune or felicity, but to this Akinari adds a sense of such happiness as one’s just deserts for a life well lived. For example, in one instance he writes of happiness as a blessing bestowed by those deities whom one has invoked or otherwise honored in one’s ritual acts and offerings, and in another he explains a character’s good fortune as the reward for good deeds performed not by the character himself but rather by his parents and grandparents (Hamada 1971: 83–85, 144). The happiness that derives from same-sex friendship is the central theme in Ueda Akinari’s short story “Chrysanthemum Vow” (Kikka no chigiri 菊 花の契り). Akinari describes how the friends’ apparent “agreement on every subject. . . made them both happy (yorokobi),” and their reunion later in the story made one “so happy [lit. so lifted his spirits that] he could have danced with joy (odori agaru kokochi shite)” (Hamada 1971: 101, 107). Friendship is so important a source of happiness for Akinari that in another story from the same Ugetsu monogatari (雨月物語 Tales of Moonlight and Rain) of 1776, a character is made “happy (yorokobi)” simply by believing that he has found a new friend (ibid: 87). Note the recurrence of yorokobi with its connotations of celebration in two of these examples. Ueda Akinari’s ability to dissociate happiness from its material conditions was so great that he was able to credibly describe a woman who has “found happiness (ureshiku) by persevering” (ibid: 12). A century earlier Ihara Saikaku certainly could celebrate the happiness that attaches to being contented with one’s lot, but it is difficult to imagine him finding happiness through perseverance in the face of adversity. In a similar vein, Ihara Saikaku linked happiness to an orderly and well-managed household, but Akinari instead links happiness to the emotional satisfactions of marriage, as one can observe in two examples where just the prospect of marriage is welcomed. In the first example, one of Akinari’s protagonists comments on the “happiness (ureshiki koto)” he experienced from having his marriage proposal accepted by a mysterious woman, and in the other a character “happily (yorokobi)” welcomes the news of a possible marriage to be arranged by a professional matchmaker (Hamada 1971: 27, 83). An early modern interest in QL?—Let us turn from these representations in popular literature to the more rarified representations in the writings of a

108  Well-Being and the Pursuit of Happiness pair of major Japanese nativists and a contemporary eclectic thinker. Happiness per se does not appear to have been a central concern of the more ideological nativists like Kamo no Mabuchi and Motoori Norinaga, though they did write regarding the conditions of well-being. Compared with his Confucian counterparts, Motoori Norinaga stops well short of implying that one might have a right or even reasonable expectation regarding one’s most basic needs, but near the end of his life and a few years after having survived one of early modern Japan’s worst famines, Norinaga did affirm that those in subordinate positions should be able to “eat plentifully, be freed from hunger, wear clothes enough to keep warm, and live peacefully in a decent house.” But all of these, he insists, are blessings bestowed by the monarch, one’s ancestors, and one’s parents and are ultimately the “gifts of the deities (kami no megumi)” (Tamakatsuma in Ono and Ōkubo 1968–75, vol. 1: 447). Further, happiness is nowhere to be found among Norinaga’s essentials, since “for better or worse, the obligation of those who are ruled is to follow their ruler,” and to do otherwise would be “a selfish act inconsistent with the Way” (ibid: 74). Kamo no Mabuchi’s views of his present were clearly more negative, but of necessity had to be expressed more discreetly. After his retirement from service to the late Shogun Yoshimune’s second son, and writing in the 1760s, Kamo no Mabuchi compared the decline of his present age to the descent of a “river down from the mountains” (from his Kai kō 歌意考, quoted in Nosco 1990: 146). His solution, however, was not to alter the priorities of the state, which it would have been both illegal and indelicate for him to propose, but rather to facilitate one’s entry into the pre-moral state of grace, to recoup the virtues from that age, and to transform the times by transforming individuals one at a time, i.e., in a manner consistent with apologetics for self-cultivation that we saw in the last chapter. By contrast, the eclectic utopian reformer and notorious hermit Nakai Riken (中井履軒 1732–1817) was exceptionally specific regarding his idealized circumstances, though with comparable prudence he expressed it metaphorically in the work Kashokoku monogatari (華胥国物語) as a vision that came to him in a dream of an imaginary realm. Riken recounts how in his reverie a young prince is prepared to undertake the most extreme reforms in order to alleviate the suffering of his people. Acting independently from the central authorities, the prince reduces taxes and initiates local reforms that include establishing universal public education with Buddhist monks pressed into service as teachers, requiring the aristocracy to embrace the standard of living of the peasantry, redistributing land equitably, and restricting appointed officials to limited terms and thus requiring their rotation (Najita 1987: 211–14). The result, he argued, would be that the people are liberated from their former suffering and concerns and “as if with one mind now dwell in happiness (tanoshikiyo).” Though expressed with varying degrees of boldness, one nonetheless observes that the broad contours of well-being proposed by the relational Confucians, the nostalgic nativists, and even an eclectic utopian were

Well-Being and the Pursuit of Happiness  109 largely consistent, typically including freedom from hunger, protection from the elements, security of home and person, and freedom from anxiety. For this reason I would style these taken together as a vision of the good life in early modern Japan, i.e., as an early modern counterpart to today’s quality of life. It seems counterintuitive that the Confucian construction of this idealized realm should include references to happiness, while the generally more affective nativist vision typically did not, but the explanation for this is a matter of both translation and tradition. In terms of translation, it is surely obvious to the reader that a considerable range of words in Japanese has been translated into English as happiness, whereas the narrowly Confucian understanding is typically represented by the character 楽, pronounced raku in Japanese. However, this character can also be glossed or pronounced as part or all of the word tanoshimi, as it typically is in the writings of Santō Kyōden with the connotation of pleasurable. This is what one might expect of an author whose writings were often situated in the licensed pleasure quarters. Though one can think of exceptions like Masuho Zankō (増穂残 光 1655–1742), a Shinto popularizer who used his reputation as an authority on pleasure quarters to attract audiences to his outdoor Shinto sermons, nativist writings tended to be highly principled, and this despite the nativists’ emphatic rejection of Confucian moral terminology as unnecessary in ancient Japan. The contrast with Confucianism also returns us to the matter of tradition, where as we observed earlier raku (楽) appears in the Analects as having both positive and negative aspects: positive when it is grounded in ritual, music, and good relationships, but destructive when based on extravagance or sloth. Since the opening words of the Analects reference the raku of having friends visit from afar, the emotion could not be excluded from the Confucian lexicon, but at the same time raku would not enjoy the prominence accorded to virtues like wisdom, humaneness, propriety, and so on. Further, the Chinese tradition tended to emphasize the problems with raku more than the potential benefits, reinforcing raku’s negative prominence within the tradition. By contrast, the relative absence of a discussion—sustained or otherwise—of raku among the major nativists can be construed as an indirect silent endorsement of an emotion whose social value seemed questionable while its appeal remained undeniable. Some comparisons—Let us review what we have found in this inquiry into happiness and well-being in early modern Japan. First, both the philosophic and the popular literature support the view that happiness is a state of mind in two senses: On the one hand, happiness, unlike hunger or cold, is a more emotional than physical response; and on the other hand, as any number of examples have confirmed, one can experience happiness even when external conditions might appear to preclude it. In both the popular and the philosophic literature, we also find substantial endorsement of the proposition that a simple life of goodness and self-sufficiency will conduce toward the experience of happiness.

110  Well-Being and the Pursuit of Happiness It is arguable whether the Japanese or the Anglo-European understanding of happiness more strongly privileges potential sources of happiness like sensual pleasure, material wealth, chance, or destiny. Both philosophic and popular understandings of happiness share the conviction that happiness can be generated not just by how one engages the here and now, but also by one’s memories—real or constructed—of the past, and even by one’s fantasies about the future. And it would appear to be a universal that happiness is more commonly perceived to be fleeting rather than enduring, ephemeral rather than lasting. As Jane Carlyle (1801–66) opined, happiness seems “of the nature of those delicate spirits which vanish when one pronounces their name” (Kraut 1989). If there is a key difference between the popular and philosophic perspectives, it may lie in the relative popular emphasis placed on the individual’s role in attaining personal happiness, as distinct from the philosophic emphasis on the state’s role in creating and sustaining the conditions for such happiness. The Japanese early modern discourse on well-being lacks the metaphysical abstraction of much European and North American thought, but its outline and contours nonetheless resemble those of its Anglo-European counterpart. Indeed, this would appear to confirm our earlier hypothesis that well-being is a more universal concept whose contours remain consistent across time and space. Regarding well-being in Japan as elsewhere, we again find a shared appreciation for self-sufficiency and moderation, even if these are not always observed in practice, and an equally utilitarian understanding of the concept. Though one would look in vain for an exact equivalent to the modern concept of human rights in early modern Japan, it is perhaps surprising that there is such a strong sense of reasonable expectations. For Kaibara Ekiken, these were part of heaven’s endowment to humankind, and for Ogyū Sorai, happiness was integral to annon. Virtually all Confucians, as we have seen in our examination of the public sphere, also accepted the notion that it was natural and necessary to allow for remonstrance when the state was perceived to be falling short of its paternalistic responsibilities. As noted previously Prof. Matsumoto Sannosuke (b. 1926) has argued that there is no concept of natural rights in Japan prior to Nakae Chōmin (中江 兆民 1847–1901), though one can identify antecedents for freedom and equality within the Confucian tradition (1997). As it happens, Ogyū Sorai’s endorsement of happiness, and by implication its pursuit, may even antedate by several decades its more celebrated counterpart in the U.S. Declaration of Independence. Problems of terminology and methodology remain in this quest for understandings of happiness and well-being in the popular and philosophic literature of early modern Japan, and we have observed how happiness may indeed abide in the mind of the translator no less than in the eye of the beholder. It is perhaps inevitable that there should be a solipsistic quality to this exercise, as Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–78) concluded in his Rêveries du Promeneur Solitaire when he wrote in 1777

Well-Being and the Pursuit of Happiness  111 that his investigations into happiness inevitably returned to himself (Quennell 1988: 131). We have also observed occasions of considerable resonance between the understandings of happiness and well-being in early modern Japan and those of early modern Europe. I have suggested that there may be a higher degree of materiality and sensuality to the Japanese conception of happiness, especially as evidenced in the Genroku writings of Ihara Saikaku, but we have also observed a number of instances in even Saikaku’s translated oeuvre when happiness is grounded in emotional contentment and freedom from anxiety. Though our sample in this discussion is too small to be definitive, it nonetheless does appear that broadly speaking there is a transition during the Tokugawa period from the more physical basis for happiness of around 1700 to the more subjective and psycho-emotional basis that one finds during the last Tokugawa century: The former never recedes but over time is increasingly balanced by the latter. In this respect, I would argue that we find yet another dimension to our thesis of a growing maturity in the understanding of the individual person and the requirements for that individual’s emotional health and prosperity. That happiness has a psychotropic dimension is evident in Thomas De Quincey’s observation in his Confessions of an Opium Eater, published in 1821, that “happiness might now be bought for a penny and carried in the waistcoat pocket,” and Samuel Johnson (1709–84) is similarly quoted to the effect that a man never finds happiness “but when he is drunk” (Quennell 1988: 364, 14). As we have seen, the happiness of both the provider and the consumer of pleasures in the licensed quarters in Japan is frequently referenced in terms of the consumption of rice wine. Similarly, the suggestion in the writings of early modern Japanese writers that happiness may be both rare, fleeting, and linked to intimacy is evident on the Anglo-European front in Ivan Turgenev’s (1818–83) claim to have recalled only one “flash of happiness” in his life: when as a young man he was able to share the happiness of his occasional lover, the miller’s daughter, upon his gift to her of a bar of scented soap. We encounter this also in Samuel Johnson’s claim to be able to recall but a single moment of happiness in his life, the night he spent with Molly Ashton, though ever the precisian, Johnson qualified this by saying that indeed this “was not happiness; it was rapture” (Quennell 1988: 18, 114). Concern with well-being may indeed be perennial, and understandings of it relatively consistent across time and place, but as tempting as it would be for us to conclude that we have uncovered similar universals in the various understandings of happiness described in this chapter, this would be mistaken. In all likelihood, the pursuit of happiness in its various guises is less an emotional part of our genetic endowment than an aspect of early modernity, with all its stresses, aspirations, and alienation. That the happiness we have observed in early modern Japan so often derived from satisfying emotional relationships would not be either so widely possible or so

112  Well-Being and the Pursuit of Happiness avidly pursued were it not for the new understandings of self and society that coursed through early modern Japan. The early modern self was no longer to be denied or left behind as in medieval times, but rather was to be nurtured, cultivated, and even indulged. Early modern persons enjoyed individual and collective dimensions of identity, as they sought to situate themselves in what had become a much more complex and transactional world. It was, in turn, reasonable for this new and increasingly competent self to have expectations regarding the minimal conditions of everyday “good life.” Whether grounded in physical acts of consumption, hedonism, good fortune, or the more subjective emotional realm of relationships and peace of mind, happiness and its pursuit become one of the basic values of early modern Japan, and it is to these values that we turn in the next chapter.

Note 1  For an excellent discussion of the challenges, see Sunstein 2014: 20–22.

7 Values

Almost everyone has an answer to the question, “What are your values?” but do any of us really know? Are the values that we publicly espouse the same values that we demonstrate in our everyday lives? Why is it that we so often say one thing and do another? Why is it that we might demonstrate one set of values in the morning, another at midday, yet another that evening, and perhaps even another in our dreams? Are there core values as opposed to peripheral values, and, if so, are these core values static or do they too change over time? If one were to wish to learn another’s values, would this be done better by asking or by observing? If knowing even one’s own values is so difficult, how dare one attempt to describe the values of persons whom one will never meet, and who lived in a very different time and place? As mentioned in the Introduction, this volume has a partial genesis in my own introduction in the late 1960s to Robert Bellah’s Tokugawa Religion: The Values of Pre-Industrial Japan (1957), which sought to explain Japan’s remarkably rapid industrialization as the consequence of a consensus among otherwise diverse religions and religious modes of thought regarding principally ethical values like honesty, diligence, frugality, obedience to authority, and so on. Yet the Japan that I experienced in my own firsthand encounter, and then proceeded to study for nearly the next half-century, fits imperfectly with what Bellah described. To be sure, I found much evidence for what Bellah maintained, but also much evidence for the exact opposite. To ask the following further problematizes this exercise: If Bellah’s values were believed to be a Japanese analogue to the so-called Protestant ethic, and thereby supported Japan’s modern/industrial transformation, does this mean that the “neglected” counter-ideological values on which this volume has focused somehow did not contribute commensurately? Since this last would be an abundantly sufficient topic for another volume, let us turn instead to evidence of these neglected values in early modern Japan. Values and value—A century ago the social historian Tsuda Sōkichi engaged in a quest for the values of Japanese people, using mythological, mytho-­ historical, and literary texts as his primary source materials. Under the overall

114 Values rubric of “studies of our people’s thoughts as revealed in literature” (bungaku ni arawaretaru waga kokumin shisō no kenkyū 文学に現れたる我が国民思 想の研究), Tsuda subdivided his analysis into categories defined by class and gender, with traditional nobility (kizoku 貴族), samurai (bushi 武士), and commoners (heimin 平民) becoming the subtitles of four separate volumes published in 1916, 1917, 1918, and 1920 respectively; that his greatest interest was in the values of common people can be inferred from the fact that they were the only societal group to receive two volumes from Tsuda. One of Tsuda’s conclusions was that early modern Japanese values are best understood as the dissemination of originally samurai values into the everyday lives of non-samurai commoners, which he expressed in the following: Since the samurai formed the kernel of society then, their manners and customs naturally infiltrated into those of the common people and the relations between master and servant, employer and employee, landlord and tenant, master-craftsman and apprentice, etc., all came to be regarded as parallel to that existing between lord and vassal in samurai society. As a result, there came to be little or no difference between the moral ideas prevailing among the common people and those dominant among the samurai. (Tsuda 1970: 159) But neither the verticality of the relationships that Tsuda listed nor the value of loyalty that such relationships privilege requires a samurai antecedent to be intelligible. Literary sources are an excellent place to plumb values, but in his analysis Tsuda was most likely projecting the experience of his own Taishō period onto the conditions of centuries earlier. Eiko Ikegami has compared the effort to write about the values of a particular time and place to the challenge of a photographer capturing the moment when a flying fish bursts briefly through the surface of the water. Regarding the difficulty of the task, she writes that: values are ubiquitous and fluid. They are hidden everywhere and are harbored not only inside of us but also outside, enmeshing us within various social fabrics. Laws, customs, and rituals are obvious examples of embedded values. But values are often tucked into less visible places such as those closely connected with the operations of groups and social organizations—values that induce or encourage certain ways of living. . . . Values, after all, require constant enactment and counterenactment by actors in order to be lived out in real life. The question for historians, then, is how to capture the revealing moments of enactment in order to describe the values, sentiments, and emotions of Tokugawa people as they were practiced. (Ikegami 2015: 31, original emphasis retained)

Values  115 Despite being ubiquitous, values, to be sure, are elusive and ephemeral, and bearing Ikegami’s cautions in mind, let us begin by considering what is meant here by values, and where we propose to find them. Value theory addresses the question of what makes something valuable, and such value judgments have multiple dimensions. In economics, value theory attempts to explain what something is worth, what makes it desirable, or why something costs what it does. These are different questions, as becomes obvious when one asks what makes having a home desirable, or what someone’s home might cost vs. what it might be worth. The first question is fundamentally psychological, and the latter two essentially economic, but all three questions are philosophically subsumed under the rubric of natural goods. Scarcity is often thought to be intrinsic to this understanding of value, as demonstrated by the fact that water in an arid desert will be more valuable than water in a land of freshwater lakes, or that the cost of land will generally be proportional to population density. All of these calculations are also affected by how affordable they might be, which in turn is related to the degree of surplus wealth in society in the hands of both individuals and their households. Markets provide a general but imperfect indicator regarding this understanding of value, one example being how something like addiction can affect the cost of what one needs to temporarily quench the addiction, but so too do aesthetics and fashion, as when one considers what makes one teacup or garment cost a hundred or a thousand times as much as another even though they are functionally equal. Necessities like food can have intrinsic value,1 while other things like training can have instrumental value, and of course these two will often overlap. Another dimension of value theory is ethical and sometimes goes by the term “moral goods,” which concerns how we distinguish good from evil, and which in the history of philosophy is called axiology. Moral goods seek to answer the question of what forms of conduct are praiseworthy, and the answers are typically contextual, i.e., situational rather than absolute. For example, consider the question of when violence might be justified. Most of us would agree that it is wrong to kill someone except in self-defense, and historically the legitimate use of force is delegated to the state, even becoming one of its defining characteristics as per Max Weber in his Politics as a Vocation (1919). But what if we were to see someone in a murderous rage attacking someone who happens also to be defenseless, and what if the circumstances make it impracticable to await the arrival of police? Value judgments regarding right and wrong often seem to come in degrees rather than as absolutes, as when one distinguishes between theft for personal enrichment, the theft of food to feed one’s starving children, and variations of theft of the Robin Hood sort. Anthropological theories of value inevitably reflect social constructs, as in the high value attached to widow chastity in

