http://search.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/fl20060910x2.html
Sunday, Sept. 10, 2006
CONFUCIUS
A man in the soul of Japan
By MICHAEL HOFFMAN
Special to The Japan Times
This story is part of a package on Confucius. The introduction is here.
Hiraga Gennnai was a low-ranking Shikoku samurai and searing satirist
against the neo-Confucianists holding sway in the Tokugawa Shogunate's "closed"
Japan. He died in prison after stabbing a disciple in 1779 in a fit of madness.
"The Analects" and other Confucian texts were brought to Japan by the Korean
envoy and scholar Wani in the fourth or fifth century A.D., some 800 years
after Confucius' death. Buddhist sutras were also among the gifts he bore.
What kind of pupils Wani found the courtiers of preliterate Japan to be is not
recorded. But the first fruits of Japan's early education were summarized two
centuries later in the 17 articles of the "Constitution" of Prince Shotoku,
dated 604. Its very first words, "Harmony is to be valued," are Confucian to
the core. So is the exhortation in Article 4: "The ministers and functionaries
should make decorous behavior their leading principle, for the leading
principle of the government of the people consists in decorous behavior. If the
superiors do not behave with decorum, the inferiors are disorderly: if
inferiors are wanting in proper behavior, there must necessarily be offences."
A palace revolution in 645, known as the Taika Reform, aimed to fuse Japan's
loose assemblage of rival clans into the centralized Confucian state envisioned
by Prince Shotoku in Article 12: "In a country there are not two lords; the
people cannot have two masters. The sovereign is the master of the people of
the whole country."
Japan's cultural and political infancy, then, bears a strong Confucian stamp. A
Chinese visitor to Nara at the height of the Nara Period (710-784) would have
seen a model in miniature of his own society.
The Heian Period (794-1185) was a different story Ea purely Japanese cultural
flowering that had little use for Confucianism. In Murasaki Shikibu's classic
"Tale of Genji," the masterpiece of the age, Confucian scholars are figures of
fun, their stuffy solemnity and stilted language provoking "gusts of laughter"
among the guests at Genji's son's matriculation ceremony.
Chinese recasting
The close of the Heian Period coincided with a Chinese recasting of the
Confucian legacy by a group of scholars known to posterity as
neo-Confucianists. The outstanding figure among them as far as Japan is
concerned is Chu Hsi (1130-1200), for whom the quality of benevolence, very
dear to Confucius' heart and central to his doctrine, is not only a human
quality pertaining to society, but a natural force underpinning the physical
universe: Man learns virtue by contemplating the natural order.
It is only a short leap from here to the notion that the given social hierarchy
is ordained by nature itself.
Hayashi Razan, who was the Confucian scholar-adviser to four shoguns from
1607. PHOTO COURTESY OF YOSHIKAWA KO-BUNKAN, from "Japanese Historians and the
National Myths, 1600-1945," by John S. Brownlee (Univ. of Tokyo Press; 1997)
Perhaps we need look no further for an explanation of why Chu Hsi's thinking
was so attractive to the ultraconservative regime of the Edo Period
(1603-1867). The Tokugawa shoguns closed Japan to all but the most limited
foreign intercourse and froze, to the greatest extent possible, the social
system in its 17th-century mold. Throughout this period, Chu Hsi's
neo-Confucianism was the official state dogma.
* * * * *
"Many Japanese Confucian scholars are truly frogs who know nothing outside
their own small wells," wrote the satirist Hiraga Gennai (1728-1779). "They
slavishly copy everything Chinese and refer to Japan as a nation of 'Eastern
Barbarians.'"
Hiraga was a jack-of-all-trades, an accomplished dabbler in Western arts and
sciences whose impatience with the hidebound Confucian scholar-officials is
understandable in view of the festering social problems Epoverty, peasant
riots, the first hints of dangerous foreign resentment over Japan's
isolationism Eto which they had no solutions beyond pedantic appeals for
greater Confucian rectitude.
"The fact that people today will frivolously walk down a road from which there
is no return is due to the existence of the 'Tale of Genji' and the [more
overtly erotic] 'Tales of Ise,'E huffed the orthodox Chu Hsi scholar Yamazaki
Ansai (1618-1682). "It is said that the 'Tale of Genji' was written as an
admonishment for men and women. It is extremely doubtful, however, that such
frivolity could serve to admonish anyone."
But the Confucian camp was less united than its outward ceremonial gravity made
it appear. Had not Confucius himself treasured the "Book of Odes," a poetry and
song collection from the ancient golden age he longed to recreate? Was it not
one of the five Confucian classics? Did that not suggest there was a place for
literature dealing with human emotions as well as with moral rectitude?
Disgust with the sanctimony of the Chu Hsi scholars drove other Confucianists
back to their original sources.
Had Confucius really been such a stuffed shirt? On the contrary, "The Analects"
show him to be a warm and at times passionate man, whose Way is rooted less in
the Cosmos, as it was for Chu Hsi, than in the ordinary feelings of ordinary
people Efamily sentiment in particular.
A STATUE in Asuka-dera, Nara Pref., of 604's Confucian Constitution
author Prince Shotoku CHRIS 73/ WIKIPEDIA PHOTO
The endorsement of "ordinary feelings" had dangerous implications for a regime
that survived by suppressing those feelings. Everything about the Tokugawa
Shogunate was unnatural Ethe closed country, the social immobility, the very
structure of the regime. "In a country there are not two lords," Prince Shotoku
had admonished, but in Tokugawa Japan there were Ethe shogun and the emperor.
Which of them had the sanction of heaven?
In Japan, hereditary official Confucian historians like Hayashi Razan
(1583-1657) and his son and successor, Hayashi Gaho (1618-1680), bent over
backwards to justify the overshadowing of the emperor by the shogun.
"Evildoers and bandits were vanquished," wrote Gaho in 1664 of the epoch-making
Battle of Sekigahara, won by the Tokugawa in 1600, "and the entire realm
submitted to Lord [Tokugawa] Ieyasu, praising the establishment of peace and
extolling his martial virtue. That this glorious era that he founded may
continue for ten thousands upon ten thousands of generations, coeval with
heaven and earth!"
Powerful state apparatus
The tone is bombastic, but Gaho himself seems to have had his doubts, for he
wrote elsewhere, "In a book intended for the shogun's eyes it is incumbent upon
one to be circumspect."
Tokugawa rule withered, but not Confucianism. In the succeeding Meiji Era
(1868-1912) it merged with the native Shinto religion to buttress the most
powerful state apparatus that had ever oppressed the Japanese people. Loyalty,
duty, filial piety and harmony were the virtues to be cultivated Eby force if
necessary. Confucius would have been appalled, but he had long since ceased to
matter, his name having been co-opted as a symbol, his teachings reduced to
slogans and commands.
After World War II, the Occupation authorities removed Confucian teachings from
the Japanese school curriculum. "Nonetheless," comments MacMillan's
"Encyclopedia of Religion," "to the extent that such ideals as harmony and
loyalty can be said to belong to Confucianism, these qualities may be
fundamental to Japanese culture and are likely to survive" Eas Hiraga had known
all along they would. "In Japan," he wrote, tongue-in-cheek as always,
"benevolence and righteousness have been spontaneously followed. Peace has
prevailed even without sages."
For other stories in our package on Confucius, please click the following links:
East and West echo the sage: 'The ideal society is like a family'
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