Abstract
The present essay appears in a collection of Koyasu’s essays called Edo as Method. “Edo as method,” for Koyasu, means to critically trace modern Japan’s construction of the images of Edo thinkers in order to deconstruct the historical image of modern Japan constructed on the basis of “Edo”—thus also illuminating the meaning of Edo thought in its contemporary discursive context. In his critiques of Maruyama’s famous study of the Ansai school, Koyasu points out that in his interest in the ideas that helped construct Japan’s modern kokutai ideology, Maruyama virtually ignored the school’s “inward” dimensions of practice, self-cultivation, ritual and personal realization—including Ansai’s emphasis on the power of oral communication. Ansai was revered within the Kimon school as the one who had grasped the true meaning of the Dao transmitted by the sages, as the privileged narrator who knew the heart of the sages and could pass this meaning on to his disciples through the power of his lectures. This is why the Ansai school was able to indigenize the Confucian Way more completely than other schools of Zhu Xi learning, but this “indigenization” was really accomplished on the level of the “lordship of the mind” rather than the level of modern nationalist discourse. Koyasu also questions whether the whole schema of typologizing discourse through the polarity of “universalism” vs. “particularism” is appropriate for understanding the structure of pre-modern East Asian thought.
The people of today are more than ever incapable of understanding the fine points of Z hu Xi’s commentaries on the Four Books, but with a proud look on their faces they call themselves the representatives of Z hu Xi learning. How laughable! In this country, the only person who has understood Z hu Xi’s meaning is Y amazaki Ansai.
Preface to the Record of the Origins of the Japanese School of the Way (Nihon dōgaku engenroku 日本道学淵源録, 1842)
There is almost no place in the whole country of Japan that has not been influenced and inspired by the Kimon school.
Tokutomi Sohō 徳富蘇峰 (1863–1957)
Published as “Shushi to Shushishugi 朱子と朱子主義,” in Koyasu 2000: 139–154.
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Notes
- 1.
Translator’s note: In the study referred to Koyasu draws attention to the language of practice that surrounds the concept of the diachronic transmission (seitō) of a single truth from mind to mind. Here the core concepts are kei 敬 (reverent attentiveness) and shinpō 心法 (method of cultivating the mind). Ansai saw the concept of kei as already expressed, before the existence of the word, in the two most basic trigrams of the Book of Changes, qian (heaven) and kun (earth). This true meaning has been passed down as shinpō through innumerable generations of sages, defining the inheritors of the transmission of that meaning as “orthodox” (of the legitimate line). The language that tells of this true meaning must be a language that transmits the true meaning directly to the human heart (kokoro), and it is just such a language—aimed at the formation of a Japanese “interior”—that unfolds in the Kimon school in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
- 2.
In the study referred to, Maruyama distinguishes two different meanings of the concept of seitō 正統 (literally “correct lineage”) using the terms “O-seitō” (the orthodoxy of a teaching or a lineage of learning, the orthodoxy of a world view) and “L-seitō” (the legitimacy of a ruler, a system of rule, or a lineage of rulers). Legitimacy, however, can also refer to the legitimacy of a partisan claim to orthodoxy. As Maruyama also recognizes, a claim of doctrinal orthodoxy always stands on the basis of the legitimacy of a faction or school, and a claim of doctrinal orthodoxy (O-seitō) is always found at the basis of the legitimacy of a faction or school (L-seitō). What I (Koyasu) refer to as the discourse of “Zhu Xi-ism” is just such a discourse in which the claim of orthodoxy gave rise to the legitimacy of a faction or school. [For a translation of Maruyama’s classic study (Maruyama 1980), see the previous chapter in the present volume, “Orthodoxy and Legitimacy in the Yamazaki Ansai School”].
- 3.
Translator’s note: If we were referring to this Confucian concept in the context of Edo-period Japanese thought (i.e., in the context of a feudal society), kunshin would have to be translated as “lord and vassal.”
- 4.
- 5.