116 Values medieval China (Mann 1987), or the high value attached to intimacy with a famous courtesan vs. intimacy with a sex worker in early modern Japan. In this chapter we concern ourselves principally with what personal values were embraced in early modern Japan by individuals in their communities, and how these values may have changed over time. If we were sociologists asking these questions of persons in a particular society, we would likely use questionnaires or direct observation to arrive at answers, but these are obviously not options for us as we interrogate the values of individuals and their communities in the Japan of two to three centuries ago. Thus, we will need to use other forms of observation that draw us into social history and even popular literature, much as we did in the preceding chapter when trying to glean understandings of happiness and well-being. The values that we will focus our attention on include the following and will be taken up in this order: stability, especially financial stability, and continuity, especially of the household; non-conformity; dissembling and prevarication, as opposed to honesty and straightforwardness; the consequences for the individual of conflicted values; and friendship and sociability. Please note that when values are promoted in order to influence the behavior of individuals and groups, they cross the line into ideology, and early Tokugawa ideology has been exceptionally well examined by Herman Ooms (1985) and others. Our concern in this chapter will be on the neglected values that arose not from above but rather from below, and that informed behavior as demonstrated and observed in everyday life, i.e., on values as actually practiced. We will then close with an examination of an extraordinary woman, Tadano Makuzu (1763–1825), who has already made several appearances in passing in this volume and who, writing in about 1817, had much to say about the values of her age and how those values had changed. Stability and continuity—Stability as a value is probably biological, certainly primordial, and was a major concern at all levels of Tokugawa society. For the Bakufu, from the Laws governing the Military Households (Buke shohatto 武家諸法度) of 1615, to the edicts of the 1630s known subsequently as sakoku (鎖国) restricting or eliminating contact with foreign countries, and on to the “No Second Thoughts” (ninen naku 二念無く) order of 1825 demanding vigorous coastal defense, Bakufu policies sought to preserve a polity that it expected to last for 10,000 generations. In this chapter, however, we are more interested in how stability, especially of the financial variety, became probably the single most important consideration for the majority of Edo-period households. The times were always uncertain for agricultural households, whose livelihood and survival often depended upon uncontrollable variables like rainfall, climate, harvests, and market conditions. The challenge, simply put, was to try to bring about stability in an inherently unstable environment. In order to maintain continuity of the household, which we will turn to in the next section, and under circumstances whereby roughly 30 percent of infants did not survive their first year (Cornell 1996: 30), it was prudent to

Values  117 have more than one son, and for this reason the average number of surviving children per household was 3.5. Though the estimates of the population of Japan at the time of the founding of the Tokugawa Bakufu in 1603 vary widely, there is no disagreement that the population grew by at least 50 percent and perhaps even as much as 100 percent between then and the first reliable census in 1721, when it reached approximately 28,000,000 and then remained at roughly this level for the next century. This begs the questions of why the population grew so quickly, and why it then stabilized, with the former being easier to answer than the latter. During the seventeenth century there were significant improvements in agronomy, with the introduction of strains of early ripening rice as well as double- and even triple-cropping with other grains, cereals, and agricultural products, and as we have repeatedly observed, it was a time of relative though not uninterrupted peace. There was no outlet for surplus population as one finds in Europe from about the same time with discovery of the so-called New World, and there were fewer instances of serious famine, with those that did occur tending to be more local tragedies, such as the one in southwest Japan that was an important factor in precipitating the Shimabara Rebellion. These conditions resulted in modest surpluses in the households of many, which, when combined with increased urbanization, provided the tinder for the commercial expansion and popular culture of the Genroku period and subsequently. But the question of why after such rapid growth the population stabilized for the next century has been controversial. The calculus for optimal household size was surely complex. More children conduced toward household continuity, but unrestrained reproduction would erode both household and individual wealth, as well as prosperity. Fewer children meant greater per capita resources as well as fewer mouths to feed, which could be a critical factor in times of famine, and consistent with our thesis regarding individuality, we see self-interest rising to the fore. The common wisdom has been that population stability and occasional decline resulted from largely uncontrollable factors such as the more devastating famines and epidemics that repeatedly ravaged eighteenth-century Japan, acting in concert with deliberate efforts to control household size by methods that commonly included infanticide. Laurel Cornell has challenged the assumption that infanticide was a major cause of either population decline or stability, and emphasizes instead factors such as the pattern of work-related migration that separated spouses, as well as the lengthier periods of breastfeeding that were common in Japan at the time (1996: 44). But using Cornell’s own statistical assumptions and drawing on other evidence suggests that infanticide was as common in eighteenth-century Japan as abortion is in the twenty-first-century United States. Cornell estimates that “one of every three households killed one of its infants” (ibid: 45), and in 2003 it was estimated that 35 percent of all women who reach reproductive age in America will have had an abortion by the time they reach the age of 45.2 More recent statistics from the U.S.

118 Values Centers for Disease Control and Prevention suggest that 18 percent of all pregnancies in 2011 ended in abortion (Washington Examiner 2014). Despite Cornell’s conclusions, it is arguable whether infanticide was perceived to be a last resort, particularly in eighteenth-century Japan. Fabian Drixler has concluded that for roughly a hundred years, from the late seventeenth century to the late eighteenth, “overpopulation fears and individual household strategies amid an increasing scarcity of land reinforced pre-existing permissive attitudes toward infanticide” (2013: 20). Drixler estimates that the “proportion of infanticides and abortions [was] closer to 40%” during this peak century, and argues that what changed this beginning around 1790 was concern over the depopulation of the countryside brought on by several years of famine and epidemic, and an increasing awareness of the potential for foreign threat, making it desirable to increase the supply of adult males for national defense (ibid: 18, 21). The horror of infanticide was mitigated by different conceptions of the integrity of the life of a child under the age of 7, or 6 when using a Western way of reckoning age. If one considers contemporary Anglo-European debates over when life actually begins, one can perhaps sympathize more readily with the notion that there was something of a sliding scale during which children were believed to transition from a stage of pre-humanity, through liminal humanity, culminating in full humanity. The practice of destroying children who survived the birth process was euphemistically styled “returning to the kami” (kami ni okaeshi 神にお返し or simply kogaeshi 子返し), because children under 7/6 were called “children of the kami” (kami no ko 神の子), as if they were not yet fully of this world. This would make it easier to rationalize infanticide as one means to preserve a household’s strength and thereby to assure the continuity of rituals intended to honor deceased ancestors and assuage their spirits. It would, of course, also assure the relative well-being of all surviving members of the household, which explains the alternative euphemism for this practice as “pruning” (mabiki 間引き), i.e., as a way of sustaining and even strengthening the remaining household by reducing its numbers. Whether in times of famine or as a form of socially responsible family planning, there were various ways of controlling or reducing household size, which included strangulation, smothering, burying alive, and crushing, but not drowning, which was the most common form of infanticide in China. Instances of smothering or crushing—it is difficult to tell which— are depicted in ema (絵馬 votive plaques) believed to date from the late Tokugawa period, when in response to the state’s growing concern over depopulation, there were ever more frequent appeals that the practice be abandoned. That these unsettling representations were intended to discourage infanticide is indicated by the typically blank expressions on the women’s faces and the depictions of divine retribution accompanying the act’s karmic consequences, as seen in Figure 7.1.3

Figure 7.1  Imagining the karmic consequences of mabiki. Credit: Mr. Omoto Takahisa.

120 Values Continuity is stability’s first cousin and was a particularly powerful concern for Daimyo, since the domain of a Daimyo who died without an heir could be subject to Bakufu reassignment. Note, however, that in yet another example of the power of performance, the display of having an heir by posthumous adoption could on occasion be accepted as a satisfactory alternative to the actuality (Roberts 2012). Here too, however, our concern is not with Daimyo or Bakufu but rather with commoner households and the individuals they comprised, i.e., those whose financial stakes in continuity may have been much smaller, but whose commitment to continuity was, in its own way, equally intense. In our earlier discussion of orientation, we noted the importance of the household in Tokugawa society, and the manner in which Confucianism supported this perspective. Nakane Chie (中根千枝) has described the ie (家) or household as “the basic social unit among the common people” in early modern Japan and its continuity as “a major concern among its members” (1990: 216). Indeed, intergenerational continuity as a value is symbiotic with stability, since each conduces toward and supports the other, and continuity of the household, with its corporate character, was as much a concern as stability at all levels of Tokugawa society. For households, this meant having a son either biologically born or adopted through marriage to one’s daughter, and if childless then simply by adoption. The only or eldest son was the sole inheritor of a family’s property or estate during the Tokugawa period and was from birth destined to family headship. These primary heirs were expected to remain on the estate as its stewards, a tradition so strong that Ihara Saikaku, our oft-cited observer of the mores of his Genroku times, included in a short story the posthumous advice of a wealthy merchant in his will that his variously talented but financially inept youngest son seek out a True Pure Land temple4 where the head priest had only daughters, and to marry one of them, thus providing financial security for himself as well as continuity to the chief priest’s temple headship (Nosco 1980). Some daughters and younger brothers could be productively absorbed into the lives of their agricultural households, which represented 80 percent of the population, but for those who could not, marriage and migration were the most common alternatives. On the basis of his analysis of the temple registrations of the populations of Edo and Osaka, Hayami Akira (速水 融 2001: 65–66) has estimated that over half of the population of these two largest cities was represented by such in-migration. In the case of women, entering into the domestic service of a more well-to-do urban household was a common pattern. Ihara Saikaku also warned of the problems that can arise in urban households from romantic entanglements between male family members and female domestic servants who, with seasonal gifts of clothing and so on, were in many ways treated like valued members of the household, in much the same way as agricultural workers hired by their rural counterparts.

Values  121 In a study of the sibling rivalry between the grandsons of Hirata Atsutane (平田篤胤 1776–1843), Anne Walthall (2015) has written of the importance of birth order and the dilemmas faced by second sons, whose superfluity frequently became a problem and whose occasional unruliness could bring embarrassment to the main household, as represented in the popular saying “good elder brother, bad younger brother (ii aniki, warui otōto いい兄貴 悪い弟).” Among the nativists whom I have studied most closely, Kamo no Mabuchi, Motoori Norinaga, and Hirata Atsutane were all younger brothers, whose birth order left them no alternative than to find their way in some fashion other than their family’s vocation. And if one is wondering about the two exceptions among Kokugaku’s “great men” of Keichū and Kada no Azumamaro, note that the former was an only child who chose the path of celibate Shingon priesthood in order to respect his parents’ vow to Kannon when they feared their son’s death, and the latter was substantially motivated by the wish to use his expertise in antiquarian matters to provide financial stability and continuity to the straitened Fushimi Inari Shrine of which his family were the hereditary wardens. Non-conformity—If everyone were an eccentric, then of course no one would be, and so non-conformity can be a prominent value but never a paramount one. As W. Puck Brecher has described, it was the growing acceptance of strangeness—its very social currency—that would prove to be its eventual undoing. Over time, eccentricity and non-conformity acquired their own conventions that eventually evolved into an alternative orthodoxy, with the consequence that when engaged some two centuries after the fact, “early modern Japan’s growing fascination with eccentricity. . . cannot be viewed as a marginal, anomalous, or failed experiment [but rather] indicates evidence of an emergent paradigm that valued strangeness for its own sake” (2013: 20–21). Indeed, there are times when it seems as if Edo was one immensely large carnival of eccentrics. During the Edo period, the most commonly used word to refer to eccentrics was kijin (奇人), but this was not a term that one could legitimately use to refer to oneself, since to do so would have been regarded as self-aggrandizement of a sort that would disqualify one from further consideration (ibid: 21n2). Rather like privacy, to be designated a kijin was an accorded privilege rather than an earned right and could never be claimed for one’s own. Though kijin might be strange, and many to be sure were neurotic geniuses, neurosis, strangeness, and/or genius were not their defining characteristics as much as eccentricity, exceptionalism, and non-conformity. The year 1790 was an important one for both conformity and non-conformity, since it was when Matsudaira Sadanobu promulgated his Prohibition on Heterodoxy in the Bakufu-sponsored Shōheizaka Academy, and Ban Kōkei (伴 蒿蹊 1733–1806) published his biographical compilation “Eccentrics of Our Times” (Kinsei kijinden 近世奇人伝).5 Kinsei kijinden was not the first collectanea of kijin biographies, but it was by far the most important

122 Values and set the standard for later collections.6 The juxtaposition of these two events is significant, since eccentricity generally carried no political valence other than disillusion and disappointment with mainstream values, and it was precisely this apolitical quality that ironically enabled non-conformity to imbue those values and “to assume an inviolable position within mainstream culture” (Brecher 2013: 5). At the same time, Sadanobu’s decree, while narrowly focused on the Bakufu-sponsored Shōheizaka, revealed a far broader concern with ideological orthodoxy and what he believed to be its link to societal order. In its apolitical quality, eccentricity represented something of an extension from the medieval tradition of artistic and spiritual reclusion that was its progenitor, and the salon culture that was its fellow traveler. Regarding the values that aesthetic reclusion represented in the Momoyama and early Edo periods (roughly 1568–1615), Kendall Brown has written that aesthetic reclusion was politically ambivalent, in that while it assumed “an inversion of the values of the normative sociopolitical order, by relegating criticism of that order to a personal choice and then channeling that choice into artistic or ritual expression, the political rejection implied by reclusion [was] safely distanced from revolution” (1997: 175).7 Brecher likewise agrees that during the Edo period, most eccentric art “positioned itself to orbit conventions” rather than to express anything that could be construed as political opposition (2013: 20), and Matsudaira Sadanobu’s concerns notwithstanding, we have already noted the fundamentally apolitical discourses that characterized eighteenth- and nineteenth-century salon culture in Japan. Avoidance of political discussion was of course the safer path, since as early as 1652 during what was probably the high-water mark of its efforts to control people’s religious beliefs and social behavior, the Bakufu declared kabukimono (傾奇者, also 歌舞伎者), as the most extreme eccentricity was then styled, to be deviant behavior and against the law; and returning to the late eighteenth century, as innocuous a statement as that of Hayashi Shihei (林子平 1738–93) to the effect that island countries should emphasize coastal defense earned him house arrest in 1792, which lasted until his death the next year. One manifestation of the Edo-period fascination with eccentricity and weirdness in general was the misemono (見世物), which Andrew Markus has defined as “private exhibitions of unusual items, individuals, or skills, conducted for a limited span of time inside a temporary enclosure for the purpose of financial gain,” and which likely served as the “first point of contact between the average citizen and novelty of any sort” (1985: 500–1). Misemono were often linked to kaichō (開帳), temple fairs where ordinarily concealed statues, images, and relics believed to have efficacious potency were put on a pay-per-view display for periods ranging from a few days to a few months. In this way, secular spectacle of the unusual was linked to exceptional display of the concealed sacred in a symbiosis of liminality.

Values  123 As examples of Edo-period eccentrics, consider the komusō (虚無僧), priests of the Fukeshū (普化宗) offshoot of Rinzai Zen Buddhism. The komusō were specialists in the shakuhachi (尺八) bamboo flute, and they used their skill in the instrument to solicit alms, but what was most distinctive was their appearance (see Figures 7.2 and 7.3). The classic mark of the komusō was and still is a loosely fitting, woven straw helmet with

Figure 7.2  Sketch of an Edo period komusō. Credit: Alamy Limited.

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Figure 7.3  A group of contemporary komusō. Credit: Wikimedia Commons. Photographer: 松岡明芳. CC-BY-SA-3.0.

a crisscross pattern of slits worn to the front to enable the wearer to see forward. The shape allows for the insertion of the shakuhachi while at the same time completely concealing the face of the komusō as he (or she) performs on the instrument. This, in turn, adds a bizarrely gothic dimension to the already otherworldly sound of the instrument. Sir Rutherford Alcock, England’s ambassador to Japan in the early 1860s, viewed the komusō with suspicion and likened those whom he encountered along the Tōkaidō to the “brothers of the Misercordia and begging penitents, still to be seen in the towns of Italy,” commenting that “it is not a little singular to find their counterpart here” (1863: 118). Writing at about the same time, J.M.W. Silver included the drawing shown in Figure 7.2 of komusō in his Sketches of Japanese Manners and Customs (1867: 22), with the heading “A Begging Criminal.” Komusō were not confined to Edo but extended throughout the length and breadth of Japan, with subtly distinctive strains in Hokuriku, Tōhoku, Koganei, and Ōme in the Kantō, Kyoto, and Kyushu, and note that a komusō was and still is as likely to be a solitary maverick as part of a procession of musical-spiritual eccentrics. Either way, to see a komusō was (and still is) to invite the question, “Did you see what I saw today?” Dissembling and prevarication—Societies need minimal levels of trust if they are to survive, and they devise various mechanisms in order to incentivize the honoring of commitments and to discourage their violation. During

Values  125 the notoriously treacherous Sengoku years, the exchange of family members as hostages was often used to cement alliances, and oaths similarly have a long history in Japan. But far from being core values of a long-gone age, trust is as essential today as it ever has been (Sztompka 1999), and Japan has been singled out as an exemplary model of a trust-based civilization (Eisenstadt 1996). Similarly, truthfulness and its sibling honesty are universally present in ethical codes from the time of Hammurabi’s Code (c. 1754 BCE) to the present, and foreign observers of Japan from Francis Xavier (1506–52) to Carl Peter Thunberg (1743–1828) to the present continue endlessly to comment on Japanese honesty as represented by such contemporary acts as the returning of a wallet with its contents intact even when this is accomplished at some inconvenience to the Samaritan.8 Of course, there was dishonesty and theft during the Tokugawa period. Chikamatsu’s Sonezaki shinjū (曽根崎心中), first produced in 1703 and based on recent actual events, told of the hapless Tokubei, who was swindled by the villainous Kuheiji, whom he trusted, believing him to be his friend. Thwarted thereby in his love for the courtesan Ohatsu, the pair ultimately seek redemption and an eternal life together through their love suicide in Sonezaki Wood. Or consider the celebrated thief Nezumikozō (鼠小 僧 1797–1832), who acquired such notoriety through his burglary of some thirty Daimyo compounds in Edo that he became the subject of woodblock prints, including one by Utagawa (Tokinoya 1977). All this makes it surprising that prevarication and dissembling should appear among this list of the neglected values of the late Edo period, and that one can discern in this a subtle but significant change from the values of the Genroku. While both dissembling and prevarication are forms of deception that involve speaking or acting evasively, to dissemble is to speak in a narrowly truthful way and thereby to conceal or hide the broader truth regarding one’s convictions or beliefs (a standard practice for those who followed any of Japan’s forbidden religions or religious practices), and to prevaricate is to deliberately mislead by speaking evasively: the two are obviously related, but prevarication is closer to lying. Both fly in the face of the straightforwardness (shōjiki 正直) that Kamo no Mabuchi identified in the 1760s as an essential attribute of Japanese “True Hearts,” and both are polar opposites of the honesty that Robert Bellah claimed to be a core value of Tokugawa society endorsed by any variety of traditions. Indeed, in almost the same breath that he commented upon the generally “trusty and honest” behavior of the Japanese whom he observed in the mid-1770s, Thunberg also wrote that the Japanese deceive “their enemies. . . as well as each other with dissembled friendship” (quoted in Screech 2005: 183). Consider two quotations from the Tokugawa period separated by just over a century. The reader will recall the first, which was cited to illuminate the Chinese Other and which comes from Ihara Saikaku’s posthumously published Some Final Words of Advice, where the author describes a remarkably honest salt vendor (Nosco 1980: 110): “He once found a wallet

126 Values with some money in it and actually returned it to its rightful owner! I’ll wager you never heard of someone else doing that in or out of the Capital.” Dishonesty in material matters grows in direct proportion to the volume of transactions in a society, and so Saikaku’s amazement at the salt vendor’s honesty is to some extent also a reflection of the exponentially increasing opportunities for financial dishonesty in Genroku society, as Saikaku’s repeated warnings in the same work regarding swindlers also attest. Compare this with the following quotation from the second paragraph of the 1809 opening volume of Jippensha Ikku’s Tōkaidōchū hizakurige, in which Ikku describes the circumstances surrounding his protagonists’ decision to embark on their epic ribald journey: Theirs is the easy life of the bachelor. No more than the rats are they required to waste money on rent, and as all the property they have is tied up in a bundle they have no anxiety about that. . . . Moreover, instead of paying what they owed to the landlord, they had to get their papers to pass the barriers. However, they made some money by selling to a second-hand dealer what they had of value. . . . Nothing is left, but there is still the difficulty of paying the rice bill and the saké bill. They are very sorry to go without paying them, but then as the old poem says: “Whether in this life or the next we cheat, in either case our punishment we’ll meet.” This made them burst into laughter. (Satchell 1960: 23–24) Their lifestyle was indeed the enviable but unscrupulous “easy life” in which to pay one’s rent is to “waste” one’s money; possessions to them were only a source of anxiety, so it is far better to sell what one has in order to acquire counterfeit travel papers (prevarication); and to postpone paying one’s bills to local saké or rice vendors is hardly regrettable (dissembling), since karmic retribution is no better than a joke. What is different between these two examples is precisely this dismissal of the concept of karmic retribution. Like his Genroku contemporary Chikamatsu Monzaemon, Ihara Saikaku was a didact; he did not shy from entertaining his reading audience with tales of mischief and excess, but he also took pleasure in graphically describing the bad end that such behavior invites, as in his description of the adulterous Osan in Five Women who Loved Love and the pale-blue slip that she wore to her execution. To Jippensha Ikku’s protagonists, such concerns as karmic retribution are simply laughable. This contrast becomes even clearer when we consider the dilemma of conflicted values. Emotional complexity and conflicted values—When one’s most heartfelt desires conflict with what one understands to be one’s fundamental responsibilities and obligations, one often experiences emotionally complex

Values  127 conflicted responses. As is well known, this is regarded as one of the major themes of Genroku popular culture and is a common motif in the prose writings of the just-cited Ihara Saikaku, especially those that deal with amorous adventures (kōshokubon 好色本) and the everyday lives of urban commoners, as well as in the plays of Chikamatsu Monzaemon that deal similarly with his contemporaries. Minamoto Ryōen (源了円) framed this as a conflict between duty (giri 義理) and emotions (ninjō 人情) (1969), and even though this basically Confucian terminology for a universal binary was not used at the time, Minamoto’s has remained the predominant manner of conceptualizing the tension ever since. In the popular literature, death represents the only resolution of conflicted values, but the binary of giri–ninjō lends itself to a range of interpretation, including the perspective that the two need to be kept in something like balance. Writing about the sociocultural context for jurisprudence, Meryll Dean has written, “No one wants to be regarded by others as a person who acts only in his own interests, and it is said of a person who acts in that way that, ‘he does not know his ninjō,’ and he is considered abnormal from the social point of view” (2002: 18). This may in fact be the case during the Edo period, and if one compares the resigned didacticism of Saikaku and Chikamatsu with the libertine emotionalism of Jippensha Ikku a century later, one suspects that here too we may observe something of a transition in how both giri and ninjō functioned as early modern values. In general, it does appear that an appreciation of emotional complexity as a factor in conflicted values is yet another neglected value within Tokugawa society. Examples would include the numerous memorials erected during the period for “exemplary” acts of self-sacrifice valorized in such improbable sources as biographical compilations of eccentrics (see Carter 2014: 314–30). If these “exemplary” acts were not exceptional, they would of course not have been memorialized, but one alternative explanation for such memorialization might be that the compilers of such collectanea sought to protect themselves from the watchful eyes of censors by including altruistic acts of the sort that conservative Confucians would endorse. Nonetheless, these valorous acts of self-sacrifice might just as plausibly be examples of ideology as a form of social medicine to remedy more conventional tendencies to prioritize self-interest. To say one thing and to do another, i.e., to profess one value and to demonstrate another, or to exhibit one value at one moment and another at the next moment, were likely as common in eighteenth-century Japan as anywhere else. Consider in this regard Thunberg’s characterization in the same sentence of the Japanese of the mid-1770s as both “free and unconstrained” and “obedient and courteous,” at once both “trusty and honest” and “mistrustful,” simultaneously “intelligent” and “superstitious” (Screech 2005: 179). It goes without saying that there are ways to reconcile such superficially contradictory observations, as, for example, that one might appear perfectly intelligent as well as superstitious to the eyes of someone with a

128 Values different worldview. Nonetheless, Thunberg’s language underscores for us the complexity of and contradictions intrinsic to the effort to generalize about values as practiced, as opposed to values as ideologized. Friendship and sociability—It may be surprising, especially to those familiar with Chinese thought and society, that friendship and sociability arise as values during the second half of the Tokugawa period. Of all the values that we discuss in this chapter, friendship would seem in many ways the most natural and universal, as when Confucius opines in 1:1b on the pleasure of having friends visit from afar (有朋自遠方來, 不亦樂乎). The underlined character used for friendship recurs in the writings of Mencius in the compound 朋友 (Jpn. hōyū), as one of the Five Confucian Relationships known in Japanese as the gorin (五倫) and notably as the only one of the five understood as a relationship between equals without connoting either a superior–subordinate or benefactor–beneficiary dimension. Yet there is a fundamental contradiction in this understanding of equality, for it is the very nature of friendship that one elevates a select few to this status over the vast majority of others. Indeed, if one were to say that all of humanity are one’s friends—as the radical eighteenth-century contrarian Andō Shōeki (安藤 昌益 1703–62) argued—then these “friends” have been reconstituted along quasi-familial lines as a universal brother-/sisterhood, much like that posited by the fifth-century BCE Chinese philosopher Mo Di (墨翟), best known for his teaching of “universal love.”9 Friendships such as that described between the seventh-century BCE Guanzhong and Bao Shuya (官仲 and 鮑叔牙) in the first-century BCE Shijì (史記) seem to have been in no way unusual in Chinese society, and were understood as exemplary of the virtue of loyalty or trust (信), one of the five cardinal or “constant” virtues (五常). Friendship is said to have been a topic of such interest to Ming-dynasty (1368–1644) intellectuals that they are reputed to have written about it “almost obsessively,” and note in this regard that Matteo Ricci’s (1552–1610) On Friendship (交友論) was the first Western work to be included in Chinese anthologies and collectanea (Ricci 2009: 5). All this begs the question, why does homosocial friendship appear to have been so rare prior to the eighteenth century in Japan, especially if Confucianism is deemed to have been as important as we have throughout this volume suggested? One possible explanation is that the long period of feudal society gave a hierarchical character to almost all relationships, making purely horizontal friendships exceptional. Superiors in such relationships had varying levels of obligation to look after and care after their subordinates, in the same way that subordinates owed measures of loyalty and followership in return. One example of an exceptional relationship from the late sixteenth century seems to have been that between the two couples Toyotomi Hideyoshi and his wife on the one hand, and Maeda Toshiie (前田利家 1538–99) and his wife Matsu on the other. Hideyoshi and Toshiie were close in age,

Values  129 childhood friends, and fellow “bad boys” who rose to positions of exceptional authority; their wives, in turn, were likewise known for their strong personalities and influence over their husbands and others in their circles. A celebrated example of a friendship-gone-wrong comes from the recently referenced Sonezaki shinjū, where the shop clerk Tokubei loans money that is not actually his to his “friend” Kuheiji, an oil merchant who pleads exigency. As we saw, Kuheiji subsequently betrays Tokubei, proves to be the more convincing liar, and then pursues the romantic services of Tokubei’s beloved Ohatsu. Nonetheless, the facts that exceptional personages may have from time to time had exceptional relationships, or that trusting friends could descend into betrayal, does not shed the kind of light that we seek. If we extrapolate from a word like nenyu (念友), which was used during the Edo period to refer to homosexual relationships, we get a clue as to how to relate male–male erotic ties to non-erotic male–male friendship. The first character nen means to think about, and the second means friend(s), but together they refer to homosexual longing. In this light, most likely the best way to understand Edo-period homosociality and homosexuality is to understand them as part of a continuum that gets severed during the Meiji period (Pflugfelder 1999: 231). For domainal rulers there was something potentially destabilizing about male–male erotic relationships, known at the time as shudō (衆道, a contraction of wakashudō 若衆道). As Gregory Pflugfelder has observed, this is because shudō relationships between vassals could support the larger structure of domainal power by “encouraging the cultivation of giri, or conversely [they could] undermine it, inasmuch as they established private and horizontal loyalties outside the official hierarchy of power” (ibid: 128). When regarded in the context of the Confucian Five Relationships, one finds the absolute loyalty demanded within the lord– vassal relationship providing a metaphor for comparable forms of fidelity within male–male erotic relationships and especially those between samurai. The relationship between brothers was also employed metaphorically, since it conveniently provided a vertical element based on age differential of a sort that was characteristic of Edo-period homosexuality. Pflugfelder allows that the friend–friend Confucian relationship could be invoked as a description of an “intense form of masculine friendship” (ibid: 103), but what one does not observe is invocation of either parental or spousal domestic metaphors, since of course male–male erotic ties were incapable of generating legally acknowledged progeny. In this volume we have already examined the relatively horizontal relationships that developed in academic settings. One example of such friendship may have been that between Hanabusa Itchō (英一蝶 1652–1724) and Takarai Kikaku (宝井其角 1661–1707). Both were haikai students of Matsuo Bashō who achieved high levels of celebrity in their own right, the former principally as a painter who incurred Bakufu wrath, and the latter as a poet. Miriam Wattles describes Kikaku’s and Itchō’s painful longing for each other during Itchō’s years in exile from Edo (2013: 67), but Itchō

130 Values seems to have been in various ways the senior in the relationship, by being both nine years Kikaku’s elder as well as clearly the more celebrated during their lifetimes. One factor that may explain the rise of male–male homosociality in the late eighteenth century might be to understand it as an outgrowth of the sociability (kōyū 交遊) that Ibi Takashi has claimed to have characterized relationships in salon culture (2009: 5). As will be recalled, those who frequented salons became part of a highly egalitarian culture, a liminal society that disdained conventional values in the pursuit of individual interiority and mutual spiritual fulfillment. Similar environments could be found in many private academies as well as spiritual communities like those of Shingaku, where distinctions of status and wealth were generally subordinated to the meritocratic principles of kaidoku (“meeting to read”) pedagogy. These would have been fertile environments for the cultivation of friendships based on shared interests rather than commonalities of background, and without consideration of status. Two episodes from the world of popular literature shed different kinds of light on early modern friendship. The first is from the short story “Chrysanthemum Vow” (Kikka no chigiri 菊花の約) included in Ueda Akinari’s Tales of Moonlight and Rain (Ugetsu monogatari 雨月物語) published in 1776. It tells the story of the bond that forms between the impoverished filial Confucian Hasebe Samon (丈部左門) and the samurai Akana Sōemon (赤穴宗右衞門), something that Anthony Chambers has called a “meeting of minds” and model of “friendship, loyalty, dependability, courage, erudition, and self-sacrifice” (2007: 30, 76). The bond forms when Samon nurses the failing Sōemon back to health—“He cared for the man with extraordinary kindness, as though he were nursing his own brother” (ibid: 79)— and the two become fast friends. “Thinking what a good friend (yoki tomo よき友) he had found,” Samon is concerned when Sōemon has to leave to attend to personal matters, but the two “pledged their brotherhood (kyōdai no chikai o nasu 兄弟の盟をなす)” and vowed to have their reunion on the Chrysanthemum Festival on the ninth day of the ninth month (ibid: 79–80; Ueda 2009: 24–25). At one level this appears to be a remarkably clear example of homosocial friendship, but closer examination reveals it to be more complicated. Sōemon is five years older than Samon, and so the brotherhood metaphor is apt. The relationship of older brother to younger brother is as equally Confucian as that of friend to friend, but it is also the more hierarchical. Adding complexity is the fact that the ninth day of the ninth month was by tradition set aside for wakashudō (若衆道) or the homosexual Way of intercourse between adult males and boys. Thus, the relationship between Samon and Sōemon is as complex as the fact that the latter, having been confined by his presumed host, commits suicide in order to fulfill his pledge to reunite not in human form but as a ghost, and this in order not to disappoint his newfound “brother.”

Values  131 A more familiar image of friendship and camaraderie is found in the aforementioned Tōkaidōchū hizakurige (1802–9). The ne’er-do-well protagonists Yajirobei and Kitahachi (弥次郎兵衛 and 喜多八) wend their way down the Tōkaidō roadway using illicitly obtained travel documents in a serialized epic of drinking and womanizing debauchery. Their bond is one of rascalry, hedonism, and disobedience, as the pair scramble to stay one step ahead of bill collectors and spurned lovers, but nonetheless always find time to indulge their appetites as comrades in arms. Tadano Makuzu’s and an unnamed Edo samurai’s observations regarding values—There are two remarkable commentaries that date from 1816–17, the first by an unnamed samurai based in Edo, and the other by Tadano Makuzu, both of whom describe the degeneration of traditional values in their times. In the former, the author comments, “As I observed the customs of the present and compared them with the good times of the past, it became clear to me people’s dispositions have grown corrupt and their conduct negligent, that the principles of the Way have become hidden, and that the indiscriminate struggle for profit has created an extraordinary imbalance between rich and poor” (Teeuwen 2014: 36). The age that the author believes to have been superior is the Genroku and immediately surrounding years, “an enlightened age of supreme peace, sincere courtesy, and warm magnanimity” (ibid), whose virtues have eroded as a consequence of too much ease and plenty. Turning to Tadano Makuzu (只野真葛), the copyist to whom posterity owes thanks for transcribing her “Solitary Thoughts” (Hitori Kangae 独 考) described her as an “extraordinary woman,” and this is if anything an understatement (Tadano 2001). She was the eldest of seven surviving children, five of whom were daughters, and her father was a physician who used his home in salon fashion to entertain a diverse array of guests who included Rangaku scholars, poets, actors, and even the occasional gambler. In her own words, even “as a young girl, [she] had a strong mind,” for which we shall momentarily see ample evidence (ibid: 174). At the age of 16 she left home to enter service to a royal princess. She married at 25 in what turned out to be an ill-advised match. She subsequently divorced, remarried, and moved to Sendai, where she saw her second husband infrequently owing to his service to a Daimyo household in Edo. This was the environment in which Tadano Makuzu began to record her thoughts: “I have been left all alone in an unfamiliar country, without any friends to whom I can talk, [so with] time to myself, I found consolation in mulling over how things come to be as they are. . .” (ibid: 179, emphasis added). Makuzu expressed remarkably insightful views on a vast range of matters. At times conventional and at other times the opposite, she criticized traditional teachings for women, calling them “wrong for trying to suppress young women’s preference for the up-to-date,” and emphasized the importance of remaining current with whatever was fashionable at the time (ibid). At the same time, she cautioned women against studying things “too

132 Values deeply,” lest they appear overly knowledgeable, while also advising any woman intending to enter service to “learn an art” so as to enhance the value of her service. Despite having been described as a woman who thinks like a man (Gramlich-Oka 2006), she defied simplistic characterization by counseling that a “woman should not think herself equal to a man” and before marriage “should think of herself as an appetizer” (Tadano 2001: 176–77). Her consciousness of time was especially remarkable, as when she observed that people “are all equal with regard to the number of nights and days,” and that throughout their lives “they should keep the number of days and nights in mind and make it the rhythm inside their hearts” (ibid: 183, 193), anticipating American author H. Jackson Brown’s similar insight by almost two centuries.10 But it is her observations regarding society and its values that are of most interest to us. Note first that she was equally scathing toward merchants as well as bushi. Consistent with our own observations regarding the pursuit of self-interest, she described Daimyo as “driven by the desire to promote their own interests,” and wrote that since “there is little chance of actual warfare, today everyone battles over money.” She condemned so-called currency reforms, noting that “every time new currency is issued, the price of everything goes up,” creating profits for those who sell at the expense of those who consume, and she cynically compared fluctuations in prices to the instability of an unmoored boat: “I have never ceased to wonder why prices should go up after a fire.” But she was at her boldest when criticizing bushi, commenting that from “the perspective of townspeople, who have to struggle to make a living, warriors who live off their fiefs without doing anything must seem an object of envy or even hatred” (supra, ibid: 177–78, emphasis added). Please recall Makuzu’s samurai background and the fact that at the time of this writing she was married to a bushi. Even the monarchy in Kyoto did not escape the wrath of Makuzu’s brush. Commenting on the rumor that the Kyoto Court had been lending money at interest, she wrote, “Isn’t it despicable that the most august and sagacious emperor, who governs heaven and the four seas, should enrich himself by squeezing oil out of the people?” (ibid: 191). All of this attests to a complex and fearless woman with a wry and sophisticated understanding of economics, class structure, male–female relationships, and the manner in which status affects self-interest. In this she is every inch the equal of her better-known male contemporary Kaiho Seiryō, as well as Andō Shōeki, who died the year before Makuzu was born. But even they were unable to perceive the manner in which the values of their times differed from the values of earlier times, and in this Makuzu may be unique. Consider the following quotation: Characteristics that have become outmoded in today’s world would include true uprightness (gokushōjiki 極正直), a compassionate heart (jihigokoro 慈悲心), sympathy (nasake 情), duty (giri 義理), and a sense of shame (haji 恥). These five characteristics are truly precious,

Values  133 but nowadays they have gone out of fashion, leaving only remnants behind. . . . The transgression of norms is one indication of a disorderly era, I have heard, and that is the way things are today. (ibid:192) Let us briefly consider these five values, and whether our own observations thus far tally. The characters for gokushōjiki in “true uprightness” could as easily be translated exceptional or extreme straightforwardness of the sort that Kamo no Mabuchi championed as a cardinal virtue of Japaneseness, and which featured similarly in Robert Bellah’s analysis of Tokugawa values. Here Makuzu would appear to be agreeing with both her unnamed samurai contemporary and Kamo no Mabuchi a half-century earlier that honest straightforwardness was sorely lacking in an age characterized by the sort of corrupt politics and inflation-stoking economic policies epitomized by Senior Counselor Tanuma Okitsugu (田沼意次 1719–88). Makuzu includes an absence of compassion and sympathy for others as signs of the deteriorated times, and as evidence of this she would need look no further than the taxation policies that provoked steadily increasing peasant uprisings, averaging approximately twenty per year at the time of Makuzu’s writing. Makuzu clearly thinks of merchants as without haji, i.e., shameless, but so too does she scorn artisans on this point as persons who would regard a city in flames as a potential boon to their craft. In this regard, we have already noted the contempt shown by Jippensha Ikku’s protagonists for such bourgeois niceties as speaking truthfully or paying one’s rent and other bills. Makuzu also laments the demise of duty (giri), which earlier in the period stood alone in a binary opposition with emotionality. By Makuzu’s time, however, giri had evolved into a continuum with ninjō such that the goal had become to balance one with the other. Clearly, the times had changed, and we revisit these changes, reviewing what we have found in the terms and context of this volume’s themes, in the following Conclusions.