While commenting for instance on the doctrinal/ideological controversies that were characterized by the magnetism brought in by the sort of people who were followers of the Ansai school, Maruyama says, “It is the task of the person who thinks systematically not to turn his eyes from this desolate scene, but to consider how to control the pathology that accompanies this sort of magnetic force.”
- 6.
Translator’s note: Balibar’s actual words are that, with the end of the great age in which Marxism functioned as an organized doctrine, “There is, in reality, no Marxist philosophy, either as the worldview of a social movement, or as the doctrine or system of an author called Marx. Paradoxically, however, this negative conclusion, far from nullifying or diminishing the importance of Marx for philosophy, greatly increases it. Freed from an illusion and an imposture, we gain a theoretical universe.”
- 7.
Since the European maritime powers during the Edo period (except for Russia, a late-comer to the scene) approached Japan from the south (Southeast Asia and Taiwan), not from the Pacific, they were identified using the Chinese word for “southern barbarians.” (tr.)
- 8.
Translator’s note: Shutaisei means being the “host” rather than the “guest,” the “subject,” as opposed to an “object”, being in the center as opposed to the periphery, having a consciousness of one’s self (and one’s nation) as making one’s own choices on the basis of one’s own priorities, not being subject to standards set by someone else, just as shutaiteki action means acting on the basis of one’s own will and one’s own judgment. In the development of the Ansai school discourse, the emphasis on shutaisei in this sense arose in the context of the reorientation of Confucian world-ordering concepts from the point of view of “us, the Japanese” (particularly the Japanese samurai, with their strong sense of corporate and individual pride) as the core, rather than China, so that “we Japanese” have the right, in fact the duty, to reject any element of Confucian teaching (such as the Mencian doctrine of the legitimacy, in extreme cases, of overthrowing an evil ruler) that does not correspond with Japan’s exalted “kokutai.” Maruyama’s own philosophy also focused on the development of the Japanese “shutaisei,” which carried a different sense based on postwar disgust at what the kokutai ideology had done to the Japanese people in the militaristic period (including a destruction of the shutaisei of the individual in the name of national shutaisei). Koyasu’s Foucaultian methodology sublates Maruyama’s liberalist-modernist understanding of shutaisei into an even more reflexive critical awareness of the structure and nature of “modernist” discourse, including the postwar discourse regarding “shutaisei” in which Maruyama was a major participant.
- 9.
Translator’s note: For example, Takeuchi Yoshimi (1910–1977), under the catchphrase “Asia as Method,” proposed the construction of an “alternative method to understand the Asian experience” based on a sympathetic understanding of the different responses to the challenge of modernity on the part of the Chinese, Japanese, and other Asian peoples. He conceived this as “a cultural rerolling, or a rerolling of values, that rewraps the West anew from the East, reversing the direction to transform the West itself from our side, transforming the West in order to raise to a higher level the universal values that were themselves engendered by the West. . . . When this rerolling is done, we must have something in ourselves that is distinctively our own. What is this something? One would not expect that it exists as an entity. But can it not exist as a method?” (Takeuchi 1978; Steben 2000: 29–30). As Koyasu interprets it, “Asia as an entity” is Asia conceived by imperial Japan in its opposition to the world dominion of modern imperial Europe, while “Asia as method,” by contrast, is a critical view of history that situates its perspective outside the West, in a China whose revolutionary potential has been recognized. Analogously, Koyasu proposes “Edo as method” (the title of the book in which the present essay appears) as a critical perspective aimed at rereading and reconceptualising Japan’s modern history—formed as a resistance against Western modernity in the very process of pursuing that modernity—from the point of view of the Edo period, through treating Edo not as an entity resisting modernity, but as the methodological foothold outside of modern Japan for a critical reading of modern Japanese history. . . . (Steben 2000: 30–31).
- 10.
Maruyama has already positioned himself on the side of modernism in this controversy.
References
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Koyasu 子安宣邦, N., Steben, B.D. (2014). Zhu Xi and “Zhu Xi-ism”: Toward a Critical Perspective on the Ansai School. In: Huang, Cc., Tucker, J. (eds) Dao Companion to Japanese Confucian Philosophy. Dao Companions to Chinese Philosophy, vol 5. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-2921-8_14
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