Notes  1  Here I disagree with John Dewey (1859–1952), who famously rejected the ­notion of intrinsic value in his 1939 Theory of Valuation: Foundations of the Unity of Science.   2 See www.prochoice.org/about_abortion/facts/women_who.html, accessed ­September 5, 2014.   3 In 1694 Huang Liu-hung advised Chinese district magistrates to prohibit infanticide, proposing abandonment on the street as a more humane alternative. See Huang 1984: 612. The collections of Ibaraki Prefectural Museum of History and of Saitama City Museum have excellent examples of votive ema depicting mabiki.   4  True Pure Land (Jōdo Shin) priests were the first in Japan to be allowed to marry.   5 1790 was also the year when Buzaemon organized the largest peasant uprising of the Tokugawa period, as noted in Chapter 3, and when Fabian Drixler sees a tipping point in the transition from acquiescence to approbation in attitudes toward infanticide. I discuss 1790 as a watershed below, pp. 144–6.

134 Values   6 According to Brecher (2013: 118, 121) both “Biographies of Nagoya Madmen” in 1778 (Hōsa kyōshaden 蓬左狂者伝) by Hotta Kōzan (堀田恒山, also known as Hotta Rikurin 堀田六林 1709–91), and “Fallen Chestnut Tales” (Ochiguri monogatari 落栗物語) from the 1780s by Matsui Narinori (松井成教 1731–86) preceded Ban Kōkei’s work. Brecher also lists a number of successor publications (ibid: 143–44).   7 Michele (Michael) Marra (1956–2010) argued the provocative view that recluses used mutually intelligible codes to express profoundly conflictual ideologies in his The Aesthetics of Discontent: Politics and Reclusion in Medieval Japanese Literature (1991).  8 Xavier wrote in 1549, “The Japanese excel all other nations yet discovered in honesty. . . . They are ingenious yet not in the least given to fraud” (1963: 519). Thunberg described the Japanese “in general” as “trusty and honest” (Screech 2005: 179). The reader will recall Ihara Saikaku, as noted previously in ­Chapter 2, extolling a salt vendor who was said to have “found a wallet with some money in it and actually returned it to its rightful owner!”  9 On Andō Shōeki’s understanding of universal friendship based on universal personhood, see Yasunaga 1992: 248ff. 10 H. Jackson Brown Jr. wrote in 1991, “Don’t say you don’t have enough time. You have exactly the same number of hours per day that were given to Helen Keller, Pasteur, Michelangelo, Mother Teresa, Leonardo da Vinci, Thomas Jefferson, and Albert Einstein.” In a similar spirit, Makuzu’s elder contemporary Benjamin Franklin (1706–90) opined that “lost time is never found again.”

8 Conclusions Individuality in Early Modern Japan

“Work hard, do your best, be honest, and good things will happen” is the ideology that was impressed upon my parents when they arrived in the United States as immigrants from what at the time was known as Czechoslovakia, and this is the ethic that they in turn impressed upon me. I cannot recall when the falsity of this ideology became evident to me, but at a certain point the accumulated evidence became too much to sustain the fiction. But ideology does not necessarily fail at this epiphany. For reasons that I will likely never fully understand, I passed on this same falsehood to my own children as part of their upbringing, justifying the deception on the grounds that while it might not actually be true, it was nonetheless a better way to live. Ideology is like that. Despite a preponderance of evidence to the contrary, we accept certain ways of looking at and responding to the world as correct, and through our actions and our didacticism, they become part of the patrimony that we bequeath to our progeny. It is similar to how when watching a film or reading a novel, we suspend disbelief, and it is in that suspension that there abides the satisfaction of the experience. Perhaps ideology is similarly escapist, like a nostalgic or utopian daydream, but when as individuals or groups we say, “No more, it stops here and ends now,” the old ideology is finished, and a new one will most assuredly arise to take its place. In the early spring of 1993, when I had concluded just over a half-year as a visiting faculty member at one of Japan’s best private universities, my dean asked me during a walk around the campus what I thought of the present crop of undergraduates. When I answered that I found them immeasurably better rounded and socially adjusted than the politicized neurotics who characterized my classmates some two decades earlier at one of Japan’s best public universities, he looked at me pityingly and corrected me: “No, Peter, you don’t understand. These undergraduates are lazy and good for nothing; they do not study the way you and I did—they are un-Japanese.” One senses that this dean would have approved of Yagi Sōsaburō (八木奘三郎 1866– 1942), who in 1912 castigated kijin eccentrics on the grounds that they “reject common sense, are overcome by selfish abandon, and demonstrate

136 Conclusions no regard for public benefit. . . . Put bluntly, they are unhealthy” (Brecher 2013: 26). One of my Japanese faculty colleagues at the same elite private university was a woman who had an impeccable family pedigree, and who dyed her hair blue; she explained this to be her way of dealing with the relentless pressures on her to conform to society’s ideal of a woman who is also a professorial scholar. The event dates from long before such coloration was even remotely fashionable outside youthful bohemian circles, and setting aside the arguable proposition of whether I studied as hard as my dean did when he and I were undergraduates in Tokyo and Cambridge, the assertion of “un-Japanese-ness” is particularly striking, since it is an essentially unimaginable criticism during the Tokugawa period. On further consideration, perhaps the Meiji and subsequent fashion of retrospectively citing the proverb regarding the negative consequences that befall the nail that sticks up tells us more about the Meiji than it does about the Tokugawa. Identity cuts both ways. Whether early modern, modern, or postmodern, the state will always have its ideology and ideologues, ready to promote the values, fictions, and constructed identity that serve its interests. Herman Ooms brilliantly demonstrated decades ago that the early Tokugawa state was eager to assert a host of fictions: that relying on a form of “genesis amnesia,” the origins of the Bakufu were represented as a form of pacification; that combining traditions, Tokugawa Ieyasu was posthumously transformed into a sage worthy of status as a bodhisattva; and that supporting this Bakufu’s continuity was tantamount to a moral obligation (Ooms 1985). Tokugawa ideology attempted to assign a place in society for every person, household, and group: an orientation that included a class, an occupational group, and a household with an assigned Buddhist affiliation, as well as a place in space and a place in time. It was largely successful in this effort but not completely so, since as powerful as was the taxonomy of class, status, and locale, so too was the resistance represented by kabukimono deviants, freelance religionists, and others who lived in society’s margins, like actors, sexual entertainers, providers of mortuary services, and so on. Seventeenth-century historiography as if with one voice asserted the twin propositions that there were invisible principles coursing through the polity that inseparably linked the present to the primordial past, and that the way things are is the way that they would remain for ten thousand generations, i.e., forever (Maruyama 1972). But to do so, it had to suppress the memory of the discontinuities inherent in the Bakufu’s founding and ignore the formidable evidence of its instability. Likewise, as impressive as were the seventeenth-century successes of ideologically rooted understandings of identity, they were still imperfect. The same (Neo-)Confucian ideologies that construed obedience to hierarchy as part of the natural order of things also endorsed individual difference. If not to the political premises on which the Bakuhan state rested, resistance to the Bakufu’s dictates was widespread during the seventeenth

Conclusions  137 century. Christian resistance to government oppression joined with that of frustrated starving peasant agriculturalists in the Shimabara Rebellion of the late 1630s, resulting in the slaughter of tens of thousands of rebels. Rōnin disgruntlement was widespread and remained a major problem for the Bakuhan state through at least the 1650s, as evidenced by the Keian incident of 1651 when Marubashi Chūya and Yui Shōsetsu conspired to attack Edo Castle. During the seventeenth century the times may indeed have been changing, but not without resistance on the part of individuals as well as groups. Peasant rebellions in the form of ikki were not as common during the seventeenth century as they would become later, but they still averaged roughly five per annum. Even among Buddhists, the seventeenthcentury fratricidal struggles between fundamentalists and accommodationists within the Nichiren denomination attest to the virulence of the struggle between ideology (political pragmatism) and individuality (freedom of religion). By way of further evidence of ideological resistance, consider the enduring allure of eccentricity to non-conformists like the komusō, whose social relevance curiously remains as compelling today as it was two and even three centuries ago. Describing early modern non-conformity in language that could be equally applicable to the context of today’s Japan, W. Puck Brecher has written that “for all the political and ideological efforts to eradicate it, nonconformity was continually vindicated by a vague admiration, an intuitive sense among a portion of Tokugawa society that deviance extends and actualizes human potential” (2013: 8). It was during the eighteenth century that individuality more broadly seems to have gained the upper hand in Japan. Probably no Tokugawa thinker more thoroughly represents the interplay between individuality and ideology than Andō Shōeki. He was a contemporary of Kamo no Mabuchi, and like Hirata Atsutane, he was born in Akita in Japan’s relatively poorer northeast. Initially trained in Zen, he walked away from this path, became a physician, developed an interest in Dutch learning but with a focus on society rather than science, and eventually rejected all “-isms” of his day as hegemonic distractions from the Natural Way of the Self-Actualizing Truth (Shizen shin’eidō 自然真営道). He was just as idiosyncratic in the early modern Japanese world of ideas as his contemporary Itō Jakuchū was in the world of art, and it was said of Shōeki that he chose the sobriquet Kakuryūdō Ryōchū (確龍堂良中) from a passage in the Yijing: “A person who is firmly (kaku) resolute and does not allow others to rob him of his dignity is like the dragon (ryū) who lies in the bowels of the earth.” In this spirit, Andō disdained the academic life, but a circle of admiring followers nonetheless gathered around him, calling themselves the Kaku Group; one of them described Shōeki as “superior even to the sages of antiquity” (Yasunaga 1992: 27.) Fearing the wrath of the Bakufu, two prominent booksellerpublishers in Kyoto and Edo self-censored out Shōeki’s scathing criticism of the flawed calendar favored by the Bakufu. Ideology in this instance trumped

138 Conclusions individuality, and Shōeki’s radicalism was so profound that the import of his message went undetected for generations by those outside his inner circle. Shōeki proclaimed that “all persons are one person,” and that while our faces and minds differ one from another, it is “precisely because these differences exist [that] I exist” (from Tōdōshinden 統道真伝, quoted in Yasunaga 1992: 73–74). As a fount for individuality, this appreciation of difference resonates with René Descartes’ celebrated “I think, therefore I am,” which as noted in the Introduction allows for the equal veracity of differences of perspective that are clear and distinct to different perceivers. Shōeki’s organism-like appreciation of humanity led him to a contrarian understanding of friendship when he insisted, “There is no one in the world who is not your friend” (from “Symposium” quoted in ibid: 77); in other words, in terms of the Five Confucian Relationships, if we are all ultimately one human being, then all “others” are logically not our siblings but rather our friends. But most radical of all was Shōeki’s criticism of the class system and feudal hierarchy. His blistering critique of the samurai, artisans, and merchants in the four-class system is in volume four of the unpublished manuscript version of his magnum opus Shizen shin’eidō: The warriors pretend to loyalty, while flattering those above them and punishing those below. . . . The craftsmen cleverly flatter those above and below themselves and are led astray by their greed to increase their livelihood. Some even pray for a fire, because it means work. The merchants are the slaves of commerce. They are said to exist to make sure that goods circulate through the realm. But. . . they exploit [this privilege] to increase their own profit. . . . They seek only to make a living while sparing themselves any pains. (quoted in ibid: 82) Only peasant agriculturalists escape Shōeki’s scorn, which when taken together with his contempt for flatterers echoes the Legalist analysis of Han Fei (韓非) from China’s third century BCE. Shōeki’s critique of the exploitative evils of hierarchy, taken from his 1752 Tōdōshinden, is no less scathing: Sages appeared in the world and made themselves rulers, placing themselves above all others. They made their high status the object of the greatest respect, and conferred on the people lowly status, regarding them as inferior. From this the social hierarchy of great and small was created. . . . After the distinction between the great ruler and his small followers was established, the great devoured what the smaller produced. . . on down the line, until the entire world followed this practice. This is the practice of the world of beasts. (adapted from ibid: 83)

Conclusions  139 Clearly, ideology failed in the case of Andō Shōeki, but he was not alone. Roughly a decade later Kamo no Mabuchi, recently retired from years of service to Tokugawa Yoshimune’s second son, Tayasu Munetake, contemptuously used the Buddhist doctrine of karmic causation to mock the reality that the more one killed during the years leading up to the founding of the Tokugawa Bakufu, the higher one’s position in the Bakuhan state. In Mabuchi’s words: Some time ago, in an earlier age, there were widespread political disturbances, and for years men became soldiers and killed each other. In those days, if you killed one person, you were an ordinary man. If you killed a few persons, you became a samurai. Those who killed a few more became today’s Daimyo, and those who killed even more became the heads of entire provinces. But those who killed countless numbers of people became the supreme leaders of the nation and prospered for generation upon generation. (from Kokui kō, in Nosco 1990: 153) Besides Kamo no Mabuchi, ideology also failed between 1760 and 1837 with Takenouchi Shikibu, Yamagata Daini, Buzaemon, Tadano Makuzu, Jippensha Ikku, Ōshio Heihachirō, Ikuta Yorozu, Yamadaya Daisuke, the egalitarian denizens of salon culture, Nichiren Buddhists who defied death in order to follow the proscribed fujufuse practice, bohemian eccentrics, peasant protesters, and so on and on and on. Nativism provided answers to questions like who we are and where we came from, but how we got to this point had become a question that lacked a clear answer or any degree of consensus during the last half-century of Tokugawa rule, and had in a brief span of years become part of an increasingly national discourse that traversed class and regional divides. The extent to which contradictions abounded within this discourse can be seen in the writings of the merchant-class Kaitokudō-trained Yamagata Bantō (山片蟠桃 1748–1821), who in his 1820 essay “Yume no shiro” (夢の代 Instead of Dreams) asserted that “Only in Igirisu [England] and our Japan (我日本) have the military historically ruled the country, and so these countries have not been invaded and have no enemies in the world.” Note not just how Bantō used a historicist argument to propose a kind of privileged parity between Japan and England, but also how his cultural defensiveness and chauvinism lingered as he brands it “embarrassing” that Westerners renamed the country “Ya-pan” instead of referring to it correctly with the Japanese term of “Our Great Nihon (我大日本)” (quoted in Maeda 2009: 183; cf. Najita 1987: 257). One sees in Yamagata’s writings the same kind of iconoclastic reasoning that we observed in Andō Shōeki, but the comparative nature of Yamagata’s argument—and not a comparison with China but with Igirisu!—adds

140 Conclusions both new complexity and new vigor to the challenges confronting later Tokugawa ideology. One of this volume’s goals has been to demonstrate movement in the direction of, and thereby to historicize, individuality, and we have observed such movement in each of this volume’s central chapters. In terms of identity, we noted how an interest in the past and the positing of a patrimony served as the foundation upon which notions of Japaneseness were constructed; in our discussion of protest and the early modern public sphere, we quantified the dramatic increase in the frequency of ikki and the placement of remonstrance boxes; in the embrace of proscribed religious practices and creeds, we noted how a retreat from enforcement was followed by an ideologically inspired and fundamentally irrational resumption of persecutions; in terms of personal development, we noted how strategies for self-cultivation acquired a near-religious quality, and how both private academies and salon culture increasingly served as venues where considerations of class might be at least momentarily suspended; we noted a general but nonetheless uneven transition to more subjective and emotional, and relatively less physical and material contexts for experiencing happiness; and in terms of values, we cited contemporary observers remarking on the decline of ideological values and the increasingly obvious pursuit of individual self-interest. Let us revisit these points in greater detail. Elsewhere, James Ketelaar and I turned to contemporary images to represent some of the changes taking place regarding issues of conformity and non-conformity, ideology and individuality (Nosco and Ketelaar 2015: esp. 11–14). Consider the three images of cranes that Ketelaar and I invoked there. The first is a two-panel screen by Ogata Kōrin (尾形光琳, 1658– 1716) (see Figure 8.1); the second is a scroll by Itō Jakuchū of seven cranes (Figure 8.2); and the third is a six-panel screen by Suzuki Kiitsu (Figure 8.3).

Figure 8.1 A two-panel screen by Ogata Kōrin (尾形光琳 1658–1716). Credit: Freer Gallery of Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.: Purchase, F1956.20—F1956.21. Used with permission.

Conclusions  141

Figure 8.1  (Continued)

Regrettably, none of the three can be precisely dated, though the first likely dates from early eighteenth century, the second from the late eighteenth century, and the third from the early nineteenth century. Further, there is no conclusive evidence of influence other than the fact that it is certain Kiitsu was aware of the image by Ogata Kōrin since he made a highly regarded copy of it. Nonetheless, the issue of influence is actually extraneous to the issue at hand. In Kōrin’s screens, there is an abiding orderliness and general conformity to the nineteen cranes, though there are several instances of non-conformity that draw the viewer’s attention to themselves: three cranes choose to look downwards instead of at what lies before them, and one utterly rejects the otherwise formal postures of the other eighteen. In Itō Jakuchū’s image, there is a general disorderliness among the seven cranes, one of which is barely visible, but their individuality is pleasing and clearly celebrated by the artist: Each crane is distinctly its own, while at the same time the elegance of their individual difference and juxtaposition is unmistakable. In Suzuki Kiitsu’s cranes, five earthbound cranes appear preoccupied with their grazing and grooming, while their six colleagues escape the earthly constraints of gravity through their flight; two of the earthbound five gaze suggestively at their airborne brethren. It would be a mistake to make overly much of just three images, but the progression that they represent provides us with a gratifying measure of support for our overall thesis. Elsewhere I have tried to demonstrate how matters of identity and individuality had changed during the Tokugawa period by focusing on the years 1710 and 1810 (Nosco 2015: 113–33). Conrad Totman regarded 1710 as a useful dividing point in Tokugawa history between the Tokugawa heyday, which extended through the Genroku, and a near-century of stasis (1993), but please note that there was nothing of an eventful nature surrounding the years 1710 and 1810, and that for us they serve simply as place-markers

Figure 8.2 A scroll by Itō Jakuchū (伊藤若冲 1716–1800) of seven cranes. Credit: From the Shin’enkan Collection of Joe and Etsuko Price, who have kindly allowed the use of this image.

Conclusions  143

Figure 8.3 A six-panel screen by Suzuki Kiitsu (鈴木其一 1796–1858). Reeds and Cranes, Edo Period. Credit: Detroit Institute of Arts, USA/Bridgeman Images.

for snapshots spaced a century apart. Such place-markers are particularly helpful for historicizing transitions, and for those of us who embrace narrative history, our stories benefit from an appropriate genesis.1 For this volume’s interest in the emergence of individuality, the values and conditions that sustained it, and its relationship with ideology, the Genroku years—­ formally 1688–1704, but commonly used more broadly to refer to roughly 1680–1710—were an important watershed and served for us as something of a de facto genesis. But if we are to demonstrate movement, we need at least a second place-marker and perhaps even a third. The reader will likely have already noticed how numerous factors significant to our themes have clustered in and around the year 1790, and before opening this volume, the reader will almost surely have been familiar with at least the outlines of the important transitions that occurred in Japan from the 1850s through the first years of Meiji. Let us compare what these three “instances” have demonstrated. Throughout this volume we have referenced the Genroku period as a time when a number of changes to society and the world of politics reached such a conjunction that Japan seems—not just to those of us with the benefit of hindsight but even to those who lived at the time—to have entered a new phase in its history. A number of factors converged in order to create conditions for the emergence of what may well have been the world’s first truly self-sustaining popular culture: an unprecedented degree of surplus wealth in the hands of many; a concentration of these potential consumers of culture owing to exceptionally high levels of urbanization; a communications and transportation infrastructure that facilitated the movement of goods and services, and reduced the per-unit cost of texts to the point where even

144 Conclusions non-elites could have access to the library of public and private information; exceptionally high levels of literacy, particularly in urban settings, that perhaps only England, Wales, and Holland were able to match; a culturally liberal political environment that tolerated risqué expressions so long as they in no way challenged the status quo. But in other ways as well, the times had changed during the Genroku. The highly military character of the Tokugawa Bakufu’s first four Shogunal reigns had given way to the regnant Shogun Tsunayoshi, who was the grandson of a Kyoto greengrocer, had mandated essentially Buddhist laws of compassion toward animals, and imagined himself to be a Confucian monarch. The rapid population growth of the seventeenth century had stabilized and with only slight fluctuation was to remain highly stable for the next hundred years. Though inquisitions continued, executions of violators of the Bakuhan state’s religious policies had by and large ceased for roughly the next century, even as prolonged incarceration became for many tantamount to capital punishment; and despite periods of financial stringency, a new sense of happiness was in the air, partly—perhaps even mostly—material and physical, but also increasingly emotional and relational. The year 1790 and those immediately preceding and following it seem to be a second watershed in the relationship between individuality and ideology. We have already noted the conjunction in 1790 between the publication of Ban Kōkei’s work extolling celebrated Edo-period eccentrics (individuality), and Matsudaira Sadanobu’s efforts to impose doctrinal orthodoxy upon the Bakufu-sponsored academy (ideology). One way to understand the conjunction of these “opposites” is to see each as a reaction against the other, as if the times had reached a milestone where it became necessary to choose sides between the poles of this binary. Hayashi Shihei certainly experienced the consequences of the Bakufu’s ideological excesses when he was exiled in 1792 for asserting the self-evident proposition that island countries might wish to focus on coastal defense. But so too did the proprietors of those bathhouses and barbershops into which Sadanobu sent his spies to sniff out any traces of insurrectionist sentiment. In the history of peasant rebellions in Japan, 1790 was the year of Buzaemon’s uprising and execution by crucifixion for having mobilized some 7,500 villagers in the Tokugawa period’s largest ikki. The rebellion itself speaks of agriculturalists being prepared to use violence in order to assert their self-interests, while Buzaemon’s execution attests to the state’s willingness to use the most extreme forms of violence to discourage similar efforts by others. Here the conflict can also be understood as one between village authorities as local agents of Bakufu policy, and their traditional role of maximizing village autonomy, as one can also see when one turns to the matter of Bakuhan religious policy. The reader will recall that the Bakuhan state sought to impose its control over private religious practices and beliefs, but for nearly a century

Conclusions  145 from 1698 to 1789, convictions for violations of the state's religious policies receded to the point of being exceptional (Anesaki 1925: 299). The persecution of underground Christians, however, resumed in 1790 in Urakami, and a few years later in 1794 it renewed similarly with respect to fujufuse practitioners in Shimōsa in what today is the Tokyo suburb of Chiba. Taken together with the policies of Matsudaira Sadanobu, this congruence is best understood as an effort to return to the policies identified in the historical imagination with the vigor of the Tokugawa Bakufu’s earliest decades. But, in an exquisite irony, the Office of Inquisition (Shūmon Aratame Yaku) was discontinued in 1792 midway between these two persecutions, almost certainly because Bakufu pragmatists, as opposed to ideologues, would have seen little advantage to persecuting those who in virtually all other respects were model tax-paying “subjects.” We recall that individuality is not to be confused with individual identity, but certain developments in the latter likewise cluster around 1790. For centuries Japan’s principal point of reference—its Other—had been China, but around 1790 the Other expands in such a way as to include the broader world at large rather than its narrowed East Asian orbit. One observes this in Motoori Norinaga’s Tamakushige, published in 1789, in which Norinaga argued for Japanese superiority over all other countries in the world owing to the “fact” that the solar deity Amaterasu had Japan as her birthplace. Norinaga even argued that the world as a whole owed a debt of gratitude to Amaterasu and by extension Japan for the radiant gift of sunlight that makes all life possible (Nosco 1990: 199–200). Within the nativist tradition 1790 was also a watershed owing to its being the date of publication of Norinaga’s magnum opus, his Kojikiden (古事記伝), on which Norinaga based his Shinto theology, creating what today is known as Shinto, as opposed to the variegated forms of kami-worship that preceded Norinaga’s achievement. Though certainly not as momentous or eventful as the other items I have cited in this consideration of 1790 as a watershed, this was also the year in which Norinaga composed what proved to be perhaps his most famous Waka, at least for subsequent nationalists: “If we are to ask about the spirit of the Japanese, it is mountain cherry blossoms that bloom fragrantly in the morning sun” (Ohkuni-Tierney 2010: 106). For Yamagata Bantō as well as for many others able to see, albeit dimly, the contours of a broader world, Japan by the 1820s had clearly become both “our Japan” and “our great Japan,” and this a full half-century before Meiji, but it would still be decades before these appellations would represent Japan for the majority. In terms of values, and especially the counter-ideological value of selfinterest, the reader will recall that 1790 is the year that Drixler has identified as the tipping point between when Bakuhan ideology generally showed no interest in the matter of infanticide, leaving this option largely to women and their households to decide on the basis of their perceptions of self-interest,

146 Conclusions and when the state began to recognize that its own self-interest might be better served by expanding the supply of adult males for national defense as well as for their productive labor. If this means that 1790 may be considered a watershed in terms of one’s sovereignty over one’s physical person, then we find reinforcement for this perspective in Ōtsuki Gentaku’s 1788 declaration (following Socrates) that the more prudent way to live is to eat to live rather than to live to eat. If we are looking for movement beyond these watershed years in the direction of individuality, our best contemporary evidence remains that of Tadano Makuzu, who, it will be recalled, asserted in 1817 that values that have become outmoded include gokushōjiki (exceptional forthrightness), jihigokoro (a compassionate heart), nasake (sympathy/empathy), giri (righteous obligation), and haji (a sense of shame). The changes in values of course reflected changes in society, and by the time of Makuzu’s writing both the Bakufu and 260 Daimyo had become increasingly conscious of their own reluctant dependence on the upper echelons of their nominal social inferiors. In terms of the endless interplay between individuality and ideology in which each side’s move and advance was parried by the other, and in Herbert Bix’s words, this means that every successful political defense that those in political authority made “of their own position was matched by a corresponding social advance by the top stratum of the peasant and merchant classes” (1986: 152) Some twenty-three centuries before Tadano Makuzu, Confucius proclaimed (Analects 2:3) that if one attempts to lead the people: by means of regulations and to keep order among them through punishments, [then] the people will evade them and will lack any sense of shame. [But] lead them through moral force (徳) and keep order among them through rites (礼), and they will have a sense of shame and will also correct themselves. When Confucius spoke of moral force, the irony was that he used the word which in Japanese would be the “Toku” of Tokugawa, and whether or not Confucius was correct in the broader implications of his doctrine of the effectiveness of moral suasion, it does appear that as the force of Tokugawa ideology begins to wane from the Genroku period onwards, individuality enjoys what may well have been its heyday in Japan. So too with the other virtues that Makuzu cites: Giri transitioned from a binary relationship with ninjō into a virtue (righteous duty) that required the counterweight of natural emotion if one was to live a balanced life; and exceptional forthrightness had fallen so far out of favor in practice that by the period’s end it required repeated ideological affirmation and local valorization and memorialization.

Conclusions  147 The debates that emerge during the last years of the Tokugawa over foreign policy, national defense, and the appropriate role for the monarchy in Kyoto in many ways represent a third watershed and the culminating expression of many of the themes in this book. It is remarkable and perhaps even unprecedented that these issues were “debated” so publicly at all in Japanese history. The most important question in 1868 and the immediate handful of years both before and after was not who we are, or even where we come from, but “How did we get to this point?” Loyalties to ancestral home (furusato 故郷), domain, and Daimyo would remain powerful and would be the next challenge for the erasure required to construct the new nation. In a paper presented at the Sorbonne in March 1882, i.e., some fifteen years after the Meiji coup d’état that its leaders called a “restoration” (ishin 維新), Ernest Renan (1823–92) wrote that “the essence of a nation is that all of its individual members have a great deal in common and also that they have forgotten many things.”2 Indeed, to learn the “new” things that would address the problems and challenges posed by an alien-defined modernity, much would have to be forgotten in Japan, but, as we have seen, there was also much there in the collective past that could be drawn on to provide fuel for the task. For Meiji ideology to trump Tokugawa individuality, much would have to be not just forgotten but actively repressed. As Renan wrote in the concluding paragraph to the same lecture, A large aggregate of men, healthy in mind and warm of heart, creates the kind of moral conscience which we call a nation. So long as this moral consciousness gives proof of its strength by the sacrifices which demand the abdication of the individual to the advantage of the community, it is legitimate and has the right to exist. By the 1850s individuality had overcome much of the ideology that was its nemesis during the first Tokugawa century—recall how compassion and empathy, while admirable, were millstone impediments to the hedonistic pursuits of Jippensha Ikku’s riotous protagonists—but with the advent of the Meiji, individuality would begin to relinquish its hard-won gains. That the early years of Meiji were a time of rapid transition and transformation in Japan is clear, but the question of how much continued relatively intact from the late Edo has been a difficult historiographical issue. Consider the following two descriptions of the “restoration” of monarchical rule. The one on the left is by a diplomat resident in Japan at the time, Sir Ernest Satow (1843–1929), and is based on his notes and memory; and the one on the right is by Donald Keene, author of the definitive biography of Meiji published ninety years after Meiji’s death.

148 Conclusions (By Satow) “The Emperor of Japan announces to the sovereigns of all foreign countries and to their subjects that permission has been granted to the Shogun Tokugawa Yoshinobu to return the governing power in accordance with his own request. We shall henceforward exercise supreme authority in all the internal and external affairs of the country. Consequently the title of Emperor must be substituted for that of Taikun, in which the treaties have been made. Officers are being appointed by us to the conduct of foreign affairs. It is desirable that the representatives of the treaty powers recognize this announcement. January 3, 1868 Mutsuhito” (Satow 1921: 353)

(By Keene) “On January 4, 1868. . . [Iwakura Tomomi] was commanded to attend court immediately in full regalia. . . . He arrived at court bearing a box containing the proclamation of the Restoration and other documents. Ushered into the presence of the emperor, Iwakura offered him the proclamation that, he declared, was based on the emperor’s own views. Iwakura then withdrew. Presently the young emperor. . . read aloud the proclamation announcing the restoration of imperial rule, the abolition of the office of chancellor or regent and that of the Shogunate, and the establishment of a new form of government” (Keene 2002: 12, emphasis added)

In Satow’s account the new monarch “announces” his new authority and title, but in Keene’s account Meiji “reads aloud” a proclamation drafted for him by others. The former is consistent with early Meiji ideology and the image the new government sought to project of a new monarch rightfully placed in supreme authority, but the latter is based on meticulous archival research and conforms more closely to what we know of the history and the actual pattern of Meiji rule. By either version, 1868 was indeed a momentous year, and the effects of the political changes can be observed in the immediate aftermath and in all of the spheres we have touched on in this volume. In terms of identity, the race was on to create simultaneously “imperial” yet nonetheless “modern” subjects out of Edo-period material. Religion, especially Shinto, was to be harnessed in service of the new state, though with freedom of religious affiliation officially part of the new regime’s agenda. Except for the oligarchs actually in charge of the new government, self-interest was to be subordinated to the national goals of revision of unequal treaties, restoration of tariff autonomy, and establishment of the first stages of empire. Educational opportunities were soon to become universally available, though at great expense borne largely by local communities. And above all, the history of the previous regime was to be written and its memory rewritten as if it were a problem that had fortunately been overcome. That there were nonetheless high levels of ambivalence vis-à-vis the new project is evident in the words of the “Charter Oath” promulgated in

Conclusions  149 April 1868 on behalf of the new monarch. The document pledged that deliberative assemblies would be widely established, and that matters would be decided following public discussion, but it left unclear the matter of actual authority in the making of decisions. In what appear to be paeans to equality of opportunity and self-determination, it speaks of all classes uniting and persons being allowed to pursue their own calling, but not in their individual interests, and rather in the national goals of executing the affairs of state and reducing unrest. It declared that “evil” customs of the past would be discontinued, as if “evil customs” had their defenders, and in language that sounds much like cultural liberality, it announced that knowledge would be sought throughout the world, but this not for the advancement of the common good but rather “to strengthen the foundations of imperial rule.”3 The immediate past had to be rewritten, expunging its origins in violence, and transforming it into an act of benevolence accomplished in the name of an enlightened, magnanimous monarch. In 1871 one finds the 30-yearold Meiji oligarch Itō Hirobumi (伊藤博文 1841–1909) championing to an audience in San Francisco the official but patently false portrait of the events of 1868–69 as a bloodless revolution: “Our daimyo magnanimously surrendered their principalities, and their voluntary action was accepted by a general government. Within a year a feudal system, firmly established many centuries ago, has been completely abolished, without firing a gun or shedding a drop of blood” (Center for East Asian Cultural Studies 1969: 97). The changes indeed came remarkably quickly but also unevenly, and the amnesia was contested from below. As we have observed at numerous points in this volume, “enlightened” intellectuals like Fukuzawa in 1872 could champion notions of freedom and equality, and in the process disparage the Tokugawa polity, but they were not without their critics, as represented by the scathing parodies of Mantei Ōga and others. In this example, it is difficult not to see Mantei as the champion of early modern individuality, and Fukuzawa as the ironic spokesman for the new ideology. Even in the world of the nativist academy, where education and identity intersected, in 1868, twenty-five years after the death of Hirata Atsutane, his nativist academy the Ibukinoya (気吹舎) admitted 988 new disciples, by far the largest number in its history; yet only four years later in 1872, it admitted just four new students (Kojima 2001). The world of Japan was changing with astonishing rapidity, and people’s choices regarding education and self-betterment were following suit, with little allowance or room made for the “old ways” until some of those ways were discovered to be useful to the modern state’s ultranationalist ideology and imperialist agenda.

Notes 1 For a delightful and altogether remarkable examination of the resonances that could be found around the world for 1688, see John E. Wills, Jr. (1936–2017) (2001). Numerological theories are similarly attractive to metaphysicians. Is the world monistic or dualistic? Or is it constructed around the number 5, as ancient

150 Conclusions Chinese cosmologists argued in the theory of five elements, or even patterned after the number 4, as the Neo-Confucian Shao Yong (邵雍, 1011–77) argued? Like watersheds, the more that one can put into such numerical boxes, the more attractive as well as arbitrary the vessels become. 2  Ernest Renan, “What is a Nation?”, text of a conference delivered at the Sorbonne on March 11, 1882, in Renan 1992. Found at http://ucparis.fr/ files/9313/6549/9943/What_is_a_Nation.pdf, accessed March 11, 2017. 3 http://afe.easia.columbia.edu/ps/japan/charter_oath_1868.pdf, accessed D ­ ecember 17, 2014.

Afterword  spects of and Resistance to A Individuality in Contemporary Japan

If one examines levels of individuality in Japanese society in this second decade of the twenty-first century, one senses that individuality and state ideology remain powerfully at odds with one another. At the end of the Pacific War when the need was great for a coordinated effort dedicated to national reconstruction and the end to Occupation, the tendency to malign the immediate past was as great as it was for Fukuzawa in the early years of Meiji, and ideological pressures to join the cause were at least as strong. In the preceding chapters I have tried to use aspects of early modern Japanese society as evidence of a more broadly shared appreciation of individual difference than at any earlier time in Japanese history. I have also cautioned against the twin perils of imposing the present upon the past and vice versa. Mindful of these dual pitfalls, let us revisit those same topics as they manifest in the Japan of the mid-2010s. Identity and orientation—It is possible to reject an identity, but a new or cognate version will quickly arise to take its place. The pre-War and wartime articulations of Japanese destiny in Asia, with its assertions of racial and cultural superiority, were abruptly relegated to the taboo, and what arose in their place was a menu of ideologically charged half-truths: Japanese people are hardworking; their society is harmonious, and politeness is raised to an art form; racially they are homogenous with ambiguous unfathomable origins; their language is unrelated to any other and is not suited to precise expression; their traditional culture is exquisite, and a refined aesthetic sense universal; Japanese people love nature and conform to the rhythms of four seasons; their history is characterized by alternating moments of receptivity to and rejection of foreign influence; and one observes astonishing levels of concerted (collective) action whenever circumstances dictate. The taboo nature of post-War nativist discourse began to fade during the 1970s, when many foreign observers noticed traces of a new nationalism that was not new at all (Buruma 1987). At the time of this writing, as one approaches the seventy-fifth anniversary of that war’s end, the Japanese Cabinet has authorized conditions for Japanese military engagement that make a mockery of the war-renouncing Article 9 of its Constitution. Hate speech directed toward minorities, especially Koreans, is institutionalized

152 Afterword

Figure A.1 Cosplay at the entrance to the Meiji Shrine in Tokyo. Credit: Howard French (all rights reserved).

and rationalized on the grounds of freedom of speech, provoking condemnation from the United Nations. And China is once again Japan’s preeminent Other, with regional territorial disputes, a relentlessly growing economy, strong leadership, and a general optimism provoking both fear and envy in Japan. At the same time, expressions of individuality in Japan may be stronger than at any time since the 1930s. Consider Figure A.1 taken at the entrance to Meiji Shrine in Tokyo: Nearby is the fashionable shopping street Omotesandō, and the broader neighborhood is Harajuku, epicenter of cosplay. The personages include the photographer, representative of industrial modernity, with his professionally identifying equipment and garb; the parasol-bedecked and ambiguously gendered cosplayer, suggestive of postmodern agency in which individuality is reduced to the microcosm of the self, and with sovereignty over little other than one’s person; the uniformed youngsters on a field trip, finding subversive ways to distinguish themselves through their different footgear; alien foreigners here and there, one and all spectators rather than participants; and of course the bowlegged woman at the very center of the scene, as if from a different time and place. And

Afterword  153 where is this happening? At the entrance to the shrine dedicated to the monarch, who more than anyone else represents Japan’s wrenching transition to industrialized and militarized modernity. And what about religions and religious thought in Japan today? One often hears it said that no more than 1 to 2 percent of Japanese people today embrace Christianity, but one also hears that only about 15 percent of Japanese today follow any doctrinal religion. Not unlike the Bakufu of two centuries ago, Japan’s government today seems once again eager to “protect” Japanese people from doctrines, theologies, and host associations that resist its authority, and one finds in this confirmation that the centuriesold struggle between “church” and “state” in Japan is ongoing. This in turn suggests that despite relatively low levels of religious participation, religions and religious ideas continue in various ways to shape contemporary identity and individuality in Japan in the direct and indirect, institutional and intellectual ways similar to what we observed during the Edo period. Protest and the public sphere—And where do political participation and the public sphere stand in Japan today? At the moment of this writing in May 2017, there are three issues that are provoking public demonstrations: the effort to restart nuclear reactors in the wake of the 2011 Triple Disaster of earthquake, tsunami, and radiation known outside Japan simply as Fukushima; the effort to revise or override Japan’s post-War Constitution and especially its pacifist Article 9; and the effort to relocate the U.S. Marine Corps Futenma Base offshore. In October 2013 tens of thousands—40,000 by the organizers’ estimates— rallied in the capital against nuclear power and the restart of any of the country’s sixty-three non-research reactors. In August 2014, 3,600 filled the streets in front of U.S. Marine Corps Camp Schwab in a demonstration organized by local peace groups and opposition factions in the Prefectural Assembly. In April 2014, 3,000 protested in Tokyo against Prime Minister Abe Shinzō’s (安倍 晋三 b. 1954) stated plan to seek revision of Japan’s pacifist Constitution. Recognizing the resistance, the government has initially chosen the course of “reinterpreting” the Constitution to allow for so-called collective defense, i.e., achieving the same end through sophistry. Tragically, on June 29, 2014, a man self-immolated on a Shinjuku overpass in a desperate act of solidarity with those who oppose using the Abe Cabinet’s argument of “collective security” to bypass constitutional revision (his attempt at suicide was unsuccessful), and on November 11, 2014, another man followed suit in Hibiya Park, succeeding in taking his own life and leaving behind notes addressed to Prime Minister Abe and the heads of both Houses of Japan’s Diet. None of these protests have been particularly effective. Japan’s nonresearch nuclear reactors have largely remained idle, but the government has been unrelenting in its efforts to restart them. Two were restarted in 2015, one in 2016, and one in May 2017, with active efforts to restart another nineteen. The Abe Cabinet in May 2017 proposed constitutional

154 Afterword revision in order to legitimize the euphemistically styled Self-Defense Forces, while retaining the pacifist principles. The relocation of Futenma Base to an offshore site proceeds apace. In 2016 Okinawa’s prefectural governor revoked permission to perform landfill at the new site of Henoko Bay, but the national government appealed to the Supreme Court which rescinded the action, and the very next day work resumed on a replacement site. Indeed, except for Okinawa, which might in fact have the most vibrant political culture in all of Japan, demonstrations and the anger behind them appear like even less effective versions of those Edo-period ikki that typically receded after limited responses to their demands. In fact, the LDP government’s response to demonstrations in front of the Diet has been to consider how to regulate “noisy demonstrations and campaigns” around the building so that they would not interfere unduly with Diet members’ deliberations (The Japan Times 2014b). Consider as well the police overreaction following the arrest of three individuals suspected of “obstructing public officials” and “accused of using violence against riot police on the sidelines of a labor rally in Tokyo on Nov. 2 2014.” One of the three was a Kyoto University student, which resulted eleven days after his arrest in dozens of helmeted police officers carrying shields, wearing protective clothing, and “backed up” by plainclothes officers not from Kyoto but from the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Force converging on the student’s Kumanoryo Dormitory at Kyoto University’s Sakyo-ku campus. And what was the rationale for this overreaction, which surely terrified the dormitory residents and yet found no evidence of conspiracy in the alleged violence? To “prevent confusion.” Continuing to quote from the same Japan Times reporting: Student radicalism in Japan reached its peak in the 1960s and 1970s, when violent activists demonstrated against Japan’s military alliance with the United States, the Vietnam War, and the construction of Narita International Airport outside of Tokyo. But the movement gradually receded as Japan grew wealthier. The few remaining activists are very much a fringe force. But the government’s unpopular push to restart nuclear reactors and expand the role of the military has provided the activists with renewed impetus. Japanese police regularly turn out in force for protests, even those involving a small number of often-elderly participants. (2014c) In the absence of public outrage over such abuses, we find instead what appears to be a resigned acceptance. No one would argue that Japan is not a democracy. Elections are lively and noisy affairs, with participation (turnout) rates typically in the 60 to 75 percent range.1 And with an impressive communications infrastructure, one would be hard-pressed to imagine anyone in Japan who is unaware

Afterword  155 of the basic aspects of the political system. Further, Japanese people today enjoy rights to public education, subsidized health care, state pensions, and other social services of a sort that even the most utopian Edo-period idealists would have found unimaginable. What one seems to have in the political realm, however, is the continuation of a Confucian acquiescence to the dictates of a paternalistic state. To be sure, a “perfect” democracy would be difficult to define and impossible to find, but one recent study of Japan’s “multilayered” democracy listed the following shortcomings: The dysfunctional and non-transparent way political decisions are made. . . institutional corruption, an electoral system which prioritizes small groups such as farmers, an “uncommon democracy” dominated by a single party, a “karaoke democracy” with incompetent politicians who repeat the same slogans but do nothing, failure of the opposition to present feasible alternatives, mounting social inequality resulting from bad policies, civil society being manipulated by the state, an impervious state bureaucracy which exercises excessive influence on legislation and policy making, self-censorship of the media and its failure to serve as an effective watchdog over political decisions, networks of journalists which serve as legitimizers of government policy positions rather than genuine conveyors of information, and a country that operates under a repressive educational and intellectual environment. (Otmazgin, Galanti, and Levkowitz 2015: 3) That many of these shortcomings might be found in “liberal democracies” closer to home does not meaningfully diminish the cumulative effect of this scathing indictment. That Japanese people recognize and seem resigned to this is borne out by surveys conducted by the Legatum Prosperity Index, which polled residents of 142 countries regarding their sense of their own “freedom of expression, belief, association and personal autonomy.” Japan ranked 28th in this metric, behind Canada (5) and the United States (21), and between Brazil at number 27 and Burkina Faso at number 29 (Legatum Prosperity Index 2014). As George DeVos has written, “Japanese socialization tends to legitimize authority rather than raise issues about autonomy” (1985: 178), and if we were to replace the word “socialization” in this quotation with “ideology,” we would arrive at the heart of the problem. As Andrew Oros observed apropos of the constitutional revision and “collective security” issue but with wider applicability, “What is remarkable is not that things are changing, but that they are changing with so little fanfare” on the part of news media in Japan and the public generally (Fackler and Sanger 2014). The kinds of events that one would expect to inspire greater levels of civil society elsewhere—events like the government’s ineffective responses to the 1995 Kōbe earthquake and Aum Shinrikyō sarin gas attack, and the more recent pattern of government and industrial deception concerning the events

156 Afterword and aftermath of the 2011 Fukushima tragedy—seem to generate initially high levels of voluntarism but ultimately gain little traction and ironically appear only to reinforce widespread resignation to government paternalism. In this same vein, consider the government’s audacious efforts to impede the emergence of a better-informed citizenry. On December 10, 2014, a new government secrets law took effect, with the government designating 460,000 documents as “special secrets.” That governments might have secrets in such areas as diplomacy, defense, counterterrorism, and counterespionage is troubling but nonetheless understandable. What is unsettling, however, is that reflecting the government’s opacity, only three of the nineteen government offices provided direct answers to press inquiries regarding how much information they plan to label as “specially designated secrets” when the secrecy law takes effect (Kyodo News 2014). Let us recall Herbert Bix’s observation that steadily, albeit slowly, ikki were forcing the elites of the Bakuhan state to modify or to rescind those policies that peasants found intolerable (1986: 137). Whether the collectivized actions of today’s citizens will be comparably effective seems at the moment of this writing arguable. Religion and the state—In recent years there have been echoes of the same internecine struggles within Nichiren Buddhism, and tensions between the followers of Nichiren’s teachings and the Japanese state. Faced with European and North American pressures to rescind laws prohibiting Christianity, freedom of religion was granted by the Meiji state, and in 1876 the fujufuse movement was legalized under the name Nichirenshū Fujufuseha. There soon arose a split, however, between those who practiced their fujufuse principles underground and came to be known as naishinsha (内信 者), and those whose defiance of the state’s prohibition was more open, the self-styled hōryū (法立). Both of these rival factions have their spiritual headquarters in temples in Okayama, longtime center of fujufuse practice and home to Sakamoto Shinraku, whom we encountered in Chapter 4. Perhaps the most intriguing and least well-known heir to the fujufuse principle was founded at the height of Japanese-government efforts to nationalize religions in 1942 under the name Myōshinkō (妙信講), which was changed in 1978 to Fuji Taisekiji Kenshōkai (富士大石寺顕正会), or simply Kenshōkai. This group, which dubiously claims over a million members, maintains a strident criticism of those whom it styles “dharma slanderers,” i.e., those hōbō who compromise the principle of Lotus Sutra exclusivism. In 1973 Kenshōkai protested against the Sōka Gakkai’s plans to build a massive headquarters at Taisekiji where the original Nichiren Gohonzon or moji mandara (文字曼荼羅), the central object of veneration for Nichiren Buddhists, is housed. This culminated in 1978 in Kenshōkai’s expulsion from Nichiren Shōshū (日蓮正宗), the largest of the several surviving branches of traditional Nichiren schools and progenitrix of such powerful new religions as Reiyūkai (霊友会) and Risshō Kōseikai (立正佼成会), as well as the Sōka Gakkai.

Afterword  157 It was during the 1930s that two educators, Makiguchi Tsunesaburō (牧 口常三郎 1871–1944) and Toda Jōsei (戸田城聖 1900–58), led the founding of the Sōka Kyōiku Gakkai (創価教育学会 The Value-Creating Educational Society), with Makiguchi as its first president. Like the followers of fujufuse centuries earlier, Makiguchi and the Sōka Kyōiku Gakkai ran afoul of the wartime authorities, their “crime” being insufficient respect for the Imperial Rescript on Education, which was attributed to the Meiji monarch and bowed to at the start of each school day. As a result, Makiguchi, Toda, and twenty other leaders of the Society were imprisoned in 1943 within the notorious Sugamo Prison, where Makiguchi died the next year of malnutrition. Released after the war, Toda resurrected the Society in 1951 and renamed it Sōka Gakkai. Embracing the traditional Nichiren conversion technique of shakubuku vis-à-vis an unbelieving world, though infusing it with unprecedented aggressiveness, Sōka Gakkai grew rapidly, from about 200,000 in 1953 to 3,500,000 in 1962. The organization’s tactics drew widespread criticism both within Japan and especially abroad, and though it remains part of Sōka Gakkai’s core teachings, the more virulent strategies for “breaking and subduing” resistance to its teachings have for the most part been either abandoned or diluted. Beginning in 1990 and continuing to the time of this writing, Sōka Gakkai has struggled with the mainstream Nichiren Shōshū over who speaks for the authentic doctrine as well as for the faithful. The details are complex. Looked at from one direction, Sōka Gakkai can be regarded as a Protestantlike lay revolution against an entrenched conservative priesthood (Métraux 1992). Looked at differently, it can be regarded as an attempted power-grab by an overly ambitious cult. Either way, the fact is that in 1991 the Taisekiji priesthood expelled and thereby essentially excommunicated Sōka Gakkai leadership and members from its ranks. The fact that Sōka Gakkai has also since 1964 sponsored a political party means that the issue of Buddhist church vs. ambitious state remains alive and well in Nichiren Buddhism. From roughly 1955 Sōka Gakkai encouraged its membership to seek local elected office, and it enjoyed remarkable success in its efforts, with fifty-one of fifty-two sponsored candidates winning their local assembly elections in 1955 and three members elected to the Diet in 1956. In 1957 Ikeda Daisaku (池田大作), then chief of staff of the Sōka Gakkai’s Youth Division, was arrested and imprisoned for violations of the election law prohibiting distribution of money and other inducements by members of the Youth Division. Ikeda’s incarceration lasted two weeks, and following forty-eight court appearances, he was acquitted of all charges in 1962. In 1964 Ikeda, who had become president of Sōka Gakkai four years earlier, created the Kōmeitō (公明党) or “Clean Government Party.” Controversy has followed the party, as for example when eight of its members were convicted and subsequently imprisoned for forging ballots in 1968. In 1994 Kōmeitō split into two parties only to reunite in 1998 as the New Kōmeitō, a more conservative party currently aligned with the ruling

158 Afterword LDP. In various and sundry ways one can only suspect that the on-again, off-again struggles within Nichiren Buddhism and those who claim to speak for it, as well as between its various branches and the Japanese state, are destined to continue. Education, self-improvement, and the state—Writing about Japanese society of the late twentieth century, George DeVos observed, “The Japanese sense of self is directed toward immediate social purposes, not towards a process of separating out and keeping the self somehow distinct, somehow truly individual, as remains the western ideal” (1985: 179). DeVos’ point is well taken, and in contemporary Japan individuality remains in a struggle with powerful ideological impulses that would seek to subordinate individual interests to those of larger collectivities, and most prominently the state. At the same time, the interest in self-development is unmistakable and seemingly unquenchable, with clear continuities from the early modern period. For example, and using approximate numbers for the sake of illustration, if there were roughly 15,000 terakoya by the end of the Tokugawa period in a population of about 30,000,000, this would translate into one “schoolhouse” for every 2,000 inhabitants. For comparison consider the number of juku (塾 after-school “cram schools”) and yobikō (予備校 prep schools for university entrance exams), which together total roughly 100,000 in today’s population of around 125,000,000, or one for approximately every 1,250 inhabitants, with the total divided more or less evenly between the two forms of supplementary education.2 In a 2011 study of the subject The Economist wrote that almost a fifth of first-graders attend after-school classes, as do nearly all high-school students aspiring to university admission, with typical fees of roughly ¥260,000 (The Economist 2011).3 This, of course, is in addition to the virtually free public education available universally in Japan through the twelfth grade, but it confirms the enduring perception of education in Japan as a worthwhile investment for both state and household.4 Curiously for a country that so closely studies itself, I have been unable to find statistics for the number of individuals providing instruction in non-academic subjects like driving instruction, English conversation, making oneself more attractive as a prospect for marriage, or cooking, though advertisements for these on trains and subways suggest that they remain highly popular. Such traditional accomplishments as flower arranging, calligraphy, painting, and tea ceremony remain significant cottage industries for supplementing household income. Among Tokyo 11-year-old students polled in 2006, music (27%), English (18%), calligraphy (9.5%), and ballet (9.4%) remain the most popular among such accomplishments, though 52 percent participate in after-school sports and 15 percent report doing nothing. Note by way of comparison that these Tokyo students’ peers in Washington, D.C., much like my good neighbors in Queens in the mid1980s, report 14 percent participation in ballet and 27.5 percent in music, but with 75.5 percent in sports.5 That at least some of this training appears to be ineffective is supported by the TOEFL website, which reports that

Afterword  159 among all Asian countries, only Cambodia, Lao, Tajikistan, and Timor do worse on the TOEFL exam than test-takers in Japan, which is tied with Mongolia.6 Though at 3.8 percent Japan ranks only number 115 in the world in its percentage of GDP devoted to education,7 there is a high degree of satisfaction within the country regarding education, with Japan ranking number 4 by this indicator (Legatum Prosperity Index 2014). Japan’s universities are among the best in Asia, with the University of Tokyo ranking number 39 among the world’s top 500 in one ranking,8 and number 44 in another.9 However, in the Times ranking Japan has been replaced within the top 25 by the University of Singapore (24), and ranks behind both Peking University (29) and Tsinghua University (35). Japan remains quite possibly the world’s most literate society, with a claimed 99 percent rate, though literacy is typically measured by the percentage of those who complete the sixth grade rather than by a diagnostic procedure. Within recent memory bookstores were ubiquitous, and commuters could routinely be seen reading, though more recently handheld electronic devices have overwhelmingly replaced newspapers, magazines, manga comics, and books as the commuter’s distraction of choice. An October 2014 visit to the website of the major bookstore Kinokuniya suggests that the arts (bungei 文芸) remains the first of thirty-eight categories of books for sale, with self-improvement (kyōyō 教養) in the second spot, education (kyōiku 教育) fourth, and job-related skills (shikaku 資格) tenth. Of course, these were all major topics of private instruction in the Tokugawa period. A further look at non-fiction bestsellers in October 2014 showed the top three topics to be secrets to a long life, skin care, and the lies told by doctors. For comparison, the bestselling non-fiction hardcovers according to the New York Times ranking for November 30, 2014, had the top three as historical biographies of the first President Bush and Gen. Patton followed by a comedic miscellany. Perhaps most curious is that despite all this training in polite arts and sports, after-school cramming, literacy, and excellent universities, young Japanese people aged 13 to 29 came in last among seven countries polled in self-esteem, with only 46 percent reporting feeling good about themselves, and overall Japan ranked last among 53 nations in terms of general self-esteem (Hitti 2005). What is unclear is whether the interest in selfimprovement is a result of this low self-esteem, or whether the low level of self-esteem is a consequence of either the manner (pedagogy) or perceived effectiveness of the training. What is clear, however, is that the institutionalized interest in literacy, self-improvement, and self-cultivation so prominent in early modern Japan has left an unmistakable legacy in today’s Japan. Earlier I suggested that the tendency to link the rise of Confucian academies to an interest in moral education represents a possible projection of contemporary concerns onto the past. From the 1890s on, the Japanese state used the still-new public education curriculum to instill patriotism and imperial loyalism into students under the guise of their civic and moral

160 Afterword education. During the years of Allied Occupation from 1945 to 1952, there was a radical restructuring of the educational system, and the curriculum was revised in order first to dismantle the militarist instrumentalization of education, and then to redirect it in support of democratization, including respect for individual values (Dierkes 2011: see especially 110–23). These revisions have been consistently supported by Japan’s traditionally left-­leaning teachers’ unions, which have resisted in-school displays of the national flag and the singing of the national song on ceremonial occasions. Individual teachers in Osaka who defied nationalist pressures to sing the anthem have been disciplined with sanctions that included pay cuts, reprimands, and even suspension (Japan Today 2012a, 2012b), as have hundreds of teachers elsewhere in Japan. What this implies, in turn, is that the link between educational institutions and the training of patriotic citizens appears stronger in today’s Japan than in the Japan of two centuries ago. Happiness and well-being—And where do happiness and well-being stand in the Japan of today? The answer is complicated and often appears contradictory. The pursuit of happiness remains a widely shared goal in Japan. It is enshrined as such in Article 13 of Japan’s Constitution (promulgated in 1946 and brought into effect in 1947), which states: “All of the people shall be respected as individuals (個人 kojin). Their right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness (seimei, jiyū oyobi kōfuku no tsuikyū 生命, 自由及び幸福追求) shall, to the extent that it does not interfere with the public welfare, be the supreme consideration in legislation and in other governmental affairs.” In this we hear echoes of both the U.S. Declaration of Independence and Fukuzawa’s An Encouragement of Learning (“and, as long as we do not infringe upon the rights of others, may pass our days in happiness freely and independently”). This would suggest that happiness and its pursuit are serious business in post-WWII Japan, and we may note as well the link between happiness and the right for people to be respected as individuals, thereby affirming their most fundamental aspirations as well as our general perspective in this volume. There is still more evidence to support the impression that there is in Japan a preoccupation with happiness, and here too we observe the distinct contribution of religion. Japan is home to one of the more remarkable new religions, known in English as Happy Science, an inexact translation of its Japanese name Kōfuku no Kagaku (幸福の科学, or “science of happiness”). Founded in 1986 by Ōkawa Ryūhō (大川隆法 b. 1956), it has enjoyed exceptional popularity both in and outside Japan, and like Sōka Gakkai even supports its own political party, the Happiness Realization Party (幸 福実現党 Kōfuku Jitsugen-tō), founded in 2009. Happy Science claims that by “empowering individuals to achieve lasting happiness with teachings of universal Truth, [it] aims to create an ideal world. . . of harmony, love and prosperity.” It also defines happiness as “a harmony of personal and public. . . a balance between quiet happiness, which emphasizes contentment,

Afterword  161 and active happiness, which represents progress and development” (Happy Science 2014). Especially noteworthy for our purposes is the linkage of happiness to individual empowerment, as well as the aspiration to link societal “progress and development” to personal “contentment,” and in this way to make an effort to harmonize the personal with the public. According to the World Happiness Report (Helliwell, Layard, and Sachs 2013), which covered 156 countries surveyed over the years 2010–12, Japan came in at number 43, well behind Denmark (1), Canada (6), the United States (17), and even South Korea and Taiwan (41–42). Considering that Japan leads the world in life expectancy for women and is among the leaders for men, has been relatively free of terror concerns, and possesses the world’s third-largest economy, as well as a gross domestic product per capita that consistently ranks in the number 15–30 range, this is perhaps a bit surprising. This in turn makes it even more surprising that in the same poll taken a year later of the same 156 countries, Japan had dropped to number 53 and remained steady at that level through 2016. One interpretation for the decline is that if happiness is linked to altruism, then the surge of support for survivors of the 2011 Triple Disaster reinforced the sense that the social fabric is strong, and that this translated into elevated levels of happiness; these, in turn receded as “Japan returned to a more self-centered, hierarchical and consumerist view of. . . life” (Japan Times 2016). The Office of Economic Community and Development examined the same question of happiness in 2013 for its thirty-six member countries, the difference being that it drew the important distinction between life satisfaction and happiness, the latter understood as having more positive experiences like a sense of accomplishment and feeling of enjoyment in an average day than negative ones like pain, worry, or sadness. In the study’s words, “Life satisfaction measures how people evaluate their life as a whole rather than their current feelings [and] captures a reflective assessment of which life circumstances and conditions are important for subjective well-being” (OECD 2013). In life satisfaction, Japan at 6.0 ranked well below the average of 6.6 on a scale of 0–10, but in terms of happiness—again, understood as a surplus of positive daily experiences over negative ones—Japan remarkably came in at a score of 86, well above the OECD average of 76, making Japan by this metric the happiest country in the OECD. How to account for this? My hunch is that the low score on the lifesatisfaction index may reflect the ongoing malaise over factors that include the long-stagnant economy, the government’s ineffective recovery efforts following the 2011 Triple Disaster, disappointment with one’s work during these economically stagnant years, and a pervasive sense of disempowerment in terms of political agency and self-determination. By contrast, the remarkably high score regarding happiness may reflect the fact that for most people in Japan, daily life is subjectively quite pleasant if one chooses to look at one’s own glass as half-full rather than half-empty. Put slightly differently,

162 Afterword it appears that for many persons in Japan their individual quality of life feels quite high while their sense of the collective well-being is less hopeful. This conclusion is substantially borne out by the 2014 Legatum Prosperity Index cited previously in our examination of issues related to the public sphere. This survey of adults in 142 countries ranked Japan overall at a middling number 19, with the highest scores in the broad categories of health (number 4) and economy (7), but less impressive scores in governance (19), social capital (i.e., networks and relationships, 22), safety and security (25), education (27), and personal freedom at number 28 (Legatum Prosperity Index 2014). This finding is echoed by the United Nations’ Human Development Index, which uses life expectancy, years of schooling, and income per capita as its metrics, and which ranks Japan as number 17 (United Nations Human Development Index 2014). These rankings reinforce our impression that for Japanese citizens and their sense of personal happiness and well-being, the whole remains somewhat lesser than the sum of its parts. Yuji Genda has compared contemporary Japanese levels of having hopes, “in the sense of things one wants to realize in the future,” with the levels in the United States and United Kingdom: “In Japan 54.5% say yes to having such hopes, compared with 86.7% in the UK and 93% in the US” (2016: 157). Genda’s conclusion is that the “perceived lack of friends, the poverty of experience in feeling trusted, and the scarce experience of daily religious belief manifest as the major reasons for diminished levels of hope in Japan” (ibid: 164). One finds support for this gloomy impression in the Happy Planet Index, which polled individuals from 155 countries to see if they experience “long, happy and sustainable” lives, taking into account the metric of efficiency by calculating “how many long and happy lives each [country] produces per unit of environmental output.” Japan does brilliantly in terms of life expectancy, but is dragged down by its ecological footprint (number 109 of 155 where lower is better) and experience of well-being (50 places lower than Denmark at number 1). And returning to the question of whether happiness is linked to altruism and hence correlates inversely with selfishness, 34 percent of Japanese people polled in a Cabinet Office 2016 survey expressed the belief that their “individual interests should be given priority over the interests of the entire public” (JIJI 2016), a figure which seems low by international standards but was a record high in Japan; and in a study of generosity measured by helping a stranger, donating money to a charity, or volunteering one’s time to an organization, Japan in 2015 ranked a striking number 114, well behind South Korea (75), Vietnam (64), Taiwan (50), and Mongolia (27), and ahead of only China (140) in East Asia (CAF World Giving Index 2016). If we recall Kaibara Ekiken, one suspects that he would be pleased by the long life spans but disappointed in the overall quality of life. I believe that Ekiken would agree with the general conclusion that people’s life evaluations rise steadily with income, but that the reported quality of emotional daily experience nonetheless levels off at a certain income level (PhysOrg.

Afterword  163 com 2010). Or in simpler terms, money is certainly something, but it is not the only thing—it can make one happier to a point, but it cannot buy lasting happiness. Values—In the discussion of values in Chapter 7, we noted the difficulty of describing the values of a time and place where we are unable either to access polling data, or to have the benefit of sustained direct observation. For this reason we have focused less on ideological values than on values as practiced. However, these difficulties should not apply when attempting to determine how the values discussed in this chapter fare in present-day Japan, and, of these, values like stability and continuity should be particularly easy to quantify, and so we begin with those. In a capitalist society, the wish for financial stability should correlate with savings rates, and as recently as the 1980s and early 1990s Japan was regularly singled out for having what appeared to be the world’s highest savings rates. The explanations varied, some emphasizing the relatively less well-developed social safety net and pension plans to finance individual retirements, and some referencing cultural factors said to extend back to the Tokugawa era. Since the 1990s, however, other countries have grown richer, and Japan no longer ranks among the top 15 countries of the world in terms of savings rates as a percentage of GDP.10 The statistics for 2012 reveal that 11 of these top 15 have oil-based economies, but China actually leads the world at 51 percent, with Singapore a close second (48%), and of the remaining Asian economies Nepal, South Korea, India, Malaysia, and Thailand all ranked ahead of Japan with savings rates in the range of 30 to 40 percent, well ahead of Japan at 22 percent (World Bank 2012). Certainly, Japan has strengthened its social safety net for the elderly since the 1980s, as the percentage of the population 65 and older relentlessly continues to increase, having broken through 26 percent in 2015. But is there perhaps more to the explanation? Let us turn to household continuity to see if we find a correlation. We have observed how during the Tokugawa period, household continuity was a major concern at all levels of the society, but this concern appears to have diminished substantially since the late 1990s. The average-sized Japanese household in 2009 was 2.71, which ranked slightly higher than the OECD average of 2.63 (OECD undated), but until recently this has been understood to be a function of high housing costs in Japan rather than legal, ideological, or social pressures as represented, for example, by China’s notorious one-child policy introduced in 1979 or the “ideal” in Japan of three generations under one roof. The fact that real estate prices in Japan have declined in step with a declining birthrate suggests that factors other than housing costs are at work. If a society requires a reproductive rate of approximately 2.1 in order to sustain its population, the fact that Japan’s birthrate dropped below 2.0 in 1975 and continued to decline until stabilizing at around 1.4 has become a concern at the national level. Increasing the monthly government subsidies to women with newborns has proven to be ineffective, unlike the

164 Afterword late Tokugawa years when such incentives succeeded in halting population declines in domains that adopted such policies. Abortion, legalized in Japan in 1948, has remained a key form of birth control, with condoms preferred by 80 percent of married women in 2009 despite legalization of oral contraceptives in 1999. The two largest reasons given for electing to abort in 2007 were the parents not being married (28%) and financial difficulties (16%) (Japan Times 2009). It is difficult to escape the conclusion that marriage in general and childrearing in particular have become decreasingly desirable options for women in Japan, and that in their own ways women have been exercising sovereignty over their bodies as well as asserting their self-interest in the face of formidable social and ideological pressures. In a study released in 2014 by the World Economic Forum, Japan ranked 104th out of 142 assessed countries in terms of gender equality, below both Tajikistan and Indonesia (Japan Times 2014a). Often statistics can be misleading, but the broadly based callousness toward married women with children in the workplace was affirmed in June 2014 by the boorish sexist heckling of a female member of the Tokyo Metropolitan Assembly when she tried to speak during a debate on child-rearing policy. Despite audio recordings of the debate, the hecklers were never identified, save for one who confessed. Non-conformity in the present has not been extensively studied, though it remains much discussed. Such transgressions as smoking, drinking alcohol, reading pornography, and violating curfew are regarded in Japan as “deviant acts” when perpetrated by teenagers, where they would likely be viewed with less approbation in Europe or North America. Robert Yoder has reached a similar conclusion regarding non-conformist students as we did when looking at non-conformist adults in the Edo period, to wit: “If deviance were the norm, then to conform would, paradoxically, be deviant.” Where Yoder finds differences between early modern and modern non-conformity is in the manner in which class considerations correlate, reinforcing as well as provoking the negative labeling of and stigma attached to non-conforming students (supra Yoder 2004: 87, 130). By contrast, what we observed in the Edo period was a degree of actual admiration for those who followed their own paths. Prevarication and dissembling in contemporary Japan remain popular topics for discussion among contemporary non-Japanese observers with varying degrees of insight. But in an article in the New York Review of Books provocatively titled “Expect to Be Lied to in Japan” (2012), as astute an observer as Ian Buruma—he was among the first to write in major media of Japan’s then-new nationalism (1987)—has commented on the pervasive culture of deception in Japan. Much of this is innocent if odd, one example being the invitation to suspend disbelief in the charade of a tour guide’s invitation to tourists to admire the view of something that is in fact completely obscured. But much of it is also sinister and self-serving, especially on the part of the state, with respect to such matters as wartime behavior, health of

Afterword  165 the economy, and the aftermath of the Triple Disaster of Fukushima. That such matters happen in other countries is unarguable, but there does seem to be a resigned acceptance on the part of the public in Japan that they will be lied to and that there is little recourse for them or negative consequence for the liars. In Buruma’s words: “It is just harder in an insular, well-ordered society, where everyone should know their place, and the comforts and perks of conformity are considerable, to crack the façade of official truth” (2012). In our examination of conflicted values, we focused on the concept of giri–ninjō, which we observed to be more of a binary during the Genroku years, and more of a continuum a century later. Meryll Dean has observed that the tendency in modern Japan is to regard this as a continuum in which the ideal is something of a balance between the two extremes. As evidence he has written that for most people in Japan it would be considered mizukusai (水臭い stilted) to enter into a prenuptial contract, and symptomatic of a person whose affections are subordinate to material considerations. Dean believes that the regard for emotions as mitigating and extenuating factors is reflected in the Japanese Civil Code, whose provisions regarding matrimonial property regimes are “very limited by comparison with the French Civil Code” (2002: 18). This may be the case regarding prenuptial agreements, but anyone who has wrestled with bureaucratic rigidity in Japan will likely view this differently. At the same time, we recall that in the popular fiction and theater of the Genroku, the only recourse of those whose emotions overwhelmed their responsibilities was suicide, and suicide rates in Japan remain among the world’s highest with roughly 30,000 succeeding annually in taking their own lives since the late 1990s. Roughly 70 percent are males in the 20 to 44 age range, and the principal motivations are believed to be financial concerns, especially after the loss of one’s job; both endogenous and reactive depression; and social approbation of the sort that might follow a divorce. There is even a preferred place for taking one’s life in the woods at the base of Mount Fuji called Aokigahara (青木ヶ原), something like the Sonezaki Wood immortalized by Chikamatsu. If one considers that successful suicides are the minority and are always far outnumbered by attempts, the statistics are suggestive of a pervasive malaise stemming from the failure to live up to either what one perceives to be the expectations of others or one’s own markers of success. Turning to friendship—perhaps the most subjective of the values we have discussed—the sociologist George DeVos (1985: 162) has written that “horizontal relationships of equals are downplayed in the traditional Japanese culture” and that this “still holds true,” suggesting a continuity even when the contexts are meaningfully different. Focusing on Japanese society in the late twentieth century, DeVos wrote, “In their patterns of friendship, the Japanese tend to have a relaxed intimacy only with individuals of the same age group” (ibid: 163). Such friendships are facilitated in contemporary Japan by having one’s closest relationships be with classmates or those who enter employment as members of the same “class”

166 Afterword in the same corporation. But these represent institutionally reinforced forms of friendship and sociability, which ironically may appear to be more common yet may actually be less voluntary and elective than friendships from the Edo period. Indeed, in an unsettling comparison of “having friends” in Japan, the United States, and United Kingdom, one recent study found that 63.1 percent of Japanese people speak of having few or no friends compared with 36.1 percent in the UK and 35.4 percent in the United States (Genda 2016: 157). In an article that concentrates on the role of concepts of modernity in structuring the relationship between state and society in Japan from the late nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century, Sheldon Garon has written that “rather than treating modernization as simply a process of ‘progressive’ transformation, we would do well to specify relationships between modernization and a variety of political outcomes, ranging from liberalization to the statist management of society” (Garon 1994: 346–47). Garon is correct, and if we factor in the forces that continue to resist individual difference, we observe that the effort from below begun in (early) modern society to assert the legitimacy of individual difference remains active. The arenas, however—taken together, the contemporary public sphere in Japan—have shifted, as have the rules. William Bradbury, a freelance writer and musician who lives in Tokyo, observed that “Japanese culture encourages people to fulfill roles, yet there’s a palpable sadness within as individuality dissipates” (Bradbury 2014). Indeed, if the lens of statist modernity is allowed to define our understanding of Japanese history, then the narrative will be, if not false, at least incomplete and misleading. Nonetheless, if we will open the aperture just a bit wider and allow the field of vision to include a fresh look at Japan’s early modernity, we will have a fuller and more nuanced context for understanding contemporary Japanese society and the place of individuality in it.

Notes   1 In the national Diet lower house election in December 2014, participation rates hit an all-time post-WWII low of 52.6 percent, almost 7 percent lower than the previous low in the 2012 election that restored Abe Shinzō and his LDP to power. This is suggestive of citizen-voter frustration with the political system represented by the government of Abe, but whether this is an indicator of estrangement from the system or an anomalous blip remains to be seen.   2  See www.jyukunavi.jp, accessed November 25, 2014.   3 In a survey of Tokyo primary school students conducted in 2006 but released in 2008, Benesse found that roughly 52 percent of 11-year-olds were enrolled in a study school (http://berd.benesse.jp/english/index.php, accessed November 25, 2014).  4 Note that yobikō are government licensed but juku are not, leading Julian ­Dierkes to refer to their services as “shadow education” (2008).   5 See Benesse, http://berd.benesse.jp/up_images/english/6toshi_english2.pdf, a­ ccessed March 13, 2017.

Afterword  167  6 See www.ets.org/s/toeic/pdf/ww_data_report_unlweb.pdf, accessed March 11, 2017.  7  See CIA Factbook, www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/ ja.html, accessed March 13, 2017.   8 Times Higher Education World University Rankings 2016–17, www.timeshigher education.com/world-university-rankings/2017/world-ranking#!/page/0/ length/25/sort_by/rank/sort_order/asc/cols/stats, accessed March 11, 2017.   9 U.S. News and World Reports, www.usnews.com/education/best-global-­univer sities/japan?int=9cd108, accessed March 11, 2017. 10 The standard (World Bank and OECD) way of calculating savings rates by country is to calculate GDP income minus total consumption, plus net transfers.

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Index

Abe Masahiro 60 Abe Shinzō 153, 166n1 Alcock, Sir Rutherford 9, 124 Amakusa Shirō 48 – 9 Amaterasu 23, 34, 95, 104, 145 Andō Shigeyuki 71 – 2, 79n8 Andō Shōeki 128, 132, 137 – 9 annon 72, 102 – 3, 110; see also Ogyū Sorai Ansart, Oliver 53 Arai Hakuseki 23, 31 – 2 autobiography 23 Bakufu: defined 2 Bakuhan state: defined xivn3 Ban Kōkei 34, 121, 144 Bashō see Matsuo Bashō Beerens, Anna 86 Befu, Ben 104 Bellah, Robert 7 – 8, 14 – 16, 113, 125, 133 Bird, Isabella 17n5 Bix, Herbert 7, 44 – 5, 54, 156 Bolle, Kees 61 – 2 Book of Rites 99 Bradbury, William 166 Brecher, W. Puck 121 – 2, 134n6, 137 Brill, Alida 78 Brown, H. Jackson Jr., 132, 134n10 Brown, Kendall 122 Brown, Philip C., 5 Buddhist: main temple – branch temple system 39, 68, 74; Ōbaku Zen 38, 91, 95; Pure Land 38, 55, 66, 79n5, 83, 120; temple registration system 4, 32, 38, 41, 55, 59, 61, 69, 95, 120, 159; understandings of self 4, 32, 38; Zen 38, 66, 123; see also fujufuse; Nichiren; Shingaku Buzaemon 46, 133n5, 139, 144

canon of classics 21, 24, 33, 84 – 5, 88; see also patrimony Carlyle, Jane 110 censorship 57 – 8; self-censorship 155 Charter Oath 148 Chikamatsu Monzaemon 90 – 1, 102, 125 – 7 Chilson, Clark 78 China: comparisons with 4, 23, 25, 50, 85, 116, 118; as Other 21, 25, 38, 145, 152; study of (Kangaku) 41, 86 “civilization and enlightenment” (bunmei kaika) 5 civil society 16n1, 43 – 4, 57, 82, 95, 155 Cocks, Richard 29 – 30 Commissioner for Temple and Shrine Affairs (Jisha bugyō) 39, 55, 65 Confucian(ism) 4, 12 – 13, 19, 22 – 3, 25 – 36, 38, 40, 43, 84 – 7, 99 – 101, 105, 109; appeal of 85 – 6; organic view of society 12; priority on households 12, 26 – 7; see also classics (Great Learning and Book of Rites); Hayashi Razan and family; Itō Jinsai; Kaibara Ekiken; Kumazawa Banzan; Mencius; Nakae Tōju; Neo-Confucianism; Ogyū Sorai; remonstrance (boxes); Wang Yangming; Yamazaki Ansai; Zhu Xi Confucius 3, 56, 81, 100 – 1, 128, 146 Cornell, Laurel 117 – 18 Correa, Duarte 49 Craig, Albert 10 Dazai Shundai 35 Dean, Meryll 127, 165 de Bary, Wm. Theodore 3 – 4 debate see performance De Quincey, Thomas 111

184 Index Descartes, René 2, 89, 94, 138 destiny: as inga 92; as kaiun 93; as kōun 92; as happiness 110; as mei (Ch. ming) 101 divination 38, 92 – 3 Drixler, Fabian 118, 145 Dutch Learning see Rangaku early modernity: defined 1 eccentrics (kijin) 16, 21, 34, 121 – 4, 127, 135, 137, 139; see also Kamo no Mabuchi, Ban Kōkei education 4, 7, 20, 29, 81 – 9, 97, 149, 158 – 62; public 11, 108, 148, 155; quality 14, 97; “shadow” 166n4; Ministry of 63 efumi 39 – 41,  61 egalitarian (spaces) 13, 57, 82, 90 – 2, 130 – 9; see also equality Ejima Kiseki 104 enlightenment (Buddhist) 38, 83 equality 20 – 2, 32, 34, 82; in friendship 128; legal 54; of opportunity 149; ridicule of 7; see also egalitarian famine 6 – 7, 36, 42n6, 45 – 8, 52, 108, 117 – 18 Fan Zhongyan 101 Fisscher, J.F. Van Overmeer 56 Five-household system see goningumi food 21, 26, 36, 53 – 4, 94, 100; see also famine Forty-seven rōnin 58, 102 Four-class system see status friendship 14, 104 – 7, 116, 125, 128 – 31, 138, 165 – 6; insincere  125 Frois, Luis 85 Fujii Naoaki (Umon) 47 – 8 fujufuse principle: 12 – 13, 55, 68, 139, 145, 156 – 7; and Hideyoshi 66 – 7; history of persecution 69 – 78, 145; origins 61 – 4 Fukushima 153, 156, 165 Fukuzawa Yukichi 5 – 7, 21 – 2, 46, 59, 81, 98, 160 Garon, Sheldon 166 Genda, Yuji 162 Genroku 2, 26, 84, 105, 111, 126, 131, 165; popular culture 3, 104, 117, 127; as watershed 29, 37, 52 – 3, 88, 90, 125, 141 – 6 Gluck, Carol 2 – 3

goningumi (Five-household system) 27, 69 “good Meiji, bad Tokugawa” 5 – 6, 9, 14 Great Learning 26, 31, 93 happiness 11, 13, 37, 58 – 9, 98 – 112, 140, 144, 160 – 3; as anraku 98; as fuku 101 – 2; pursuit of 14, 16, 111, 160; as raku 101 – 103, 109; as reasonable expectations 58 – 60, 108 – 10; as saiwai 102 – 3, 107; as tanoshimi 101, 104 – 6, 109; as ureshi 104 – 7; as yorokobi 101, 104, 106 – 7; see also Huang Liu-hung, Quality of Life Happy Planet Index 162 Happy Science (Kōfuku no Kagaku) 160 – 1 Hayami Akira 120 Hayashi: family 31, 87; Hōkō 87; Razan 31 – 2 Hayashi Shihei 122, 144 Heine, William (Wilhelm) 8, 89 heritage (spiritual) 37 Hirata Atsutane 121; school 52, 121, 149 Hisamatsu Sen’ichi 40 – 1 Hitori kangae see Tadano Makuzu Honkokuji 64 – 6 Hoshina Masayuki 31 Huang Liu-hung 102, 133n3 human nature: and construction of identity 19, 31 – 2, 44n4 human rights 5, 46, 58, 60; equality of 22; happiness as 14; as reasonable expectations 58 – 9,  110 Hunter, Jeffrey Robert 64 hyakushō ikki see ikki Ibi Takashi 91, 130 identity: collective 1, 3, 15, 19 – 21, 37; defined 20; individual 1, 19 – 21, 37; Kamo no Mabuchi on 34; politicized collective 44 – 5; role of Other in formation 33; social 20; see also Japaneseness ideology 2, 21, 116, 135 – 49; Confucian 95; modern 11; state sanctioned 3, 127; Tokugawa 9, 16, 75 – 6 Ihara Saikaku 23, 25, 53, 84, 87 – 8, 104 – 7, 111, 120, 125 – 7 Ikeda Mitsumasa 31

Index  185 Ikegami, Eiko 9 – 10, 30, 114 Ikegami Honmonji 68, 70 – 1, 76, 79n6 ikki 7, 44 – 6, 68, 133, 137, 140, 144, 154 – 6 Ikuta Yorozu 52, 139 individualism: in China 4; in Japan 10 individuality 2 – 3, 6, 8, 10 – 11, 14, 19 – 21, 30 – 1, 38, 76 – 8, 99, 137 – 49, 151 – 3, 158, 166; contributions of religion 32 – 4; defined 1; difference with China 4; and ideology 2; not individualism 2, 10; see also reputation; “thinking for oneself” Inoue Masatoshi 69 insurrection 43 – 4, 47 – 9, 52, 144; see also protest, culture of Ishida Antonio 55 Ishida Baigan 86 Isomae Jun’ichi 38 Itō Hirobumi 149 Itō Jakuchū 137, 141 – 2 Itō Jinsai 32, 89 Japan: names for 26; blessings of 23, 26, 37, 108 Japaneseness, theories of 1, 11, 16, 21 – 2, 33 – 7, 133, 136, 140; see also nativism Jetten, Jolanda 20 Jippensha Ikku 104, 106, 126 – 7, 133, 139, 147 Jisha Bugyō see Commissioner for Temple and Shrine Affairs Johnson, Samuel 111 Josephson, Jason Ānanda 38 juku (cram schools) 158; see also yobikō Kada no Azumamaro 24, 33, 121; Arimaro 24, 33 Kaempfer, Engelbert 39, 61, 79n3, 88, 99 Kaibara Ekiken 54, 101 – 3, 110, 162 kaidoku (meeting to read) 57, 87, 89, 130 Kaiho Seiryō 53, 60n4 Kaitokudō 139 Kamo no Chōmei 98 Kamo no Mabuchi 15, 22, 24, 26, 33 – 6, 108, 121, 125, 133, 139 Kangaku see China, study of Katori Persecution see fujufuse principle; history of persecution

Keene, Donald 147 – 8 Keian Incident see Marubashi Chūya and Yui Shōsetsu Keichū 121 Kenkadōkai 91 Kenshōkai 156 Ketelaar, James E. 140 Kihei 55 – 6 kijin see eccentrics Kimura Kenkadō 91 kirisute gomen 5, 58 Klandermans, Bert 44 Kogidō see Itō Jinsai Kojiki 24, 34, 145 Kojima Mouemon 71 – 2, 76 Kojima Yasunori 90, 93 – 4 kokōsei 91 Kokugaku (nativism) 21 – 4, 36 – 41, 52, 108 – 9, 139, 145, 149, 151; see also Hirat Atsutane; Kada no Azamumaro; Kamo no Mabuchi; Keichū, Motoori Norinaga komusō 123 – 4,  137 Kondō Shūzō 90 Konkōkyō 95 Korea, comparisons with 85, 87, 95, 161 – 3 Kumazawa Banzan 31 – 2, 84 Kuonji see Minobu Kurozumikyō 95 Kurozumi Makoto 39 Kyoto court, courtiers 2, 41n2, 47 – 8, 52, 59 – 60, 86 – 8, 93, 132, 148 Legatum Prosperity Index 152, 162 Leuchtenberger, Jan C. 39 liberty 55 – 8,  160 literacy 3, 11, 13, 29, 37, 85 – 90, 103, 144, 159; see also kaidoku; sodoku loyalty 7, 16, 84, 114, 128 – 30, 138 MacKenzie, Norman 78 Maeda Gen’i 65 – 6 Maeda Tsutomu 86 – 7, 89 making a name for oneself see reputation Mantei Ōga 6 – 7,  149 Man’yōshū 24, 33 – 5 Marceau, Lawrence 90, 96n5 Markus, Andrew 122 Marubashi Chūya 46 – 7, 60n2, 137 Maruyama Masao 37 Masuho Zankō 123

186 Index Matsudaira Sadanobu 87, 121 – 2, 144 Matsumoto Sannosuke 6, 110 Matsuo Bashō 24 – 5, 37, 129 Meiji 136; monarch (Mutsuhito) 148, 157; Restoration 1, 5, 46, 147 – 8; see also “civilization and enlhtenment”; “good Meiji, bad Tokugawa” Meiwa Incident see Fujii Naoaki; Takenouchi Shikibu; Yamagata Daini Mencius 100 – 1,  128 mibun see status Minamoto Ryōen 127 Minobu 68 – 9,  71 monoyomi see sodoku Morris, Ivan 10, 49, 104 Motoori Norinaga 15, 22, 24 – 6, 33 – 6, 39, 108, 121, 145 Müller, Max 40 Myōkakuji 67; Regulations of 65 Myōkenji 64; see also Honkokuji Najita, Tetsuo 51 Nakae Chōmin 110 Nakae Tōju 86 Nakai Riken 108 Nakamura Yukihiko 91 Nakane, Chie 120 Namekawa Persecution see fujufuse principle; history of persecution nativism, nativist see Kokugaku; Kamo no Mabuchi, Motoori Norinaga; Hirata Atustane Nenzi, Laura 25 Neo-Confucian(ism) 21, 31 – 2, 35, 85 – 6, 93,  98 Nezumikozō 125 Nichiren 63 – 4, 67, 71 Nichiren, Shōjun’in 70 – 2 Nichiren Shōshū 156 – 7 Nichirenshū (denomination) 12 – 13, 38, 55, 57, 61, 63 – 71, 74 – 6, 79, 137, 139, 156 – 7; other priests: Nichiin, Taiun 71 – 2; Nichijitsu 65; Nichiju 70; Nichikyō, Yōshin’in 70; Nichikyū 70; Nichiō 67 – 8, 74, 79n5; Nichiryō, Sonryōin 70; Nichiyō, Ryōun’in 72; Nichiyū, Josen’in 72; Nichizen, Fusen’in 71 – 2 Nichirenshū Fujufuseha 156 Nicholas Koekebacker 49 Nihon shoki 24 Nussbaum, Martha C. 97 Nyūi Mitsugu 93

Oda Nobunaga 1, 65 – 6 odori (dancing) nenbutsu 55, 61 Ogata Kōrin 140 – 1 Ogyū Sorai 32, 58 – 9, 90 – 1, 96n4, 101 – 3, 110; see also annon Ōkawa Ryūhō 160 Ōoka Tadamitsu 36 Ooms, Herman 2 – 3, 41n4, 116,  136 orientation 31, 37 – 8, 136; social 20, 26 – 7; spatial/temporal 19 – 20,  25 Orihara, Minami 45 Oros, Andrew 155 Ōshio Heihachirō (Chūsai) 30, 48, 50 – 2,  139 Ōtsuki Gentaku 94, 146 patrimony 19, 21 – 5, 37, 135, 140 performance, public 55, 61, 84, 120; as debate 57 Perry, Cmdre. Matthew expedition 8, 60, 89 Pflugfelder, Gregory 129 pleasure quarters 44, 104, 106, 109 political culture: Confucian influence on 56; contemporary 154; taxonomy of 59 – 60; Tokugawa  102 popular culture 3, 17n1, 22, 29, 84, 101, 117, 127, 143 Postmes, Tom 20 privacy 12 – 13, 40, 55, 77 – 8, 95 private academy 13, 57, 89 – 90, 95; see also civil society, salon culture protest, culture of 7, 9 – 12, 43 – 8, 52, 54, 60, 139 – 40, 153 – 4; see also insurrection public sphere 43, 53, 55, 57 (and debate), 59 – 60, 110, 140, 153 quality of life (QL) 13 – 14, 97 – 100, 107, 109, 162 Rangaku (Dutch/Western Learning) 91, 94, 131, 137; see also Ōtsuki Gentaku; Shiba Kōkan; Watanabe Kazan reasonable expectations see human rights reclusion 2, 122 Reischauer, Edwin 58 remonstrance, right of 43 – 4, 56, 58, 110; boxes 43, 56, 59 – 60, 88, 140 Renan, Ernest 147

Index  187 reputation: as honorific valor 1, 9, 29 – 31, 84, 102; making a name for oneself 19, 29 – 31, 37, 52 – 3 Ricci, Matteo 128 Roberts, Luke 55 – 6 rōnin: civilianization of samurai 44, 53, 84, 86, 90; disgruntlement 47, 137; fall of Osaka Castle 29, 46; see also Shimabara rebellion Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 110 – 11 Rubinger, Richard 85, 88 Russell, Bertrand 2 Saikaku see Ihara Saikaku Saitaniya Hachirōbei Naomasu 27 – 8 Sakai, Naoki 20 Sakamoto Shinraku 63, 78 – 9, 156 Sakura Sōgorō 46 salon culture 90 – 3, 122, 130, 139 – 40 samurai: civilianization of 30, 53, 84, 90; values 9 Santō Kyōden 104, 106, 109 Sargent, G.W. 104 Satow, Ernest 147 – 8 secrecy 12, 56, 62, 69, 76 – 8, 156 Sekimon Shingaku see Shingaku self-cultivation 13, 32, 38, 57, 82 – 3, 92 – 3, 140,  159 self-improvement 37, 82 – 4, 87, 92, 158 – 9 self-interest 11 – 12, 43 – 5, 51 – 2, 78, 99, 117, 132, 144 – 8, 164; in confession 76 Sen, Amartya 97 Shiba Kōkan 94, 96n6 Shikitei Sanba 104 Shimabara Rebellion 30, 48 – 51, 60n3, 117, 137 Shimizu, Masayuki 21, 35 Shimōsa persecution see fujufuse principle; history of persecution Shingaku 38, 92, 95, 130 Shinto 31 – 3, 82 – 3, 95, 99, 109, 145, 148; shrines 68 Shirane, Haruo 41n2 Shively, Donald 10 Shōheikō (Shōheizaka Gakumonjo) 57, 87, 90, 121 – 2 shūmon aratame, shūmon jinbetsuchō see Buddhist, temple registration system Silver, Lieut. J.M.W. 8, 89, 124 Simmel, Georg 62, 76 – 7

Simon, Bernd 44 sociability (kōyū) 130, 166 sodoku 84 – 5 Sōka Gakkai 156 – 7 status (mibun) 4, 25 – 30, 37, 43, 52 – 4, 57, 87, 91, 130, 136, 138; Four-class system 27, 52 – 3, 138; purchase samurai 27 – 8 Suzuki Kiitsu 140 – 1 Tadano Makuzu 5, 14, 28, 36, 116, 131, 139, 146; Hitori kangae 4, 14, 36, 131 Takenaka Uneme 55 Takenouchi Shikibu 47 – 8, 139 Takeuchi Seiichi 14 – 15, 35 Tamamuro Fumio 69, 72, 79n8 Tani Tannai 27 – 8, 105 tanomi shōmon (bonds of trust) 45 Tanuma Okitsugu 133 Tavernier, Jean Baptiste 49 Tayasu Munetake 36, 139 Tenrikyō 95 terakoya 85, 158 Teruoka Yasutaka 90 Teshima Toan 92, 95 thinking for oneself 3 – 5 Thunberg, Carl Peter 54, 58, 85, 125 – 8, 134n8 Tokugawa: Ieharu 47 – 8; Iemitsu 47, 68; Ienobu 23; Ieshige 36, 48; Ietsugu 28; Ietsuna 31, 69; Ieyasu 29 – 31, 49, 57, 67, 87, 136; Mitsukuni 24, 31; Tsunayoshi 31, 144; Yoshimune 56, 72; Yoshinobu 148 Totman, Conrad 141 Toyotomi Hideyoshi 29 – 30, 65 – 7, 79, 128 Tsuda Sōkichi 103, 113 – 14 Turgenev, Ivan 111 Ueda Akinari 104, 107, 130 values 7 – 11, 14 – 16, 20, 84, 91, 102 – 3, 112 – 16, 122, 125 – 33, 145 – 6, 163 – 5; conflicted 14, 102, 127, 129, 132, 135, 146, 165; counter-ideological, counter-cultural, neglected 2 – 3, 5, 8, 11, 14, 16, 113, 125, 145; dissembling, prevarication 60, 116, 124 – 6, 164; honesty 16, 113, 116, 125 – 6, 134n8; non-conformity 11, 121 – 2, 137,

188 Index 140 – 1, 164; stability, continuity 14, 116 – 21, 163; see also Robert Bellah; George DeVos; friendship; Eiko Ikegami; loyalty; sociability (kōyū); Tadano Makuzu; Tsuda Sōkichi value theory 115 Varley, Paul ix wakashudō 129 – 30 Walthall, Anne 121 Wang Yangming 48, 50 – 1, 86 Watanabe Kazan 94 Watarai Nobuyoshi 32 Wattles, Miriam 129 Weber, Max 115 Weintraub, Karl J. 23 well-being 8 – 9, 13 – 16, 37, 59, 76 – 7, 98 – 103, 108 – 11, 118, 160 – 2

Western Learning see Rangaku Wittrock, Björn 1 Xavier, St. Francis 125, 134n8 Yagi Sōsaburō 135 Yamadaya Daisuke 52, 139 Yamaga Sokō 32 Yamagata Daini 47 – 8 Yamagata Bantō 139, 145 Yamazaki Ansai 31 – 2, 84 yobikō (entrance exam prep schools) 158, 166n4 Yokoi Shōnan 93 Yōmeigaku see Wang Yangming yonaoshi 25 Yoshida Kenkō 98 Yoshikawa Koretaru 32 Yui Shōsetsu 46 – 7,  137